Accomplishing irony: Socializing foster children into peer culture

Abstract

Parents indirectly influence their children's peer interactions by implicit socialization and directly by interference. They influence their (young) children's doings by supervising their contacts with friends, monitoring where they go, and facilitating their meetings with friends at home. Adolescents' growing orientation to peers is often at the cost of direct contact with their parents. Potentially, conversations with adolescent children become significant moments for parents to collect information about their children's social lives, preparing them for the challenges of their preadult social life. We studied conversations between in state‐created family homes amongst foster parents (FPs) and out‐of‐home‐placed adolescents, to see how FPs prepare foster adolescents to deal with the dynamics of peer culture, specifically in mocking practices. We are interested in the pedagogical role of FPs in these practices. We find that peer culture behavior is expressed in the context of family homes. Rather than preparing adolescents for peer culture indirectly by discussing possible, or hypothetical, situations, FPs react directly to peer culture expressions at the dinner table. In their approach, FPs demonstrate that peer culture membership is not just an interactional competence but also a teachable issue.

Turning irritation into teaching: professional responses to disputes amongst adolescents in Dutch family homes

“…A previous study on interaction between professional foster parents and adolescents in family homes, based on direct (video-) observation, showed that professional foster parents hardly ever intervene in adolescents' verbally ironic disputes and even gear their reactions towards preparing them for future disputes with other peers (van Nijnatten, Matarese, & Noordegraaf, 2017). This finding follows Kramer et al (1999) who found that passive parental non-intervention (parents leave it to the children but don't say so) is most common.…”