Many people admire them, others become their haters, blaming these families in earning money on kids. Let's discover, who is right.

I believe there are good foster parents and there are bad foster parents. Perhaps we more often hear the stories about the latter, bad news tend to sell better than good news. With the right foster parents, foster care is a lot better than orphanages. With the wrong parents, I'm not so sure.

As for the situation in Norway, foster care is the preferred solution, it's preferred that someone close to the child becomes the foster parents (i.e. grandparents, some uncle/aunt, etc), foster parents get good compensation. Just like with any other profession, some people choose it out of heart and interest, others choose it just for the money - and the latter rarely do a good job. (I was teaching a bit at the university and I could quite clearly see that some people had chosen the subject for money, while others were genuinely interested in learning the subject).

Some months ago there were some reports in the newspapers about the CPS (Barnevernet) doing a poor job on following up foster parents. We've seen that too - if some parents are suspected of doing a bad job and the CPS gets a report, they are obliged by law to respond within some specific time frame, but the reality is that they don't have enough resources to follow up everything. Of course they prioritize following the law - and hence they don't have enough resources to follow up the children they have decided to follow up on.

In some of the cases reported, there have been children with special needs, and the CPS promised the parents that they would always be there to support the foster family with advises and other services - but as soon as the contract was signed, the family was left entirely for themselves.

There were also some heart-touching reports where the CPS, after many years decides to simply switch foster parents. Foster parents have like no rights at all, formally the responsibility for the child lies with the CPS, and they can always cancel the contract anytime, take the child out of the family (by force, if necessary) and give it new foster parents.

Actually we have pretty strong employee protection laws in Norway, an employee cannot just be fired without due process and very good reasons (I remember that from my childhood - some teachers were doing a really poor job, but it was impossible to get anything done with that). Obviously foster parenting is not considered to be a profession, hence those laws give no protection.

Possibly the decision to cancel the foster care contract at short notice is justified - as said I doubt every foster parent is a good foster parent. Of course we get to hear only one side of the story, the CPS does not have any rights to comment the cases for the media. Anyway, if what the media reports is the full story, then it's pretty bad and heart-touching ... and I have no problems believing that in some cases the staff at the CPS is doing completely wrong decisions.