En quête « d’unité du soi » face à la discontinuité des trajectoires de vie

Résumé Fr En

Aux prises avec des liens familiaux éclatés, les parcours des enfants confiés témoignent de modes alternatifs du « faire famille ». Ces derniers sont élaborés en interaction avec les intervenants et les mesures proposées et se construisent dans le contexte normatif d’une parenté unique. La disjonction entre les différentes formes juridique, biologique et quotidienne de la parenté est source de souffrance pour les enfants confiés, notamment du fait de l’absence d’un travail sur leur histoire familiale et d’un manque de reconnaissance sociale — manifesté par un vide linguistique – pour exprimer la complexité de leur situation familiale et de leurs ressentis. Ces lacunes identifiés dans les discours des enfants attestent de la difficulté, pour l’institution de l’aide à l’enfance, de concevoir et soutenir la parenté plurielle.

The quest of a ‘unity of the self’ against the discontinuity of life courses. Cases of placement under constraint. Life courses of children who are facing disruption in their family ties and who are entrusted to unrelated caretakers demonstrate alternative ways of ‘making-a-family’. They involve various actors (social workers, foster families) with whom they interact in a social and legal context, which legitimate exclusive (legal) kinship ties. In this process, they need to manage complex cognitive social and emotional maps of family. Through their long term experience of placement, they express their attachment to elective families and try to connect their ‘foster’/host families with their biological family, trying to connect legally acknowledged family members with meaningful and elective unrelated care takers. However, the disjunction of different kinds of kinship (biological, legal, ‘everyday/social kinship’) is a source of difficulty due to the absence of social script and specific concepts for explaining and expressing their complex family situation and their meaningful subjective ties formed during placement. Thus, children are facing the absence of a well-established terminology to label these additional non biological family ties. The unavailability of existing concepts, expressed in the discourse of children, demonstrate a ‘blind spot’ in the way institution deal with children’s experience and testify a difficulty to conceive and sustain plural kinship (and specifically ‘host’ parenting).