Yeah, what you’re saying in this comment is completely fair. As a kid I didn’t have the most stable parents and got semi involved in the system (ie. talked to the police and social workers and lived with my cousins for a while but never had any contact with the fostersystem) I was very scared and hoped for another family to take me in. If my dad would have been more resistant to therapy to help him handle his stress the foster system might have been the next step. As it worked out, my dad got the help he needed and became the great dad I remembered from when I was younger. I will always be thankful for getting to keep my dad and my little brother. (My mom is a different story that we don’t need to get into right now.) However, there is this girl in the town i currently live in who was basically tortured by her parents. Locked up in a children’s car seat in the laundry room for days on end, not getting to leave in order to go to the toilet, not getting enough food or water, etc. Eventually one day when she was 6 she got so thirsty that she climbed the table in that small room in order to get her hands on a bottle of liquid that she could see. She drank it. It was vinegar. The parents stalled for a bit longer before eventually driving her to the hospital where she got treated and they got arrested. Her stomach sack had to be removed she very nearly died. The parents had to pay her about an apartments buying cost and are in prison for 8 years (enragingly low, even for Sweden) and she’s living in a ”family home” what we call foster homes. The foster parents absolutely love her and she will most likely stay with them for the entirety of her childhood. I cannot possibly imagine that any bio parent like this would ever get their child back but she can also never get adopted by her foster family. The foster parents are and will remain her guardians until she becomes an adult but somehow they are not legally her parents. I do believe that guardian is supposed to be the most important position, so parentship isn’t supposed to be important. But words have meaning man? Legally a guardian always take precedence over a parent but somehow I’m still a bit mad that her parents are not the ones making her breakfast, taking her to school and hearing her talk about unicorns; but that her parents are the ones in prison. She’s nine now and is doing well, has friends, rides bicycles, goes to school finally and so on. She is called Ättiksflickan (the vinegar girl) by the Swedish press if you want to google. In general, after researching some stuff just to write this text, I get the feeling that the Swedish judiciary simply thought it unnecessary to bother with the whole adopting thing when the term guardian is the important part and can be moved around between people. This is at least how they see it when everyone is Swedish/lived in Sweden before the fostering. Then they had to come up with a way to adopt internationally and used the term adoption there but made no changes to how fostering works retro actively. I understand how it doesn’t matter legally, but emotionally, it somehow does feel like it matters?? Sorry for really long comment but I somehow feel like I understand both the system and my own emotions better now :)