Respite care from the child’s perspective – The Support Family Intervention in Finland

This article presents a synthesis of two PhD studies of Support Family Intervention (SFI) in Finland. This is a service in which volunteer families provide support and respite care to children and parents who are coping with a range of psycho-social challenges by looking after the children for one weekend a month. The aim of this article is to develop a child-centred programme theory (CCPT) of SFI that combines a meta-ethnography-based theory underpinning the use of SFI with evidence of participating children’s lived experiences. The CCPT that emerged is grounded on three elaborations of the programme theory currently informing SFI: a more nuanced description of the child as a stakeholder in the intervention, an investigation into the supportive properties of the environment and the activities provided by the support family to the child and clarification of the function of relationships as a central element of the intervention. Plain language summary Support Family Intervention is a social work service provided to children and parents in Finland and other Nordic countries. The child receives a voluntary ‘extra’ family whom they visit on a regular basis one weekend every month. At the same time, the parents get time for recovery and rest. In this article we present the results of two doctoral theses. Our focus is on how the support family can be understood from the child’s point of view. We summarise our results in a programme theory that can be used, for example, when the social worker introduces the service to the family. For the child, the home, the support family and the surroundings provide opportunities for many activities. The most important element is the relationship(s) to which the child gets access in the support family.