CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 88Child Welfare and AdoptionFamily Dynamics and RelationshipsPoverty, Education, and Child Welfare

‘A Child has Many Mothers’: Views of child fostering in northwestern Cameroon

Verhoef, Heidi·2005·Childhood
DOI 10.1177/0907568205054926
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

This article examines 20 fostering arrangements in a growing urban community in northwestern Cameroon from the perspectives of those involved. Analysis of interviews with caregivers and birth mothers suggests that the nature of adult relationships is central to children’s living arrangements. Three caregiver-mother relationship profiles are described: the joint venture, the ambivalent takeover and the tug-of-war. These profiles are compared with views of the ideal fostering arrangement and subsequently discussed in relation to the adjustments sub-Saharan families have made and continue to make to contemporary realities.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1177/0907568205054926

Cites

40 of 40 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Grandmothers, or in a few cases a migrant's previous foster mother, are the preferred caregivers, as in national fostering arrangements and transnational families elsewhere.

    “Consequently, grandmothers, or in a few cases a migrant's previous foster mother, are the preferred caregivers, as in national fostering arrangements (Verhoef 2005) and transnational families elsewhere (Dreby 2010;Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997).”

    From Navigating transnational childcare relationships: migrant parents and their children's caregivers in the origin country (2017) · cites this paper as Verhoef 2005

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Verhoef, H.
Affiliations
Boston College (US)
Corresponding author
Verhoef, Heidi
Venue
Childhood
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2005-08
Volume
12
Issue
3
Pages
369-390
ISSN
  • 0907-5682 (ISSN-L)
  • 1461-7013
DOI
10.1177/0907568205054926
OpenAlex
W1982105770
Cited by
88
References
40
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 7 · 2012: 7
FWCI
10.95
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)
Locations
Childhood (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Child Welfare and Adoption
  • Social Sciences › Demography › Family Dynamics and Relationships
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare
Keywords
child fostering, foster care, birth mothers, children's living arrangements, family structure, urban households, family adjustment

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review