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Family Conflict Communication : Food And Foster Families : Care, Communication, And Conflict

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Research Paper 2 – Family Conflict Communication
Food in Foster Families: Care, Communication, and Conflict Rees’s article in Children & Society from 2012 contrasts the differences foster children experience between the food they are provided by their families and the relationship they have with their birth family and foster family because of it. It discusses the way children are provided with food can lessen the amount of conflict they feel is centered on them within their family. The study was conducted on ten different families containing foster children from age 9-16. Some of these families had children that were born to the foster parents, but most were no longer living at home. Two of the families consisted of single mothers, while the other eight were heterosexual couples. In order to collect information, each family member was interview multiple times over a period of time. Each subject was promoted to keep an audio journal or a written journal and to not talk about any part of the process. Throughout the audio journals and interviews, food came up frequently in a variety of ways. The first way the article discusses it is the “symbolic nature of food” (101) which discusses how food can be used to create a sense of structure in children. It mentions how some kids going through the foster system did not always have consistent access to food. Not knowing where their next meal would come from created a conflict within the family. The article describes cases where kids

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