In Chile, grandparents make up by far the largest proportion of foster carers. Research on the topic is mainly from Western countries and it has been predominantly quantitative. Research carried out in Chile is about children in formal kinship care placements, and little is known about those in informal arrangements. Research on children’s perspectives of kinship care is also scarce. This thesis aims to explore the experiences of grandparents and their grandchildren, living in both formal and informal kinship care arrangements in Chile. In-depth qualitative interviews were carried out with grandparents and their grandchildren, separately, in two Chilean locations. The sample included 18 families comprising grandparents (N= 20) and grandchildren between 7 and 16 years of age (N=21). To facilitate the interviews with children, visual methods and interactive approaches were used. Thematic and narrative analysis were used as a complementary way of analysing the data The thesis applies concepts of care as a social process. Grandmothers are the main carers of the children, and they had to negotiate the normative positions of being both parents and grandparents. They expressed positive feelings about being their grandchildren’s carers and saw it as a second chance to do things differently and make up for their previous parenting mistakes. Grandchildren mainly felt positively about their lives with their grandparents. They felt thankful to their grandparents for taking care of them. However, they also showed their concerns about the future and felt anxious about the grandparents’ health. With time and through practices of care and love the grandparents become their grandchildren’s parents, and grandchildren become their grandparent’s children. These processes of becoming created conflict and contradictions for the grandmothers and the grandchildren, especially in relation to the place of the birth mothers in these children’s lives
