Storytelling and listening to children`s voices

Today, both, children`s studies as well as practice of child substitute care, is changing as understanding and expectations about children's competence, agency and participation in society is changing. In this presentation, the focus is on children who are living in a substitute care, more precisely, the focus is on children's voices. There has been concern about the quality of care and acting on the best interest of these children, including listening their needs and wishes. Today child-centred approach is in the centre of the practice. What does the `listening to children`s voice` mean in substitute care context? What is the best way to support the development of children’s autonomy and unique identity in substitute care? How do we help children with severe trauma experiences  to conceptualise their own life events and people around them? The presentation provides some answers to these questions based on ethnography research carried out recently in Estonian SOS Children’s Village among eight young persons aged 13–18 who agreed to participate in a process called “storytelling.” The aim of this research was not simply to collect fragmented pieces of children`s perspectives during interviews; rather to understand their world and create a safe environment where children could voice their stories and make meanings of their life events.

In workshop, we wish to share these preliminary results of research and lessons learned in Estonian context. One of the most important lesson of this research is the experience of how important it is to offer support to children who are removed from birth families in developing their unique identity and autonomy. We discuss that it is absolutely necessary to children growing up in substitute care to have opportunity to exercise their interpretation ability with adults who are active listeners not instructors of what and how the child has to think to become a “proper” child and adult. `Listening to children’s voices’ requires an active adult interactional partner, which implies an interactional perspective. The conversations with children can be seen as form of participation and an attempt to position the child as an expert of his or her life, as an active social actor.