Misfitting Feelings: Young Care Leavers’ Emotional Work During the Transition to Adulthood

ABSTRACT

This article examines the emotional work that young adult care leavers perform during their transition to adulthood. It is based on 30 biographical interviews with young adults (formerly) placed in care. Among researchers, social workers and policy makers, there is a need to understand what young people do about their feelings when they have been exposed to bereavement, abuse, neglect and conflict. Furthermore, it is important to understand how feelings associated with growing up with hard times impact young adults’ everyday lives. To understand what young adults who have been placed in care think and do about their feelings in relation to their birth parents, I draw on Hochschild's model of “deep acting” and “surface acting” [Hochschild, A. R. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 551–575. https://doi.org/10.1086/227049; Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of Chicago Press]. The study reveals that these young adults constantly engage in emotion work to manage feelings towards their birth parents that do not fit within social guidelines for how to feel about one's parents. These “misfitting” feelings include hate, anger, disgust and distrust but also love and admiration towards the birth parents who neglected and abused them. Managing these feelings leaves the young adults in moments of pinch or discrepancy that they must act on to successfully transition to adulthood.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional work
• young people in care
• youth transition
• longitudinal studies
• social work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Fewer than 30 children have been adopted without parental consent in Denmark over the last 10 years (see VIVE's report Adoption som social indsats, 2020, https://www.vive.dk/da/udgivelser/adoption-som-social-indsats-17743).

2 An extensive literature search was conducted to find short examples of seminal research applying Hochschild's concept emotional work in studies of young care leavers. The search provide no such results. However, in a study by Chomczyński (2017). Hochschild's concept emotional work was applied to explain how young people in correctional facilities in Poland adapt to a resocialisation process.

3 This article draws on one research project, Against All Odds? funded by the Research Council of Norway (236718/H20) and led by Elisabeth Backe-Hansen. The Danish data were collected together with Signe Ravn, Mette Agerskov Smith and Maj Bjerre. I would also like to give a special thanks to Alexandrina Schmidt for assisting with the initial analysis of the data.

4 The participating organisations were LOS—National Association of Residences, DAV—Conditions of Children in Care, TABUKA—National Association of Present and Earlier Youngsters in Care, FADD—Association and Danish Residential Homes for Children and Young People and FBU—National Association of Parents.

5 In Denmark, no central institutional review boards or committees approve studies within the social sciences, but all studies must follow standards as described in the Danish Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (Ministry of Science, 2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeanette Østergaard

Jeanette Østergaard holds a PhD in Sociology and is working as a Senior Researcher at the Department of Social Policy, The Danish Center for Social Science Research (VIVE). Her research interests are youth transition, risks and everyday life using longitudinal studies. She has published widely in journals such as Sociology, The Sociological Review, International Journal for Social Research Methodology, Youth and Society, Acta Sociologica, Journal of Youth Studies, Addiction Research and Theory, Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, European Addiction Research and Drug and Alcohol Review etc.