Editorial ‘leaving care in the Nordic Countries’

This special issue of Nordic Social Work Research aims to explore the field of young people exiting out from care in the Nordic Countries, both from foster care, residential care and young people that have received assistant measures from the child welfare services.¹ The special issue is initiated from the Nordic Research Network on Care Leavers´ Transition to Adulthood (NRT) and is funded by NTNU Social Research.

The Nordic perspective

In this special issue, we want to focus on recent research on young people leaving out-of-home care in the Nordic countries. It is of particular interest to investigate how the Nordic countries, generally defined as social democratic welfare regimes, with universal benefits and an equal distribution of social resources, social insurances based on citizenship, de-commodification and a generous family policy (Esping-Andersen 2006), organise the transition from care to adulthood for young people leaving out-of-home care. Albeit the similarities between the countries, several researchers have pointed to the national differences when moving from comparing income transfers to comparing welfare services (Ellingseater 1998; Sainsbury 1999; Rauch 2005), which seems to be true for the regime typology in general, not only for the countries with supposed social-democratic traits (Anttonen and Sipilä 1996; Sainsbury 1999; Daly and Lewis 2000; Anttonen 2002; Kasza 2002; Bambra 2005; Jensen 2008; Melke 2010). The variance within the Nordic countries is obvious also when studying support to young people leaving care (Storö, Sjöblom, and Höjer 2018). Since 2010, members of the Nordic Network for Leaving Care Research have met regularly to share research findings, and the articles in this special issue are examples of research performed by the network-members.

Background

Several studies over the last decade show that young people in the child welfare system are especially vulnerable in the transition to adulthood and that they may have a more challenging transition to adulthood than young people in the general population. Many of these young people face more challenges in important life domains, such as education, employment and housing compared to young people who have not been in contact with the child welfare system (Backe-Hansen et al. 2014; Gypen et al. 2017; Mendes and Moslehuddin 2006; Mendes and Snow 2016; Stein 2012). In the International Research Network on Leaving Care (INTRAC), researchers from different countries in the world have come together to recognise and discuss issues related to the specific situation for young people who age out of out-of-home care, and their transition to adulthood. Support for care leavers varies between countries depending on factors such as the balance between universal services for all young people and specialist services for care leavers and how services are accessed (as a right or discretionary etc).

However, the challenging and different transitions for young people from out-of-home care facilities to independent living seems to be a general challenge, regardless of different countries’ legislative context. While many of these youths are highly resilient in their transition to young adulthood from foster care, others are not being adequately served (Stott 2013).

The challenges can be related to a number of factors, both experiences prior to care, inadequate support while in care, accelerated transitions to adulthood and lack of guaranteed assistance to facilitate this transition. Many researchers point to ‘compressed transition’ and lack of support in a vulnerable life situation, as main challenges that these young people face. Adolescence is a vulnerable period in life, often characterized by moving back and forth between dependency and independency (Bynner 2005; Rogers 2011), and this tension is one of the key questions in the research on transitions from adolescence to adulthood. There has been a shift away from young people’s transition to adulthood being understood as a linear process toward conventional goals. It is now argued that youth transitions tend to be highly chaotic, often involving nonlinear and fragmented movements between dependence and independence, as also pointed out by Bynner (2005). Such switching between family support and independency are described as a nonlinear transition, yo-yo transition (Biggart and Walther 2006) and interdependent transition (Paulsen and Berg 2016; Propp, Ortega, and NewHeart 2003). Biggart and Walther (2006) describe this as complex processes in which youths seldom see themselves as either adolescents or adults, but rather on the way to adulthood.

Such movement between dependency and independency is common in the youth population in general. But youths transitioning out of the child welfare system seem to experience an ‘instant adulthood’ and are not given the opportunity to experience such a gradual transition into adulthood (Geenen and Powers 2007; Rogers 2011; Paulsen 2018). ‘Instant adulthood’ not only includes the requirement to live independently but also removes these young people from the personalized and emotional support they may have received while in care (Rogers 2011). Cashmore and Paxman (2006, 232) argue that whether these young people exit care in consultation with the child welfare system or through an unplanned discharge, they approach independence ‘with fewer resources and less support, and at an earlier age and in a more abrupt way’ (than youth in the general population).

Further; research highlights the importance of social support (Mitchell et al. 2015). Young people leaving care often face challenges related to creating and maintaining good relationships (Marion, Paulsen, and Goyette 2017; Rutman and Hubberstey 2016) and receiving good quality social support (Barry 2010; Höjer and Sjöblom 2010). Without such support there is a risk that they will struggle to be included in full terms in society. Partly because they do not have the necessary belief in their concrete traits and contributions to society (Paulsen and Thomas 2018) and also because lasting relationships have shown to be a predictor of successful functioning subsequently (Curry and Abrams 2014; Marion, Paulsen, and Goyette 2017; Refaeli 2017). Research has also identified how young people turn to formal relations (e.g. employees in residential care units) for support (Schofield, Larsson, and Ward 2017) when this is possible and that formal relations to some extent can be an important supplement and/or compensation for the support from the informal network.

It is also known that many of these young people previously experienced many challenges through early childhood, psychosocial difficulties and troubled family relations. Furthermore, research point at the correlation between risk factors during childhood and professional activity in adult life (Marion, Paulsen, and Goyette 2017).

The papers

This Special Issue aims to explore practices within the Nordic countries through nine articles, based on qualitative and quantitative empirical data, and theoretical concepts.

Mattias Bengtsson, Yvonne Sjöblom and Peter Öberg has written the article ‘Well, it´s up to me now’ – young care leavers’ strategies for handling adversities when leaving out-of-home care in Sweden. The article is based on a qualitative longitudinal study of 20 young Swedish care leavers, where they investigate their subjective experience of and strategies for handling adversities when being in the process of leaving out-of-home care. They use resilience as their theoretical framework which gives the opportunity to understand care leavers´ experiences of adversities, but also of how they navigate and negotiate to overcome the adversities during their transition to adulthood. The analysis show that the majority of the informants over time developed process-oriented strategies. These strategies concern both the care leavers’ inner world: Re-framing of experiences and Increased self-reliance, and their outer world: Restructuring of the social network. These strategies are continuously negotiated and change over time.

In Norway, formal support to care-leavers is provided by two different organizations: Child welfare services (barneverntjenesten), and social services for adults (the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration, or NAV). Inger Oterholm and Veronika Paulsen have written the article Young people and social workers’ experience of differences between child welfare services and social services, where they have interviewed social workers and young people, to investigate the difference between the support provided by these two organisations. They found that Child Welfare social workers paid more attention to the young people’s previous care experiences, and saw them as ‘young people in need’. Social workers from the adult services had a different perspective, where the young people were regarded as ‘adults who have to meet adult requirements’. The young people themselves talked about a sudden transition to adulthood which they related to being ‘left alone’ and expected to manage themselves. Some of the young people who had been in contact with the adult services had experience of a more ‘formal’ approach, where they perceived themselves as being treated like ‘a number’, and not as an individual. The authors conclude that which agency young people receive support from is of importance. Social services cannot replace child welfare services when it comes to offering support for young people leaving care.

In the article Supported or accelerated transitions, Elisiv Bakketeig and Elisabeth Backe-Hansen investigate the role that the Norwegian Child Welfare Services (CWS) can play in assisting care leavers with their transition to adulthood. Their point of departure is in-depth interviews with 16 Norwegian young adults aged 20–32, who were either students or in stable employment at the time, and thus considered to be doing well. They found that the young people they had interviewed had two different perceptions of CWS: Some had experienced that the CWS had recognized their needs and provided services accordingly. Young people from this group had received support that allowed them to experience agency and influence their situation. The relationship between the social workers and the young people was defined as important. Others thought they had either not been offered support or had been offered inadequate support. In this group the young people had a less positive relationship with the social worker, and they experienced less agency. According to the authors, CWS should acknowledge that it is responsible for the young adults who have been in public care until they are demonstrably able to fend for themselves. They suggest prolonged services for this group, and consequently an amendment to the current legislation.

Inger Oterholm has interviewed 15 social workers, with focus on their considerations regarding support for young people leaving care in the transition to adulthood. In the article Limitations of aftercare, she accounts for the findings from this study. The author is interested in the difference between the ‘private and the public way of thinking’ expressed in social workers’ discretionary judgments about aftercare. In her study, the author found two opposite tendencies; One, where social workers stated that it was important to pay attention to the special situation of each individual young person and to have a flexible approach, and another, where social workers referred to commonalities related to the circumstances and focused on rules and the need to follow general procedures. Interestingly, the same social worker could express flexibility and emphasize the need for individual assessments in some situations, while referring to guidelines as crucial to the decisions in others. Such differences in judgments seemed to relate to differences in how the social workers perceived the situation of each young person. The longer the young people had been without support from child welfare services, the less flexible the social workers seemed to be in their decision-making process. The findings from the study imply that social workers in child welfare services need to address the division of care and formal responsibility, and highlight the importance of a reflective practice and relational skills for social workers.

Tea Bengtsson and Anne-Kristine Mølholt contribute with the article Creation of belonging and non-belonging in the temporal narratives of young people transitioning out of care in Denmark. Through the article they show how young care leavers struggle to create meaningful connections to both people and places on their way to adulthood. The article is based on longitudinal in-depth interview studies in Denmark with individuals that have experienced out-of-home care during both childhood and adolescence. A key experience for these young people was that belonging cannot be taken for granted, but must continually be negotiated and fought for.

Maritta Törrönen, Carol Munn-Giddings, Chrissie Gavriel and Demi Morris are focusing on how to ensure that young adults are active partners in society and have written the article Emotional Participation of Young Adults Starting their Independent Living. They argue that the question of being active partners in society has a particular relevance for young adults leaving the care system as they may have been disadvantaged by their care experiences, and focuses on what supports and hinders meaningful participation in their communities. The study design is participatory action research, thus involving young adults with leaving care experiences in question-setting, research design, ethical review, data generation, analysis or dissemination from both Finland and the UK. The young adults in this study talk about what enables or constrains their participation, and their wish to be socially and emotionally attached to other people is highlighted. To understand this concept and practice the authors draw on a theoretical discussion of reciprocity, which include the importance of social support and that we in a reciprocal relationship both give to and gain from that relationship. The authors suggest a movement from individualistic practice towards community practice which has at its core the importance of supporting reciprocal relationships.

In the article Investigating the link between school performance, aftercare and educational outcome among youth ageing out of foster care: A Norwegian nationwide longitudinal cohort study, Kirsti Valset investigates the important question on how school performance is connected to the measures that care leavers receive. Earlier research has pointed to a positive relationship between aftercare and educational success, and Valset analyses in what direction this connection seems to go; does after care contribute to educational success or is it rather so that young individuals that perform well in school are more likely to receive after care? The data studied consists of more than 800 Norwegian foster children born in 1986–1990, both those who stayed in foster care at 18, and those who moved out. The results show that school performance in adolescence affect the degree of child welfare support among youth aging out of long-term foster care. However, the relationship is not linear. The results thereby evoke an important discussion on ‘who gets what when and how’ as it shows that those who could be expected to need the most support, i.e. care leavers with low school performance, receive the least.

Signe Frederiksen and Mette Lausten analyses Danish register data on young care leavers born in 1995, looking into the prevalence of aftercare and the characteristics of recipients and non-recipients. In Denmark, young persons are eligible to aftercare when leaving out-of-home care at the age of 18, if they show the prospect of positive development during aftercare. However, they may turn down the offer and they may be offered other services instead. The authors are therefore interested in finding out how frequently aftercare is used, and to understand more about when it is used. The authors find that 56 percent of the care leavers in the studied population receive aftercare. When it comes to differences between recipients and non-recipients, they find that young people leaving residential care are less likely to receive aftercare than those leaving foster care or an own dwelling. They also find that having experienced a higher number of placements, and attending a special school at primary or lower secondary level have been shown to contribute positively to the probability of receiving aftercare, whereas duration of care contributes negatively. However, the authors also conclude that many variables that were included in the study did not turn out to have an impact. Vulnerabilities, such as mental health or delinquency, or resilience, such as being enrolled in an educational institution or being employed, do not impact the likelihood of receiving aftercare.

Jan Storø discuss the concepts on independence versus interdependence in relation to what happens when young people leave care, in his article To manage on one’s own after leaving care? A discussion of the concepts independence versus interdependence. When talking about young people’s transition from care to adulthood, this is often conceptualized as a transition to independence. Jan Storø argues however, that the concept of independence might lead us to misunderstand what type of life the young people are moving to, and which challenges they might face. Independence suggests that becoming an adult is an exercise of managing totally on one`s own. This is problematic, given the fact that most adults in a society are taking part in mutual exchanges in social networks. In exploring this and related issues theoretically, he discuss the content, differences and similarities in the concepts of independence versus interdependence, and suggests different ways of combining the perspectives of independence and interdependence in helping young people in transition from care to adulthood.

Notes

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article

1. Assistant measures refer to assistance provided by the Child Welfare Service when a child is in particular need of assistance due to conditions at home or for other reasons. The object of the assistance measures is to contribute to a positive change to the child and his/her family, by either care-changing or/and compensatory assistance measures. In many families the assistance measures can be extensive, and families often receive different measures at the same time. Examples of various types of assistance measures are advice and guidance, a personal support contact, a respite home, respite measures at home and various parental supports.