“My Whole Family Is Not Really My Family”—Secure Care Shadows on Family and Family Practices Among Young Adults and Their Family Members

Emotional Chaos

One of the most prominent aspects of stories told by young adults and their parents about their experiences of family life during and after institutional placement was emotional chaos. These experiences and stories were marked by a wide range of emotions, and these emotions were strongly felt and changed at a rapid pace.

For parents, their stories of family life when their child was placed in secure care were stories of parenthood in crisis. Although several parents had asked for their child to be taken into care and were convinced that they had no other option, they expressed how they questioned their own parenting abilities and that they felt questioned by others. As one mother explained:

[…] when she [the daughter] was taken into care, you felt like the worst parent in the world… I mean, like you weren’t worth much. (Agneta, mother)

Secure care is seen as a last resort in child welfare, and this option emerges only when everything else has failed, including family. Thus, having a child placed in secure care brought a sense of personal failure that was magnified by social stigma surrounding institutional placement. The parents who themselves reached out to child welfare authorities for help and thereby asked for institutional placement for their own children emphasized situations that made them go against what is considered “good parenthood.” The feelings expressed of shame and lack of self-worth testify to the moral frame construing what parents should and should not do, and manifest parental responsibility as an unquestionable claim (Ribbens McCarthy et al., 2000).

We argue that these feelings of shame are related to the shadows of secure care that fall onto parents’ sense of self-worth. The overarching prism of parental failure when having children placed in the institution makes the secure care shadow persistent and visible in parents’ talk about their family. Interestingly, the impact of secure care does not fade away with time; rather, the shadow of secure care affects current self-images of parents and their parenting skills. Troubled images of self also triggered troubled thinking about one’s own position, and these thoughts were experienced as bearing a heavy emotional load:

But we are still here, and surely that’s what… that’s what’s important in a way, no matter how awful it has been. So, to endure, that’s undervalued as a method I would say, to actually endure. Sometimes it’s only about that. I mean, you cannot do anything more than endure because you have no other choice. (Gunilla, mother)

Reflecting upon her experiences, Gunilla repeatedly used the word “endure” to explain her parenting position. The sense of powerlessness emerged as an overwhelming condition that affects all aspects of family life. “Endurance” indicated not only the inner strength to fight unfavorable circumstances but also indicated an ongoing struggle to find one’s own position in the shaken image of family life. Even years after the placement, the power of the emotional chaos of that time still comes forward when parents make sense of their own family positions and families.

This shadow of emotional chaos seem persist in parents’ troubled self-images. For some parents, doubts regarding own family positions had been accompanying them for years. For them, secure care might have magnified existing problems and concerns:

I’m pretty much a failure with that part. What I consider to be a family, it’s a nuclear family. It actually is. But I screwed that up back when I was 18, my thoughts about family so to speak. (Linn, mother)

When admitting to being a failure, Linn used the present tense. To her, the experiences of parenthood in crisis seemed to constitute a permanent feature of her life as a mother. In this context, secure care was used as an example or rather evidence of failures that could neither be hidden nor fixed. In this highly emotional excerpt, Linn recalled her teenage pregnancy to emphasize that from the start, she was doomed to fail. Her perceived failure did not refer to the actual events, but rather the imagined family ideals that, when not reached, may have permanently damaged the way individuals related to others and engaged in family life.

Parental involvement and positions at the time of placement also received attention in stories told by young adults. Although they could describe strained and fragile relationships with their parents before the placement, they expressed very intense reactions to their parents’ involvements (or lack thereof) in the placement. Akin to the highly emotional tone in some parents’ stories, young adults whose parents initiated the placement expressed their anger and disrespect. Reflecting upon the placement, Rashid shared strong and ambivalent feelings when he found himself in secure care:

When this happened, how I… I still love my mother. When I talked to her, I cried… The first time I got … I wailed and she wailed. But I told her that I hated her and stuff, but god… I knew in my heart I didn’t hate her, I just said shit ‘cuz I was angry as hell. […] I was angry about where she put me, that’s what I was angry at. But I still loved my mother, but I was still… it’s that, I surely said all those things to her ‘cuz I was afraid, [I] remember that I was afraid because I felt like I was in a prison. (Rashid, young man)

Feelings of fear and anger accompanying the institutional placement were also feelings of abandonment and rage with parents whose role was to protect their children. Vivid memories of crying and wailing as exemplified by Rashid were common in stories of young adults who struggled to understand their placement in secure care. As indicated, a great part of their displayed struggle was related to the disrupted and broken family images. Regardless of their previous situations and the quality of family relations prior to the placement, young adults narrating their experiences could not make sense of the situation because they could not make sense of the role their families took during the time of institutional placement. Rashid, for example, speaks both of anger and love to his mother in an attempt to recall the conflicting and overwhelming feelings that has since marked his experiences and memories of secure care. The shadow of these ambiguous feelings about their parents lurked in their talk about the placement, almost 10 years later. Still, after such a long time, several of the young adults told us that the strength of emotions they were experiencing made it difficult for them to talk about this ambiguity with their parents.

Secure care (a powerful, last-resort intervention that the young people had often been escorted to in haste) stands as an extraordinary context from which to consider questions about family and family life. We posit that, as an institutional practice, placement into secure care is highly emotional and affects relationships of both the confined youths and their families (Enell & Wilińska, 2021.). The emotional chaos accompanying this form of institutional placement is closely related to the disturbed family life and the images of what families should be about. In the social imaginary of family, parents are those who care for and protect their children; children, on the other hand, can rely on their parents. Secure care shows that this idea is not always the reality. In some cases, it shows that family is not enough; in other cases, it shows that family is the main source of problems. The emotional bearing of such ways of understanding family in the context of secure care cannot be underestimated. The voices of children and parents presented above demonstrate that vivid, strong, long-lasting emotions accompany placement and that these relate to how we look at families. The shadow of recalled horror of secure care is not only about the institutionalization, it is also about family displacement, and the shadow appears as emotions that both children and their families are left to manage many years afterward.

Revised and Negotiated Family Positions

Under these conditions of emotional and relational chaos for both family members and young people, relationships with family during the placement were expected to continue, now within the restrictions of a secure care setting (Enell & Wilińska, 2021.). One such restriction was that for the first weeks or months, the youths were not allowed to phone anyone in their private network except for their parents. Moreover, the number of calls and time allowed for them was limited. Some young people claimed (confirmed by parents) that they could only make one ten-minute long phone call and receive one ten-minute long phone call back each day. Another restriction concerned physical visits, which in some cases were limited to every third weekend. These circumstances were exacerbated by the (frequently remote) locations of the secure care institutions. For the most part, young peoples’ contacts with the outside world were restricted to contact with parents regardless of the quality of relationship or the existing family tensions.

The young adults experienced the forced separation and the highly restricted contact with family differently. Some found the restrictions very frustrating. Lisa, for example, said that despite previous conflicts, her mother was her first choice to call and she often used the two allocated phone calls each day to talk to her. As she remembers it, these phone calls were what kept her going. Later on in the placement, when Lisa was allowed to talk to people other than her parents, she explains that the limited number of phone calls each day forced her to choose if she would accept a phone call or save it for later in case her mother might call. Often, she prioritized calls from her mother. Eight years after the placement, she reflects:

The fact that my and mum’s, mostly mum’s relationship, was based on me feeling bad, and this eroded our relationship so that even now we will never have a mother-daughter relationship because there is always something she has to help me with. It’s still a little bit of a dependency relationship. It’s been like that since [name of secure care unit], that I feel she is the only one I can trust when it comes to certain issues. So, she is the one who has to to help me. It tires her and it also makes us often have… not anymore, but we had many discussions and quarrels because of me thinking that she should help me while she maybe thought “yeah, but you need to learn yourself too.” (Lisa, young woman)

Lisa displayed her relationship with her mother as atypical compared to the ideal of a “proper” mother-daughter relationship. The way she was left to depend on her mother when she was at her most vulnerable provided her with an understanding of the relationship that was still present in her life. Her display that her well-being is dependent on her mother is to her a distinct and still-present shadow of secure care that hinders her self-expected change to a self-governing daughter with a more equal relationship to her mother.

Secure care as a difficult and highly emotional time could also mean that family ties and bonds would strengthen. This was something that young adults and parents from the same family could agree upon and it was something that happened to Nora and her mother. Nora, similarly to Rashid, was angry at her mother for putting her in secure care. After realizing that she was only allowed to have contact to her parents, Nora said; “well of course, they became very important to me because I was not allowed to have anything else.” The relations could also be strengthened in situations when both young people and their parents feel united against the overarching power of institutional placement. Having a common enemy could allow both parties to redefine their family relations and positions. Lisa’s example puts forward the perspective of a mother who, thanks to her resourcefulness, emerges as the most important person in Lisa’s life. It may be that Lisa’s mother had always acted like that, but perhaps it was the institutional placement that could have revealed the meaning and importance of her actions to Lisa.

While secure care might have triggered changes and re-definitions of family that resulted in more or better connection for some, for others, the path to increased understanding took more time and effort, as the following story illustrates:

Johan: When you stayed at [secure care unit] and [city] and so, there wasn’t much of family ‘cuz… you only had contact over the phone sometimes.

In Johan’s family display above, he draws a distinction between knowing family and doing family. His woeful reflection is a vivid reminder of the importance of family practices to the way we experience families where the “little things” (Ursin et al. 2017), like being together, being in touch, and engaging in one another’s lives, make a difference. Family without contact and practice ceases to exist. Still, Johan used the categories of “parents” and “brothers” to name his family relations, although his final “far away” signifies great emotional distance that grew during residential care and when there were restrictions placed on relationships with others. However, Johan’s story is also about revised family relations after aging out-of-care. After years in various care arrangements, Johan resumed his contact with his mother and some of his siblings.

You learn to value it because a family member can disappear like that [he snaps his fingers] and they are gone. (Johan, young man)

The way he made meaning of his family relationships can be understood of as a shadow of his time in care and the sudden relational changes placements brought into his life. The shadow of secure care in his story is a vivid reminder of family temporality and its limits.

The fragility of family relationships during institutional placement also affected the ways that young adults and their parents conceived of family. Young adults emphasized the importance of trust, support, and care. While by default they saw family as parents, they also created space for more open definitions of family based not on blood ties, but rather on the concrete practice and qualities of relations.

Family to me. Well, I mean my whole family is not really my family in that way. For me, my family is those who, well, you would basically do anything for. Or that without them it feels very, very empty. It’s like a mainstay. […] And, I don’t quite feel that way about my mother, unfortunately. I would like to, but I don’t. (Nora, young woman)

The notion that families would do everything for their members and that family relations provide a sense of stability and safety was widespread among young adults. Those reflections often occurred against the backdrop of lived experiences of family life that did not quite match the picture. The evident struggle in Nora’s story can reflect any struggle in which one tries to free oneself from a family defined by birth. Thus, “My whole family is not really my family” is not only an expression of a complicated family situation, but above all else, an expression of a moral stance according to which, in order to qualify for “family,” one must deserve it. When family membership does not match family practice, that membership can be withdrawn (see Becker & Charles, 2006). The boundaries young adults drew around their families in terms of excluding some family members and including other people, such as friends or even pets, were not drawn with a light heart. Nora’s description of her feelings towards her biological mother evokes a sense of loss and disappointment, and offers testimony to the (culturally and socially determined) valuable position of biological parents no matter the circumstances.

Interviews with parents revealed much more limited possibilities for negotiating the concept of family. Although some of them shared their children’s more open definitions of family, none of the interviewed parents rejected their children nor refused to see them as part of their family—neither at time of, or after, secure care. To some, the experience of secure care forced them to prioritize their children. Linn, who previously described herself as a family failure, intended to end the damaging relationship to her partner at the time when her child was placed in secure care. However, the way secure care staff emphasized the importance of parental support to her child made her change her mind, and she stayed in the relationship.

And I got that imprinted, how important we were. And that made me back off a bit, because [daughter’s name] still [comes] first. (Linn, mother)

Linn’s display of putting her child first and taking parental responsibility by sidestepping her own needs emerged as a secure care moral lesson of how to be a “good parent.” In terms of a secure care shadow, the moral lesson strengthened her perception of herself as a failure, and during the interview she talked about herself as an insufficient mother.

The experiences that the parents had gone through could also help them to admit that family life does not need to be perfect, or rather cannot be about perfection.

And that you don’t have to, everything doesn’t have to be cheerful, you can be angry at each other, you can be sad too, but you still keep contact. […] I would never kick my kids out. I’ve put them into this world and then… well, it’s a lifelong commitment. (Agneta, mother)

Speaking from the position of family bearers, parents often shared their experiences of keeping things together and trying their best to make family happen. In accordance with the moral imperative of putting children first (Ribbens McCarthy et al., 2000), they placed responsibility for family life on themselves. Although experiences with secure care could allow them to reflect more freely on what families could look like, these experiences also placed a morally ingrained shadow on their parenting—that children should be their first priority.

The pressure to make family (read: birth family) work is evident in stories of both parents and young adults. There are signs of individuals, mainly young adults, creating new meanings and opening the idea of family to include people outside the traditional kin network, as well as signs that family is being thought of as a form of doing rather than as a fixed unit. Even so, such interpretations occur against the backdrop of firmly rooted ideas about the dominance of birth families. The notion of “birth family” is persistent, and young people are very reluctant to give it up (as also observed by e.g., Wilson et al., 2012). It is possible that the idea is so important that, in trying to display that a family is working, (birth) family members are driven to explore new ways of interacting and communicating (Finch, 2007). The pressure to make family work and a family’s revised communications can be understood as a secure care shadow: contacts to parents are accepted, but also the idea that (birth) family is important is reinforced.

Doing and Undoing Family

The post-secure care context of a family marked by emotional chaos and (in many cases) revised images of family also has consequences for immediate practices and actions that either maintain or dissolve various family relationships. As much as family display and the practices of “doing family” reveal a great deal about families in the context of secure care, the lack of display, or the undoing of family, may provide even more profound insights into family complexities. As Gabb (2011) points out, both visible and invisible family displays are equally relevant for learning about what family is about. Not surprisingly, in the analyzed stories, the “doing” dimension was found more often among interviewed parents, while the stories of undoing family were exclusively found among young adults. By undoing family in this context, we mean the process of redefining the normative assumptions and ideals about family life and distancing oneself from the overarching preeminence of family in the lives of individuals. In this, any attempts at undoing family are directed at both imagining and living life without a family as one of the most desired relational forms.

Typically, parents are held responsible for what families look like (Ribbens McCarthy et al., 2000). Secure care may therefore challenge the ability of parents to rise up to the demands of being a “good parent.” Family displays can thus become a useful strategy to fend off moral stigma following secure care, and to convey that their family relations are like those of “proper families” (cf. Ursin et al., 2017). In the following excerpt, Olle shows what he learned from his experiences with a child in secure care:

Well, now we’ve got a different perspective on that too, but a family is basically that we can talk about everything. We can engage in what we do. We do not let anyone go the day without telling something that they have experienced, you have to at least talk a little bit to them about what they think. (Olle, father)

The importance of communication and of keeping an (indirect) eye on children can be read as a typical example of reproducing the parental ideal. For Olle, this description also indicated that having a daily talk increased in importance as a direct result of secure care experiences and he related that talk to difficulties in family relations, especially between parents and children. As he admits, he learned to do that because “you thought you lived well and had a nice life, but apparently [the daughter] did not feel well at all.” Thus, Olle’s way of doing family 9 years later is shadowed by his experience of secure care.

Talking, or “just talking” as some parents and young adults would say, became one of the most important ways of doing family. Stories of neither parents nor young adults included much about other types of activities—talking and calling each other was most often mentioned when explaining family practices during and after secure care. Sometimes, however, talking to each other indicted trouble, dependence, or fear:

Now, when he calls so often, he calls just to talk… No, maybe he does not do that, not just to talk, there is always something he wants. But before, you knew,“right, something must have happened” when he called. But it’s not like that anymore. (Robert, father)

Robert’s comments give insights into the troubled side of communication in that they show how an apparently single practice (calling) may acquire various meanings even if the same persons are involved. What used to be a reason for worry has changed and is now an opportunity to keep in touch. However, “doing family” is not only about how and with whom but also when and where. Considerations of membership and practice that keep the concept of family alive (Morgan, 2011) also have spatial and temporal dimensions that may change or affect the meaning assigned to them, which is also reflected in Boddy (2019), who found that family memories and relationships over time could change and become both strained and supportive.

As much as keeping in touch was an important practice of displaying family in the post-secure care context, being on one’s own was the main strategy for “undoing family” among young adults.

I don’t care much about family anymore, like I did when I was younger. I don’t because family is family, but you… I mean, they can still hurt you the most or… It’s like this… so, the most important thing for me is actually myself. (Tove, young woman)

Strained relations with parents coupled with experiences of secure care could turn young people inwards, searching for a better quality of life on their own without reference to family. Placing emphasis on oneself could therefore be seen as the extension of individualistic discourses (prevalent at secure care units) that, in the name of teaching responsibility, had gradually grown to a shadow of blaming and stigmatizing young people as the sources of all trouble (Enell & Wilińska, 2021.).

In her story, Tove gave also voice to the negative feelings and difficulties experienced in her relations to family. Recognizing the importance assigned to families, she therefore emphasized that the emotional damage caused by difficult family relations “hurt you the most.” These difficulties also mean that young people may have limited relational resources to help them move on and create new relations and families, as described in another interview:

Adam: Hmm. But then, I think it’s a lot because… I have not been with mum and dad since 2007. It’s been mainly about creating my own family.

Only a few of the young adults found it difficult or impossible to define current family relations. Adam’s story of “creating family” reflects his doing and undoing of family in a childhood that included multiple placements with foster families and in residential care settings. His response “I don’t know” implies ambiguous feelings about family relations and, as Holland and Crowley (2013) suggested in their study of young people leaving a care situation, the loss of having other people’s biographies intertwined with yours over a longer period of time.

To many of the young adults, the concept of family seemed to be reserved for parents, which became evident in the stories of young adults with children on their own. In their stories, they identified themselves as “children” to their parents rather than as parents to their children. Having children seem to have brought some of those young adults closer to their parents. When they were asked to name their family members, their own parents came first. Thus, not knowing who your family is must not be read literally as having no family relations, but can instead be understood as a persistent difficulty in coming to terms with non-functional relationships with parents. In the interview with Adam, he spoke about his siblings and his tattoo that says “family” to emphasize that he would always stand by his family. This ideal and morality of how to do family might reflect what he wished his family would have done for him while he struggled to create his own family.

The “I don’t know” can also be a reminder of the life stage that the interviewed young adults found themselves in. The young adults were in an age when many young people leave home and birth family. Leaving home is considered one of the most important transitions separating the period of youth and adulthood; however, it is a long process that depends on various structural, contextual, and relational aspects (Holdsworth & Morgan, 2005). Entering adulthood with experience of secure care, where some felt they were abandoned by their own parents and to blame for disturbing family life, might have made it easier to undo families, at least temporarily. To the parents of children entering adulthood, their parental responsibility and their moral obligation to protect and put their child first seem to be persistent, even in their child’s process of leaving the birth family.