Anchors for deliberation and shared deliberation: Understanding planning in young adults transitioning from out-of-home care

Abstract

This theoretical paper focuses on early-stage planning in young adults in transition from out-of-home care. The theoretical approach builds on philosophical accounts of planning and shared planning by Michael Bratman and Jennifer Morton; previous research on care leavers’ experience; and findings from two recent qualitative studies of planning in care leavers in the UK. There are three central proposals of the paper. First, that if we focus on a young person’s deliberations about what matters (‘anchors for deliberation’), or what is important – to her or him – we may better understand the early stages of planning. Second, that social-cooperative or shared deliberations may be of special importance in understanding and supporting the early stages of planning in young people leaving care, partly because of the severe disruptions to social relationships that may have afflicted many care leavers during their earlier development. Third, that it may also be important to understand young people’s standpoints on planning norms, in both individual and social-cooperative contexts, given some young people’s subjection to repeated violation of norms. After introducing Bratman’s and Morton’s work, we suggest three categories of early-stage planning: specific anchors, policy-based anchors (including self-reliance, and ‘I don’t plan’), and anchors for the provisional future. Implications of the theoretical approach for research and practice are outlined. The paper aims to contribute to a theoretical basis for collaborative transition-planning (or ‘pathway planning’ in the UK) with young adults leaving care.

Keywords

Anchors for deliberation leaving care planning resilience theory young people

Introduction

Young people in transition from out-of-home care usually participate in goal-oriented planning of various aspects of their lives – health, education, accommodation, financial support, employment, family and social relationships, identity – in the UK this is termed ‘pathway planning’ (Stein, 2012) – in the US and in many other countries young people participate in ‘transition planning’ (Mendes and Snow, 2016; US Department of Education, 2016).

But young adults may or may not wish to plan in an explicit goal-oriented manner. First, emerging adulthood is regarded as an experimental period of life, characterised by exploration and instability (Arnett, 2014). Second, for young people in transition from care (or ‘leaving care’ or ageing ‘out of care’ – I use the terms interchangeably), multiple barriers may frustrate attempts to ‘get a life’ (Pryce et al., 2017). Third, there is preliminary evidence that at least some young adults who are leaving care may be sceptical about future-oriented planning (Barratt et al., 2019; Hung and Appleton, 2016).

Can we, as researchers and practitioners, look at young people’s planning from a different perspective?

In this theoretical paper, we ‘rewind’ from explicit goal-oriented planning back to more exploratory and less formal ways of planning. There are three central proposals of the paper. First, that if we focus on a young person’s deliberations about what matters, or what is important – to her or him – we may better understand the early stages of planning. In turn, we might then develop a stronger sense of how to support young adults in beginning to make their way through the world. Throughout this paper, deliberations about ‘what matters’ are termed ‘anchors for deliberation’, following the philosopher Michael Bratman (2007, 2013):

Here my proposal is – – – – the idea that certain plan-states both concern what matters in the sense of having weight in our deliberative thought, and when functioning properly tie together our thought and action in relevant ways, both synchronically and diachronically. (Bratman, 2013: 60)

The second proposal of the paper is that socially-cooperative or shared deliberations (Bratman, 2014, Chapter 7) may be of particular importance in understanding and supporting the early stages of planning in young people leaving care, partly because of the severe disruptions to social relationships that may have afflicted many care leavers during their earlier development. Here, our focus is primarily on shared deliberations the young person may have with friends, family and the informal social network, and how this indicates what and who is personally important to the young person.

The third proposal is that it may also be of particular importance to understand young people’s positions on planning norms, in both individual and social-cooperative contexts, given some young people’s subjection to repeated violation of norms (Morton, 2011).

Our focus will be on the specific example of emerging adults in transition from out-of-home care (Arnett, 2014; Courtney et al., 2012, 2015; Stein, 2006, 2012), although the approach may have some generality for the wider range of young people living in chronically adverse circumstances.

The paper has six parts:

an introduction to early-stage planning;

a ‘remarkable trio’ of planning capacities: a brief outline of Bratman’s theoreticalmodel of human planning,

planning norms and Morton’s ecological critique of normative aspects of Bratman’s model (Morton, 2011);

anchors for deliberation and shared deliberation: an approach to early-stage planning in young adults leaving care;

implications of the approach for research and practice;

conclusion.

What is early-stage planning, and why is it important?

Initially, we might tend to think of planning, in the contexts of leaving care, as requiring explicit goals or objectives: to attend college; to meet with an estranged birth mother; to apply for a specific job (or indeed to set small objectives directed toward these goals). But when we stand back for a moment, we realise that there may be a complex set of steps before that – deliberating, imagining, discussing, experimenting, failing, tripping over, ‘finding a way’. These first recursive steps may be vaguely drawn, perhaps like initial artistic sketches, with repeated ‘false starts’. Furthermore, first steps may not be explicitly goal-oriented – but they may ‘turn out’ to be important for future decision-making.

There are at least four reasons why the idea of recursive and exploratory early stage planning may be an important focus for researchers and practitioners working with young adults transitioning from care.

First, emerging adulthood (nominally 18–29 years of age: Arnett, 2014; Arnett et al., 2014) is regarded as a life-stage, in which the person tries out what kind of life to lead, especially in the areas of love relationships, work and ideology; with potential instability in each of these domains. The idea of ‘planning a life’ may not sit comfortably with this exploratory mental set – early stages of life-planning would therefore be important to understand. In addition to the experimental nature of the life-stage, precarious employment arrangements have become a major concern for many young people, introducing further instability (Benach et al., 2014).

Second, young adults who are transitioning from care are known to experience a ‘stacked deck’ of multi-level barriers to accessing a range of educational, social and economic resources (Gypen et al., 2017). In addition, those leaving care are more likely to experience mental health issues and drug misuse (Havlicek et al., 2013) and criminality (Gypen et al., 2017). Current barriers add to a picture of corrosive developmental disadvantage, beginning before admission to care, and also, unfortunately sometimes after placement in foster or residential care (Havlicek and Courtney, 2016). Quantitative data on transition from care are matched by qualitative data showing young people often feeling isolated and unsupported (Cunningham and Diversi, 2013; Hiles et al., 2014; Munford and Sanders, 2015; Natalier and Johnson, 2015; Stein, 2006), and struggling to seek help (Pryce et al., 2017) – a picture that, for some young people, contrasts sharply with the ‘ideal’ of emerging adulthood as exploration. Barriers are likely to affect expectations, and confidence and willingness to plan, but the specific literature on this is sparse (Barratt et al., 2019; Cook et al., 2005; Geenen and Powers, 2007; Glynn and Mayock, 2019; Hung and Appleton, 2016; Lemus et al., 2017; Sulimani-Aidan, 2015).

Third, for a majority of young people transitioning from care, there will have been a history of experience of maltreatment (Havlicek and Courtney, 2016). Maltreatment is known to predict low self-worth, low relationship quality (elevated anger, reduced trust, poor communication) and raised risk for psychiatric disorder (Collishaw et al., 2007; Flynn et al., 2014; Steine et al., 2017; Teicher and Samson, 2016). A significant proportion of children removed from their birth families following abuse experience further abuse in out-of-home care (Havlicek and Courtney, 2016; Katz et al., 2017). In general, our services are still not geared up to understanding the developmental impact of abuse (and subsequent removal from home) on young adults’ lives (Havlicek and Courtney, 2016), which, when compounded by poor access to housing, work, education, etc., surely has an impact on adolescent and emerging adult capacity to plan for the future and plan jointly with others (Cook et al., 2005). Importantly, ‘future orientation’ and ‘planning’ have been shown to promote better outcomes following severe adverse experiences such as child maltreatment and institutionalisation (Luthar et al., 2015; Oshri et al., 2018; Sulimani-Aidan, 2015; Rutter, 2013; Rutter and Quinton, 1984).

Fourth, in two recent qualitative studies of young adult care leavers in England, some participants were sceptical about prospective planning, with strongly felt and detailed deliberations about this stance (Barratt et al., 2019; Hung and Appleton, 2016). Our findings led us to consider more carefully how to describe and understand the early stages of planning a life, in the context of emerging adulthood, multiple barriers to effective planning and historic maltreatment.

We turned to philosophy in order to begin to clarify concepts of planning agency. One of the clearest and most systematic accounts of planning agency – in the words of a colleague ‘as clear and straightforward as one gets in this business’ (Millgram, 2014: 153) – is the work of Michael Bratman (Vargas and Yaffe, 2014).

We next describe the broad sweep of Bratman’s theoretical framework, followed by an ecological critique of certain aspects of this type of model (Morton, 2011) – a critique which seems highly relevant to the adverse circumstances of care leavers.

A ‘remarkable trio’ of planning capacities: A brief outline of Bratman’s theoretical model of human planning

The philosopher Michael Bratman has developed a theoretical framework of human planning in which he incorporates what he calls ‘a remarkable trio of capacities’ (Bratman, 2013: 47). The trio refers to capacities for: (a) temporally extended intentional agency, (b) shared or social agency and (c) self-governed intentional agency.

Temporally extended agency

Bratman defines temporally extended agency/cross-temporal planning as ‘acting over time in ways that involve important forms of intentional cross-temporal organization and coordination – – each of them infused with the agent’s understanding of and commitment to the larger temporally extended arc of the activity’ (Bratman, 2013: 47).

For a young person who feels reasonably well-resourced, cross-temporal planning might include a plan to apply to university to study a subject which she is drawn to (Okpych and Courtney, 2017; Rios and Rocco, 2014). Cross-temporal planning might imply both an arc of ‘plan-infused’ intention to attend university, and, where relevant or available, an active use of autobiographical memory of particular vocational experiences and social support from individuals. Importantly, the ‘arc’ of cross-temporality is past and future-oriented, involving what has come to be called ‘mental time-travel’ (Suddendorf and Busby, 2005).

More modestly, cross-temporal planning might include a tentative plan to contact an estranged birth mother, with painful retrospective memories to address, and a prospective sense of uncertainty about what this particular ‘arc’ of social relationship might look like in the future.

Of course a young person might wish to plan to go to university and re-contact a birth parent – during the same arc of future time, placing significant demands on overall psychological and social resources.

This theoretical approach – emphasising intentional cross-temporal organization and coordination – values the semantic or cross-referential interconnections a person actively makes between different aspects and times of her life, and what deliberative sense she makes of those connections – her own groundwork.

Shared agency

Shared planning, for Bratman, refers to ‘acting together’ (Bratman, 2013, 2014): ‘each sees herself and her partners as acting together in ways that involve distinctive forms of commitment and responsiveness to the joint activity and so to each person’s participation in that joint activity’ (Bratman, 2013: 47).

A young person might negotiate with a trusted previous foster mother to jointly look at some potential independent accommodation, in order to help with decision-making. Or, a young person might value long-standing relationships with specific friends going back to time while in care – she might wish to ensure that they all meet up regularly, have fun and share concerns.

In Bratman’s model of shared planning, which clearly goes beyond ‘strategic interaction’ with a stranger (Bratman, 2014: 92–96), there is usually a cooperative ‘meshing’ of sub-plans as part of shared planning, reflecting the joint commitment and responsiveness referred to above.

For Bratman there is ‘a deep continuity between individual and social agency’, with shared/social agency being seen as ‘an aspect of the fecundity of planning structures’ (Bratman, 2014: 4, author’s italics).

This ‘deep continuity’ is reflected in our approach in this paper, where we keep in mind the painful social relationship experience of most young people leaving care. Bratman’s approach, which he refers to as addressing ‘modest sociality’ (Bratman, 2014: 1–9), seems particularly suited to thinking about young people who may be making understandably quite tentative approaches to social cooperation (Pryce et al., 2017).

Self-governance

‘As an initial, basic step, we can say that in self-governance the agent herself directs and governs her practical thought and action’ (Bratman, 2007: 4).

For Bratman, this involves the capacity for guidance of thought and action by ‘plan-like commitments to weights’ and ‘certain plan-states’ which ‘concern what matters in the sense of having weight in our deliberative thought’ (Bratman, 2013: 60–64). For Bratman, plan-states not only concern ‘what matters’, but also ‘when functioning properly tie together our thought and action’, both during a small temporal interval (‘synchronically’), and over a temporally extended arc (‘diachronically’). Plan-like commitments to weights (i.e. concerning what matters) anchor deliberation and are seen by Bratman as ‘central to our non-homuncular model of human self-governance’ (Bratman, 2013: 64).

To summarise the triadic model, Bratman suggest that human planning involves cross-temporal (from past, through present, to future) intentional agency; social and cooperative/shared planning, involving responsive and committed ‘acting together’ in relation to specific joint plans and self-governance, involving plan-states concerning what matters, and (‘when functioning properly’) these plan-states tie together an individual’s thought and action in the present and over time.

In addition to the planning trio, Bratman also regards planning norms as central to an understanding of how human planning agency works (Bratman, 2013). We briefly describe Bratman’s approach to planning norms, followed by a critique based on the work of Morton (2011).

Planning norms, and Morton’s ecological critique of normative aspects of Bratman’s model

Planning norms

For Bratman, self-governance, in tying together thought and action, will usually be planning-norm-guided (Bratman, 2013). Relevant norms might include means-end coherence, internal consistency with the agent’s beliefs, agglomeration – a coherent or dovetailed stance to planning, and stability – ‘some sort of defeasible presumption in favor of one’s prior plan states’ (Bratman, 2013: 51). Bratman also discusses the relevance of norms to shared planning (Bratman, 2014).

But, we might point out, young people with a history of maltreatment and out-of-home care will usually have experienced flouting and violation of rational and planning norms by significant others – a birth parent, sometimes a foster parent, and sometimes a public service provider (Natalier and Johnson, 2015; Pryce et al., 2017; Unrau et al., 2008).

These recurrent social norm-violations will have been in addition to the more fundamental violations of maltreatment and removal from home.

What implications might this have for our understanding of norm-oriented and future-oriented tying together of thought and action by young people, especially in shared or social contexts?

One answer to this question arises from work suggesting that those aspects of theories of planning-rationality that assume certain norms as criterial of well-functioning or coherent planning (such as Bratman’s) may be untenable because such theories fail to take account of the ecological circumstances of the agent (Millgram, 2014, 2019; Morton, 2011).

Perhaps the key point is that normative aspects of theories such as that of Bratman assume relative stability of the environment. Jennifer Morton argues:

we can’t discuss which norms should structure deliberation without taking into account the environment or the psychology of the agent. The norms that should structure deliberation are those that enable an agent with a particular psychology in a particular environment to deliberate so that she ends up doing what she has most reason to do. (Morton, 2011: 577, my italics)

For the purposes of the present paper, the ecological contexts of young people leaving care are well known – they are anything but stable (Hiles et al., 2014), so we might expect the planning norm aspect of Bratman’s theory to be up for question. But Morton goes further – she suggests that a person ‘ends up doing what she has most reason to do’. It is with this phrase in mind that we move on to the next section of the paper in which we outline a detailed approach to early-stage planning based both on Bratman’s model and Morton’s critique.

Anchors for deliberation and shared deliberation: An approach to early-stage planning in young adults leaving care

Bratman begins a 2007 chapter on anchors for deliberation as follows:

I want to sketch a model of deliberation that is anchored in certain plan-like commitments of the agent. These anchors need not be inescapable or necessary, they can sensibly vary from person to person, they can stand in complex relations to judgements about the good, and they play basic roles in the cross-temporal organization of practical thought and action. And such deliberation is, I conjecture, central to autonomy and self-government. (Bratman, 2007: 187)

On shared deliberation: ‘we reason together in a way that involves a common ground of shared commitments to treating certain considerations as mattering in our shared deliberations’ (Bratman, 2014: 132, author’s italics).

‘and not all conversation is shared deliberation’ (Bratman, 2014: 194, note 39)

In this central section of the paper, we tentatively outline three preliminary categories of anchors for deliberation. The categories are based on Bratman’s concepts of plan-states; Morton’s ecological critique of planning norms; our theoretical emphasis on young people’s experience of social violation of planning norms; the extant literature on care leavers and our own qualitative studies (we include very brief case illustration material below ((Hung and Appleton, 2016)). The categories are:

Specific anchors;

Policy-based anchors: (a) self-reliance, (b) ‘I don’t plan’;

Anchors for the provisional future.

The categories overlap and are not intended to be a comprehensive type list – rather a first approach. They are interpretive/reflexive. They are designed to be entirely provisional and open to further conceptual and empirical inquiry (Kuusela, 2008).

Specific anchors

For an individual person, anchors for deliberation focus on what matters (Bratman, 2013), or what is important (Archer, 2003), or what is valued. For Bratman, aspects of our lives that are important are given weight in our individual or shared deliberative thought (Bratman, 2007, 2013, 2014). Anchors are plan-like and involve personal commitments.

To take an example of a young person in transition from care: if a relationship with a previous foster mother is valued, weight may be given in thinking about how to see her soon, or how to help her with something she is worried about. Or, to take an example from Bratman: ‘love involves plan-like commitments to give significant weight to the interests of the beloved’ (Bratman, 2013: 62).

Shared deliberation implies a shared or joint commitment to weights (Bratman, 2014: 134–141). For instance, to return to a previous example, when seeking suitable accommodation, a young person may jointly share a sense of what constitutes acceptable housing with a trusted previous foster mother, and therefore discuss the detail of some proposed accommodation with her – or ask her to share a site visit.

The word ‘anchor’ (i.e. for deliberation) neatly includes (a) the commitment to weights – the focus on certain personally or relationally important aspects of the life-world – and (b) weights not being necessary or inescapable – the anchor may be ‘taken up’ when no longer thought to be personally relevant.

Anchors are regarded as ‘plan-like’, in the sense that they organise our thinking and behaviour, but without necessarily having explicit goals or objectives.

‘What matters’ might include relatively circumscribed aspects of the life-world such as a relationship with someone, a specific educational course, or a new job, or might include immensely complex anchors such as a commitment to foster and birth family members.

Corrina (woman, age 20: Hung and Appleton, 2016) talked in some depth about her family, which, for her, formed a complex anchor for deliberation. She explained that her father, from whom she had been estranged for perhaps four years, had been back in touch about a year ago, and she had had to think through whether she wished to see him again. After shared deliberation with others she trusted, and after further individual deliberation, she decided to meet him – he then became part of her family network. She was helped in her own thinking by a warm and detailed imaginative memory of her deceased paternal grandfather.

Corrina’s thinking about her family (i.e. members of both her birth family and foster family; Biehal and Wade, 1996; Lee et al., 2016) was anchored – involved personal commitments and plan-like aspects. Crucially, she experienced a depth of deliberative thinking that had gone into whether, how, where and when to meet with her father, in the context of a complex set of deliberations about her self-defined family.

But how are anchors identified ‘in the first place’? Agnieszka Jaworska (2007) argues that the internal (i.e. psychological) identification of an anchor (e.g. thinking about a foster mother who has herself given loving and consistent care to one) does not itself depend on deliberative reflectiveness. Her argument, based on the role of secondary emotions, is too detailed to go into here, except to note that her and our theoretical framework does not require a primarily rational overview of ‘what matters’. To take an example, a young person leaving care may ‘know’ that she wants to study music, not necessarily simply because she is ‘good at it’, but also because she remembers how her birth mother used to say how much she loved the way she (the young person when she was a child) sang and danced. The recalled memory has multiple connotative and expressive meanings and forms an anchor for her sense of ‘what matters’.

Policy-based anchors

Policies (Bratman, 2007: 6, 295–303) also count in Bratman’s theoretical framework as forming anchors or plan-like commitments to weights in deliberation (Bratman, 2013: 60–64). They are regarded as part of the personal constellation of what matters/what is important.

Policies are defined as intention-like attitudes, appropriately general in their content (Bratman, 2007: 6). Bratman gives, as an example of an individual policy, assigning great weight to certain religious practices in deliberation about how to conduct one’s life (Bratman, 2007: see p. 295 for other examples). The policy might affect a wide range of day-to-day decisions about eating, socialising, forming relationships, and so on.

Here we discuss two examples of self-governing policies found in qualitative studies of care-transitioning young people: self-reliance and ‘not planning/can’t plan’.

In both these examples, we have centrally in mind Morton’s (2011) critique of normative aspects of planning theories – such as Bratman’s – that assume stability of resources and environment.

Self-reliance as a policy

‘Survivalist’ self-reliance is a frequently found ‘policy’ in young people transitioning from out-of-home care (Hung and Appleton, 2016; Kools, 1999; Pryce et al., 2017; Samuels and Pryce, 2008; Stein, 2006). Many young people, including those in emerging adulthood, feel ‘responsible for their own development and safety’ (Samuels and Pryce, 2008: 1207; Pryce et al., 2017), and mistrust others as potential sources of support and connection (Pryce et al., 2017).

Danny (man, age 20: Hung and Appleton, 2016) regarded his experiences in childhood as key to understanding how he thinks and feels about the world now:

I ain’t gonna lie – I had trouble when I was a child – no-one would talk to me – my parents didn’t pay any attention – stuff like that – So I developed a state of mind where the only person I could trust is myself and my head. And my head tells me what I want to do – I always based my decisions on that. (Hung and Appleton, 2016)

As part of further reflective deliberations about his policy on self-reliance, he explains ‘So I know for a fact that I can’t rely on my family’ – he describes arguments he still runs up against when he speaks to family members – he concludes ‘family are definitely not in the higher prospects of my life’ (Biehal and Wade, 1996; Mendes et al., 2012).

This autobiographical aspect of his reasoning about self-reliance was clearly central to the web of attitudes he, as an individual, took. The policy is wide-ranging, determining his stance toward family and social network, and toward his own actions.

Clearly survivalist self-reliance is an understandable personal stance, given developmental and ecological history (Samuels and Pryce, 2008). However, our point in this paper is different. It is that the anchored, deliberative, cross-referential ‘internal logic’ of the policy may be understood as a form of reasoned early-stage planning. Such a justified personal policy may include anchored reasons for not seeking certain sorts of help, and not finding it possible to engage in shared deliberations, in certain circumstances (Pryce et al., 2017). Both Bratman’s and Morton’s work help illuminate the significance of the detailed and thoughtful cross-referential deliberations that may accompany this policy.

Not planning as a policy

In two recent studies of young adults leaving care several individuals expressed strong feelings about their intentions not to plan for the future (Barratt et al., 2019; Hung and Appleton, 2016). In this paper, I treat this stance as a ‘policy’ – as an anchored self-governing planning policy of not planning.

Corrina says: ‘I can’t plan, I have to do it the day before. I can’t - - um - - I don’t know how I’m going to feel (describes her mental health problems) so I have to plan it on the day’. She says she can’t imagine the future: ‘It never goes to plan anyway’.

Danny doesn’t acknowledge planning more than one day ahead. More than that – ‘I don’t believe in that, planning further ahead. Because you never know. You NEVER (his emphasis) know’. On decisions: ‘I don’t believe in it, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t. I don’t believe in it’.

In terms of early-stage planning, how can we begin to think about a planning policy of not planning? If we bear in mind both Bratman’s model, and Morton’s critique, it is possible to see an agent’s strongly expressed wish not to plan as linked to each aspect of the Bratmanian planning trio – explicitly future-oriented cross-temporal planning is actively and reflexively negated, shared agency may be highly circumscribed (with mutual implications for the growth of social-relational trust?), and self-governance includes the deliberative anchor that planning is futile. Empirically, we note that the web of interconnected deliberations and autobiographical justifications for not planning may be expressed with high emotion (Hung and Appleton, 2016) – an aspect of plan-like commitment in these circumstances?

This policy is an example of how multiple aspects of normative aspects of planning, may be (provisionally?) set aside by some young adults as they try to make their way forward, while taking deliberative account of their previous experience. Morton’s (2011) work is of course fundamental in this context – conventional rational planning and shared deliberation norms may not apply for some young people holding this policy, for reasons provided by the young person.

Anchors for the provisional future

One of Bratman’s key theoretical proposals is that anchored deliberations ‘tie together’ current and future thought and action (Bratman, 2013).

Cross-temporal planning allows the person both to envisage future events, and to consider the implications of hoped-for future outcomes for immediate day-to-day plans across a range of aspects of her life-world. In addition, past relevant events may be systematically recruited in memory to inform details of the plans: ‘infused with the agent’s understanding of and commitment to the larger temporally extended arc of the activity’ (Bratman, 2013: 47).

In the previous categories of ‘what matters’, and ‘policies’, the semantic ‘tying together’, often intricate, has been with a relatively short (or very short) time horizon, not an extended arc. In our next case, illustration anchored deliberations and plan-like commitments do have an explicit future arc of time.

Tyreece’s (man, age 20, Hung and Appleton, 2016) deliberations were anchored by a number of very clear foci, each with a future-oriented arc – finishing an educational course, continuing to do voluntary work, ‘having my people around me’ (specific family and friends), having a romantic relationship, and paying off some significant debts. Each focus had detailed personal meanings – for instance he had three stable friends with whom he had shared the ups and downs of the last few years – these friends were ‘like a family’ and were trusted for shared deliberation. Importantly, he ‘held’ all the anchoring foci in his discourse, discussing the (normative) balancing acts of thinking about each, and thinking about each coherently and consistently in relation to each other (Hung and Appleton, 2016).

But again, Morton’s (2011) work applies. Tyreece’s planning is rich, but his anchors for deliberation include clearly formulated aspects of his own current mental health issues, and his understanding of his previous traumatic environment, which he incorporates in his thinking when cautiously planning his future. His mental health issues include what he identifies as a tendency to ‘overthink’. His reflexive sense is that his own deliberations, however well-anchored by a clear sense of what is important to him, can sometimes be unhelpful: ‘as I said, I overthink, my brain just shoots things at me and I’m just feeling like overthinking so much’. He also judges that this is linked to his past traumatic experience: ‘basically things that have affected me in the past are affecting me today’.

Bratman’s theoretical work, which emphasises modest and small-scale building-blocks of individual and shared deliberation as a form of planning, together with Morton’s work on the ecology of planning norms, may provide a theoretical resonance for the phenomenology of young people’s own tentative and gradual rebuilding of a sense of identity, self-determination, and forward direction (Geenen and Powers, 2007; Hiles et al., 2014; Munford and Sanders, 2015).

Implications of the approach for research and practice

The approach to early-stage planning which has been outlined in this paper may have several implications for practitioners and researchers working with young people leaving care.

It suggests a need for interdisciplinary research (e.g. philosophy, social work, sociology, psychology) aimed at throwing light on the ‘dynamic structures’ of anchors for deliberation, and patterns of shared deliberation, as they evolve over time and experience during adolescence and emerging adulthood for young people leaving out of home care.

The painful developmental history of social relationships among most young people leaving care, and what we know about the possible role of planning and social support in ongoing resilience processes (Ungar, 2003, 2013), suggests that this research would be of relevance to a better understanding of the overlap between individual planning and social-cooperative shared planning.

Bratman (2013) himself talks about his theoretical framework as conservative or minimal, but we would try to take a further step and suggest that Morton’s (2011) critique helps us to be undogmatic (Kuusela, 2008) about planning norms, and rational norms, and social norms, and to begin to ‘look carefully’ at what norms young people use in what ecological and developmental-biographical circumstances.

Such research could act translationally to bring young people’s subjective experience into the design and process of planning-based interventions, such as pathway planning or transition planning.

Even this preliminary attempt to consider a theoretical approach to planning does raise questions about how pathway or transition planning is conceptualized and conducted (Lemus et al., 2017). To what extent is the ‘voice’ of the young person included in the planning process (Dixon et al., 2019; Mendes and Snow, 2016; Munford and Sanders, 2015), and how can the planning process be integrated more fully with the young person’s own psychosocial starting-points for life-planning, or anchors for deliberation?

Conclusion

The three central proposals of this paper have been that our understanding of the early stages of planning may be assisted if we focus on (a) the young person’s deliberations about what matters, (b) the young person’s shared or joint deliberations – involving a common ground of shared commitments to what matters – with friends, family, and the informal social network and (c) that it may be useful to take special care to understand young people’s positions on planning norms, following the work of philosopher Jennifer Morton. We have emphasised the overlap between these three proposals, recognizing the central importance of social relationships in our lives and acknowledging the severe disruptions to social relationships (and to expectations of what constitutes normative aspects of planning) that may have afflicted many care leavers during their earlier development.

The approach values in particular the semantic or cross-referential interconnections a person actively makes between different aspects of her life, and what deliberative sense she makes of those connections – her own groundwork for planning a life. If a young person is trying to re-build a relationship with a birth mother or father, then how is that thought about – autobiographically – and how is it connected to the practice of current day-to-day life, including shared deliberations with significant others?

Bratman regards these anchors for deliberation and shared deliberation as involving plan-like commitments. These specific commitments are embedded in the ongoing practice of the person’s life, including their social life (Bratman, 2014). This work begins to help us track back from objectives and goal-oriented thinking towards an ‘earlier’ form of implicit planning, i.e. the delineation of what matters, and why.

‘What matters’ may not look like a plan and will frequently not be called a plan, but it may have threads of quasi-planning which in some Bratmanian sense tie together the young person’s day-to-day life. The personal description of what matters may appear to lack ‘overall coherence’, lack unity and lack norm-guidance, but it may (a) resonate with the history and ecology of the young person’s life (Morton, 2011) and (b) contain highly thought-through and justified reasoning, as well as sensitivity to what is, and has been, important.

The theoretical approach outlined in this paper is offered as a framework of thinking which may provide a re-orientation, in the contexts of adverse emerging adulthood, away from our thinking in terms of atomistic goal-planning, and toward considering more fundamental ‘building blocks’ of planning a life – focused on the interpretive positions young people start from.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all participants and staff members in the London and Suffolk research sites. I am grateful to Caroline Barratt and Isabelle Hung for thoughtful feedback on previous drafts of this paper, and to Natalie Glynn, Miriam Richardson, and Dawn L Stewart for helpful correspondence about ideas in the paper. I also thank anonymous reviewers and Lisa Morriss for such thoughtful input on revising the paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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