Institution-Reared Children and Their Transition to Adulthood

Abstract

The article explores the transition to adulthood of care leavers in Russia. Social policies enabling access to public services create a normative vision of youth’s behavior according to age. Modern societies are characterized by destandardization and defragmentation of events unfolding in the biographies of young people, and individuals are expected to play an active role in making vital choices and decisions.

In this article, transition is viewed as a number of social policy institutions and culture-related normative regulations framing the process of growing up. The authors use the resilience concept taking into consideration a societal context to bridge the gap between the structure level and the individual biography level during the transition to adulthood.

The study is based on biographical interviews of care leavers, expert interviews, thematic blogs and forums. The authors provide an analysis of typical trajectories of the transition to adulthood: moving forward, adapting and going off the trajectory. The article describes resilience factors behind a particular path and explains how different understanding of adulthood and a normative transition to adulthood turn into structural restrictions resembling industrial society and leaving no chances for care leavers for a more individualized flexible transition typical of modern young people (basically, middle class young people with a family as an “insurance mechanism”; their transitions is regarded as a cultural norm while growing up). Standardized normative model of transition that care leavers have to follow goes contrary to the modern trend towards pluralization of youth lifestyles.

Acknowledgements. The article is part of the HSE Academic Fund Program in 2020 - 2022 (grant no. 20-01-005), “5-100 – Russian Academic Excellence Project” and supported by “Arifmetika Dobra” Charity Foundation.