Building Resistance Narratives amid Audience Failures: Life Stories of Adults Formerly in Foster Care

Background and Purpose. Emerging adults with extensive foster care involvement are tasked with building identities that help make sense of difficult pasts and build adult lives. Narrative identity theory asserts that the stories we tell ourselves and others about ourselves reveal and construct ourselves. This presentation uses two key concepts from the theory to explore identities and identity building challenges of young adults formerly in foster care. It (1) examines how they described the audiences with whom they shared their stories and it (2) details master narratives about foster care with which their life stories contend.

Methods. The presentation draws from a study that used three semi-structured individual interviews each with 12 young adults formerly in foster care (ages 21 to 34). The third of these interviews asked participants to reflect on the meaning of their life histories discussed in the first two interviews. A modified grounded theory approach guided our analyses. We were sensitized to the social processes in narrative identity, however, we let the stories of each participant highlight the directions of our analyses.

Results. Most of the young people in this study developed resistance identities designed to maintain views of themselves as motivated agents amongst ongoing adversity, actively thwarting low expectations for fostered youth. They described themselves as stubborn, fighters, and experts at pushing through. Challenges in developing positive identities included not knowing key information about their early lives, finding meaning in the indefensible, and group care that limited opportunities to be involved in activities through which new identities could be forged. We present a grounded process model of how resistant identities are built.

Participants reported finding few audiences from the foster care system receptive to hearing, let alone processing their full life stories. They were burdened by two master narratives about foster care, that (1) it was originally sold to them as something that was going to help, and (2) the expectation that former foster youth routinely struggle after leaving care. They were stigmatized by the foster care label and eager to avoid “becoming another statistic.” College and work environments were valued precisely for opportunities for identity shifting. But successes in these environments led to emotionally fraught decisions about how much of their stories to reveal to these new audiences. Revealing their status as formerly fostered brought intrusive curiosity and the risk of others continuing to center their foster care identity, while choosing to withhold this status limited their social circles.

Conclusions and Implications. It’s essential to structure conditions where youth and young adults from foster care feel safe to share their difficult stories in full. This may include longer term relational work that sustains through placement changes. This study informs two clinical literatures, providing depth to this work. Narrative therapy provides techniques to both thicken identity stories hidden by the story of foster care and to prep audiences for hearing stories of a reformulated identity. A literature on creating counterspaces for marginalized groups emphasizes how groups can generate counterstories designed to foil unhelpful master narratives.