Misfitting Feelings: Young Care Leavers’ Emotional Work During the Transition to Adulthood

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the emotional work that young adult care leavers perform during their transition to adulthood. It is based on 30 biographical interviews with young adults (formerly) placed in care. Among researchers, social workers and policy makers, there is a need to understand what young people do about their feelings when they have been exposed to bereavement, abuse, neglect and conflict. Furthermore, it is important to understand how feelings associated with growing up with hard times impact young adults’ everyday lives. To understand what young adults who have been placed in care think and do about their feelings in relation to their birth parents, I draw on Hochschild's model of “deep acting” and “surface acting” [Hochschild, A. R. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 551–575. https://doi.org/10.1086/227049; Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of Chicago Press]. The study reveals that these young adults constantly engage in emotion work to manage feelings towards their birth parents that do not fit within social guidelines for how to feel about one's parents. These “misfitting” feelings include hate, anger, disgust and distrust but also love and admiration towards the birth parents who neglected and abused them. Managing these feelings leaves the young adults in moments of pinch or discrepancy that they must act on to successfully transition to adulthood.