This study (based in Sweden) explores family practices and family displays among young adults with a history of secure care. Placement in secure care signifies critical interventions in young people’s relations both in and outside the institution, making this placement a special form of relational practice. In this article, we apply a relational perspective on families, which means that we understand family relations as fluid and liable to change. With this as a starting point, we engage with the concept of family within the context of secure care to explore the ways in which such care affects families, their understanding of family, and their everyday family practices.

The study is a follow-up of 16 young adults with experience of secure care. Almost ten years after the last interview, these 16 young adults were contacted again. After months of intense efforts at reaching out , 11 young adults (six men and five women between 21 and 26 years old) and 11 nominated family members agreed to participate.

To help elucidate how secure care affects understandings of family and family practices, we use the metaphor of shadows. This metaphor emphasizes the ways in which the experiences of secure care may lurk through images of family and family life years after the placement. By using this metaphor, we discern three broad areas (emotional chaos; revised and negotiated family positions and; doing and undoing family) in which secure care shadows revealed themselves providing different forms of shadows where some were more distinct while others were more difficult to grasp. Of the more apparent shadows were the recalled horror of secure care reflecting family displacement and the pressure to make family work reflecting the restricting practices in secure care where only (birth) parents were considered as family and relations of (natural) importance to the young people. These shadows may impair an understanding of family as something relational, created and maintained through various practices. In this sense, the context of secure care does not seem to support young people’s embeddedness in relationships other than to parents. Nor does the institutional context support the idea of intertwined life biographies with relations other than parents. The institutional strategy of solitude and consequential undoing of family life could have been avoided if different types of relations had been embraced and supported during secure care. Consequently, both parents and young adults shared stories of a struggle between their morally ingrained images of family and their (young adults) experiences of family members failing to reach this ideal, or of being the one(s) (parents) failing

The title of this paper contains a quotation from one of the young adults, Paula, who states “My whole family is not really my family.” The excerpt manifests a persistence of culturally and socially shaped family norms that emphasize the parent-child relationship. At the same time, to Paula, family membership is something that one has to qualify for through actions – one has to earn and deserve it. The narratives seem to be impregnated with the idea that ‘family’ means a parent-child relationship, and they demonstrate that it is difficult to go beyond such an understanding. In this way we can also see how secure care casts shadows on the talk of young adults about doing and undoing, i.e. giving up family relations.

Above all, our findings reveal the shadows cast by secure care are shown to be strong, which testifies to the tremendous impact that institutional placement has on the relational and family landscape, stretching far beyond the immediate situation of being locked up. We call for more attention to the perversity of secure care arrangements, at both policy and institutional levels.