This study (based in Sweden) explores family practices and family display among young adults with a history of secure care, which limits and restricts contacts and therefore causes fundamental changes in relationships. Almost ten years after institutional placement, narrations of 11 young adults and 11 nominated family members reveal ongoing struggles between imagined and lived realities of family. These struggles are revealed by memories and emotions evoked by the context of secure care and show how deeply the secure care penetrated their family lives. By using the metaphor of shadows, we discern dimensions of secure care (moral obligations of parental responsibility, moral practices of parents as the only contact and the emotionally pervasive life situation) in the young adults’ and their parents’ moral understanding of the parent-child relationship as family. We call for more attention to the perversity of secure care arrangements, at both policy and institutional levels.