Research project Foster care and family dynamics over the life course. Partnership formation, parenthood, and union dissolution among individuals raised with society as a parent
How does growing up in foster or institutional care shape adult life? This project explores how relationships, family life, and work evolve over time—and what can lead to more positive life outcomes.
Growing up in care is often linked to difficult life outcomes, but the picture is more complex. This research project examines how experiences of foster and institutional care shape adulthood, focusing on relationships, parenthood, and working life.
Using extensive Swedish register data spanning decades, researchers follow individuals into midlife. The project aims to understand both challenges and opportunities, and how factors such as gender and family dynamics play a role. Ultimately, it seeks to generate knowledge that can improve support systems and future prospects for children in care.
Experiences of foster care (foster-family and residential care) are well-known to be associated with compromised economic and health development. Yet, little is known about how care experiences relate to more positive outcomes such as partnership formation and parenthood, and whether such intermediate factors change later development. By framing foster care as a unique family structure, this project aims to deepen our understanding of family dynamics, including processes of partnership formation and parenthood, in individuals with this experience. Utilizing register data, which cover 21 Swedish cohorts born 1975-95 and their family connections (including siblings and parents), we will investigate family dynamics and its links to labor market outcomes in individuals with care and non-care experience until midlife (ages 30-50).
This cohort material, combined with state-of-the art statistical models for longitudinal analyses, enables us to both separately and simultaneously investigate a set of hypotheses related to life-course mechanisms of family dynamics. Additionally, we assess to what extent these mechanisms are gender neutral.
The project will thus contribute both theoretically and empirically to our understanding of family dynamics and its consequences in a vulnerable population in which society plays a parental role and makes significant investments to enhance development, ultimately informing family support policies and interventions.