Recognising foster family practices as a form of extended care for emerging adults transitioning out of long-term fostering

For care-experienced youth, emerging adulthood is period of normative social and emotional experimentation, but disconnected from the supportive adult relationships available to their peers, particularly from family. To address this, formal child welfare services are increasingly interested in finding ways of avoiding rigid age-determined withdrawal of support by adopting various forms of extended care. This paper identifies continuous relationships between emerging adults and their previous foster carers as a source of relational informal extended care that has received little attention in practice, policy and research. Drawing on an expanded concept of family that recognises fostering as an underexplored iteration of kinship, the paper reports on a study of narrative accounts from 12 care-experienced emerging adults and their former foster carers (22 carers). Foster kinship normalised support as family practices, buffering the challenges of emerging adulthood, and offering an additional, informal, form of extended care for some care-experienced young people.