1 Introduction

It is well established that permanence is critically important for young people growing up in long-term foster care (Schofield et al. 2024; Burge 2020; Moran et al. 2020; Neil and Beek 2020; Pérez 2017; Biehal 2014). For this reason, once it has been established that a child will not be returning to live with their family of origin, many Western child welfare systems prioritize securing permanence with the key aim of mitigating the many additional challenges faced by care-experienced young people. These challenges arise in key areas such as education (Ellis and Johnston 2024; Brady and Gilligan 2020), housing (Palmer et al. 2022; Gypen et al. 2017), employment (Soyez et al. 2024; Arnau-Sabatés and Gilligan 2015) and the transition out of care (Stein 2012).

Previously, permanence was largely understood to equate to legal ties between a young person and their carers. Securing legal permanence through adoption was a key policy within Western jurisdictions such as the UK and the USA (Biehal 2014; Tefre 2015). In these circumstances, adoption was aimed at supporting positive experiences and outcomes for young people growing up in long-term care (Rolock and Pérez 2018). However, within contemporary debates, permanence is understood more broadly and is increasingly recognized as grounded within other factors beyond establishing legal connections. Issues such as the longevity of a placement and the development of strong and enduring ties between a young person and their carers, or another important adult, known as relational permanence, are also understood to be central (Ball et al. 2021; Moran et al. 2020; McSherry and Fargas-Malet 2018).

Increasingly, research indicates that young people in care value relational permanence over legal permanence and has begun to describe what relational permanence looks like in the daily lives of young people in care (Salazar et al. 2018; McSherry and Fargas-Malet 2018; Pérez 2017). Although this literature has highlighted the importance of relational permanence, research exploring how young people who have grown up in long-term foster care understand these experiences is well established. Notably, Schofield (2002, 2003) conducted a retrospective study with 40 young adults aged 18–30 who grew up in foster care in England, exploring their relationships with long-term foster carers and producing narratives that resonate with themes of belonging and family membership. However, there is limited empirical research describing how relational permanence develops over time within long-term foster care families. This article contributes to this area by reporting on findings from a qualitative study conducted in Ireland with young adults who grew up in long-term foster care, drawing specifically on one element of the wider study that explored young people's lived experiences of permanence within long-term foster care. The findings presented here focus specifically on participants' retrospective accounts of how enduring relationships with foster carers were developed and sustained over time. These findings highlight ways in which permanence was experienced and co-created within everyday family life. The article concludes by considering the implications of these findings for social work policy and practice in a key area of child and family social work.

2 Permanence for Young People Growing Up in Foster Care

Permanence planning has been a central focus of child protection and welfare policy, particularly within the UK and the USA, for many decades and has been described as ‘the hallmark of child welfare policies and practices’ (Pérez 2017, 179). A focus on permanence arose amidst ongoing and long-standing concerns about foster care ‘drift’ (Neil and Beek 2020, 77), characterized as a ‘lengthy placement away from the natural family without a clear goal to return the child or find some other permanent home’ (James 2004, 1). Responses to concerns about drift emphasized permanence planning for young people in care (Rolock and Pérez 2018; Rolock and White 2016; Neil and Beek 2020) based on the belief that placement instability and uncertainty negatively impacted children's daily experiences and that legally permanent placements would counteract this (Rolock and White 2016). However, over time, understandings of permanence have evolved beyond the sole focus on legal status and now incorporate ideas of relational permanence.

2.1 Broadening Definitions of Family

For some researchers, broadening definitions of family has been central to understanding how young people develop a sense of belonging within their foster family. It has been argued, for example, that evidence of shared family practices (Morgan 2011) and family display (Finch 2007) contributes to the creation and recognition of family relationships, reflecting a shift towards seeing family as something people ‘do’ rather than ‘are’ (Fargas-Malet and McSherry 2020), rather than something that is defined by legal or biological ties. Finch (2007, 77) introduced the term ‘family display’ to describe ‘the conveying of meanings through social interactions and the acknowledgement of this by relevant others’, although not developed specifically in relation to foster care, Finch (2007) and Morgan (2011) emphasize the importance of nurturing and developing relationships so ‘that their “family-like” qualities are “positively established”’ (Finch 2007, 80).

Building on these ideas, and those of other authors, including Sinclair (2005) and Bullock et al. (2006), MacDonald (2016) drew on Sinclair's concept of ‘enacted permanence’ to describe how foster families and the young people in their care engage in family practices and family display to actively create a sense of family, even in the absence of legal permanence. Enacted permanence refers to foster families choosing to live as though they are family, demonstrating belonging, commitment and mutual obligation through everyday interactions. Subsequent work by MacDonald and colleagues (MacDonald et al. 2025) has further developed this perspective, highlighting how foster family practices can extend beyond the formal end of placement and be experienced by young people as enduring and family-like.

Together, this body of work provides important insights into how family belonging can be constructed relationally within foster care. However, although these concepts illuminate what family-like relationships may look like, they pay less attention to how relational permanence is negotiated and sustained over time within long-term foster care placements. In particular, there remains limited empirical examination of how young people and foster carers co-create enduring relational commitments during childhood and adolescence, prior to transitions out of care. It is this gap that the current paper seeks to address.

2.2 Shifting Understandings of Permanence

Early conceptualizations of permanence focused on legal permanence, with adoption prioritized within some child welfare systems for young people who could not return to live with their birth families. In an important critique of permanence policies within the US child welfare system, Stott and Gustavsson (2010) examined permanence from multiple perspectives, highlighting tensions between legally defined notions of permanence and the lived experiences of young people in care. They drew attention to the long-term implications for young people who do not establish legally recognized permanence before adulthood and argued for broader conceptualizations of permanence that extended beyond legal arrangements alone.

Building on this critique, subsequent research has increasingly foregrounded relational dimensions of permanence. For instance, Pérez (2017) demonstrated that adoption does not guarantee relational permanence into adulthood. His research described four different categories of relational permanence: enduring, ambivalent, spurned and severed. Although these categorizations illuminate the shifting and dynamic nature of permanence, they do not address how enduring relational permanence is developed within care relationships. Other studies have sought to define relational permanence more explicitly. For example, McSherry and Fargas-Malet (2018, 124) describe relational permanence as ‘an enduring and supportive relationship between a young person and a caring adult’. Although such work has been critical in establishing the importance of relational permanence, there is limited empirical data that describes how these relationships develop and are sustained over time, particularly from the perspective of the young people themselves. It is this aspect of relational permanence, how permanence is experienced and established within everyday foster care relationships across time, that is the focus of this article.

3 Irish Context

This study took place in Ireland with 22 young adults all of whom had grown up in the Irish foster care system and self-identified, in line with the study's recruitment criteria, as having experienced permanence within their foster care placements. In Ireland, Tusla, the Child and Family Agency (hereafter referred to as Tusla), is the primary agency that holds responsibility for child protection and welfare, including alternative care. Tusla was established in 2014 with a specific remit to provide a more integrated and child-centred approach to child protection and welfare services, including services for children in foster care (Gilligan 2019).

Historically, Ireland was heavily reliant upon residential or institutional care. The move towards a system that places most children in the care of the state into family-based foster care placements has occurred within a wider international policy context that increasingly favours family-based placements (Gilligan 2019). In addition, in Ireland, there have been developments such as the gradual reduction in the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, an increase in public social work services and social worker preferences for family-based placements and pragmatic factors such as improvements in foster care payments and the increased use of private foster care providers (Gilligan 2019; Munro and Gilligan 2013).

Contemporary Irish child welfare policy clearly prioritizes foster care as the primary placement option for children in state care. Tusla's stated policy aim is that 90% of children in care will be placed in foster care (Tusla Child and Family Agency 2025a). As of April 2025 (end of Q1), 5783 children were in the care of the state, of whom 5041 (87.2%) were placed in foster care, including both general foster care (71%) and relative foster care (29%) (Tusla Child and Family Agency 2025b). Importantly, Tusla's permanency planning policy recognizes long-term foster care as a viable and appropriate permanence option for some children, particularly where reunification or adoption is not considered suitable. Permanency planning in Ireland, therefore, extends beyond legal permanence alone and places emphasis on stability, continuity of care and the maintenance of enduring relationships over time. Within this policy framework, long-term foster care may be formally planned as a permanent placement, with an expectation that children in long-term foster care will remain with their foster carers into adulthood where possible (Tusla Child and Family Agency 2020). Legal permanence through adoption is not commonly used within the Irish child welfare system. The most recent available data shows that in 2024, only 45 children, or 0.8% of all children in care, were adopted from foster care (Adoption Authority of Ireland 2024). However, this is not to suggest that there is no permanence within the Irish child welfare system, and indeed, it may be possible to distinguish between reported legal permanence and other forms of permanence, such as relational permanence.

One way of considering relational permanence is to examine post-care living arrangements for young people who grow up in long-term foster care. The statutory age of leaving care in Ireland is 18 years. Tusla provides aftercare services to ‘all young people that are between 16–21 years old and have spent 12 months in the care of the state with either Tusla or the HSE, between the ages 13–18. Aftercare services will still be available for people up to 23 years old if they are engaged in accredited training or education’ (Tusla Child and Family Agency 2025c). Once they reach 18 years of age, young people are entitled to receive an aftercare allowance. Recent data shows that 46%, or 1018 young people, in receipt of aftercare allowance continued to live with their foster carers between the ages of 18 and 22 years (Tusla Child and Family Agency 2025b). These figures suggest that remaining with foster carers beyond the statutory age of leaving care is a significant feature of the Irish care-leaving landscape. However, these statistics provide only one perspective on this issue. Although the figures indicate that ‘continuing to live with foster carers remains an important category of accommodation for care leavers beyond age 18’ (Brady et al. 2025, 390), they do not reveal the nature or durability of their relationship with their foster carers. Therefore, this information provides limited insights into whether relational permanence was present within these foster care placements or how such permanence was established.

When young people are adopted from foster care in Ireland, they are typically adopted by their long-term foster carers (Adoption—Domestic Adoption) with whom the young people have already established relational permanence. Taken together, the policy recognition of long-term foster care as a permanence option, the relatively low rates of adoption and the high proportion of care leavers remaining with foster carers into adulthood position the Irish context as particularly well suited to exploring how relational permanence develops and is negotiated within long-term foster care. This makes the Irish context of relevance not only nationally but also to other jurisdictions seeking to better understand how enduring relational relationships are formed and sustained within long-term foster care.

4 Methods

This article draws on findings from a wider study that explored young people's lived experiences of permanence within long-term foster care (Whiting 2023), with the current paper focusing specifically on participants' accounts of how enduring relationships were formed and sustained over time. Ethical approval for the study was secured from the Research Ethics Committees in the School of Social Work and Social Policy in Trinity College Dublin (Ethics ID 843) and Tusla, the Child and Family Agency.

Twenty-two young adults, aged 20–30 years, participated in the research. All of the participants had grown up in long-term foster care and self-identified, in line with the study's recruitment criteria, as having experienced permanence within their long-term foster care placements. A key aim of the study was to capture a range of experiences of permanence, and therefore, the characterization of permanence as both relational and legal was described in the recruitment material.

4.1 Participant Recruitment and Sampling

Participants were recruited using purposive sampling (Lune and Berg 2017) through a combination of gatekeepers within Tusla, aftercare services, foster care support organizations and social media. Recruitment materials explicitly outlined the study's focus on permanence within long-term foster care and invited participation from young adults who felt this description resonated with their own experiences. For the purposes of recruitment, permanence was described in both relational and legal terms. Eligibility criteria specified that participants must have the following: (i) grown up in long-term, stable foster care, defined as having lived with the same foster family for at least 5 years prior to turning 18 years, and (ii) continued to have a close relationship with their foster carers into adulthood. Young adults who had been adopted by their foster carers were also eligible to participate. This approach was intended to ensure that the sample reflected a range of experiences across both legal and relational forms of permanence, while allowing participants to self-select on the basis of their own understanding of their foster care relationships.

Table 1 provides an overview of the final sample. As illustrated, nine of the participants had been adopted by their long-term foster carers, whereas the remaining participants described enduring relationships with foster carers in the absence of legal adoption. This composition enabled exploration of permanence as lived and experienced, rather than as a solely legal status.

4.2 Data Collection

Data were generated through semi-structured qualitative interviews that incorporated elements of a narrative approach. This approach was used to support participants in describing their lived experiences of foster care and their relationships with foster carers across time. Interviews initially focused on participants' current lives and circumstances. When discussing their present relationships with foster carers, participants frequently, and unprompted, reflected on their experiences of growing up within their foster families. The researcher used probing questions to explore these narratives further, generating data that provided insight into how participants experienced and negotiated permanence while growing up in foster care.

Interviews were conducted between October 2019 and October 2020. Due to public health restrictions arising from the Covid-19 pandemic, interviews conducted between June and October 2020 took place online using MS Teams. In total, six interviews were conducted in person, and 16 were conducted online. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim by the author. Pseudonyms were assigned to all participants, and identifying details were altered to protect confidentiality.

4.3 Data Analysis

‘Reflexive Thematic Analysis’ (Braun and Clarke 2022) was used to analyse the data gathered for this study. Following Braun and Clarke's (2006) six-phase framework, the researcher began by personally transcribing each interview verbatim and re-reading transcripts to develop initial familiarity with the data. Each transcript was then coded line by line using NVivo. Open descriptive codes were generated, with some excerpts being assigned to multiple codes. Codes were subsequently reviewed across the dataset, and four broad candidate themes were identified relating to participants' relationships with their foster family, their relationships with the wider world during the transition to adulthood, their connections with birth family and their sense of self and identity. These themes were reviewed and refined, with sub-themes identified to capture diversity within each theme. Throughout, analysis was informed by the researcher's ongoing engagement with the data and attention to how meanings were constructed within participants' accounts. Through this analytic process, a theme relating to ‘negotiating permanence while growing up in foster care’ was identified that illuminates how participants described the development of enduring relationships, belonging and commitment within their long-term foster families over time. It is this theme and its sub-themes that are the focus of this article.

4.4 Reflexivity

The researcher approached this study from a qualitative and interpretive standpoint, recognizing that knowledge is co-constructed through the research process (Mason 2017). Reflexivity was an integral component of both data generation and analysis. As reflexivity is a ‘fundamental characteristic’ (Braun and Clarke 2022, 5) of thematic analysis, the researcher engaged in ongoing reflection regarding their professional background in social work, assumptions about permanence and position in relation to participants, particularly given the sensitive nature of care experiences. Reflexive memos were maintained throughout the research process, and academic supervision was utilized to support a critical examination of how the researcher's perspectives may have shaped data collection, interpretation and theme development.

5 Findings

In this section, key findings from the study relating to how participants described the development and negotiation of enduring relationships within the long-term foster care placement will be reported. Specifically, findings will focus on how a sense of permanence was co-created by the young people and their foster carers throughout the young person's time in care. Co-creation of permanence refers to a multitude of seemingly small daily actions, as well as more significant actions that occurred throughout the young person's life. In this findings section, themes such as the co-creation of permanence within day-to-day experiences, family events and celebrations, challenging experiences, connections to birth family and more significant events such as adoption will be discussed. A key element of co-creation that was identified is that it is an action or actions that involve both the young person and their foster carers, and it is not a singular action; rather, it is a multitude of actions that occur frequently and across time. Building on Finch's (2007) concept of ‘displaying family’ and MacDonald's (2016) ‘enacted permanence’, the actions that the young people and their foster carers engage in can be understood as a form of ‘permanence display’. Permanence display relates to how the young people and their foster carers demonstrate to each other and the outside world that their relationship is grounded in permanence. Examples of co-creation of permanence will be described further below.

5.1 Co-Creating Permanence Through Day-to-Day Experiences

Much of what the participants described during their interviews related to their day-to-day lives and the many ways, both subjective and objective, that they co-created permanence with their foster carers. A common example of this is related to language, and many participants talked about choosing to call their foster carers ‘mam’ and ‘dad’ to denote their closeness to them when describing their relationship to other people. Most of the participants described their foster carers as their mother and father and noted that their foster carers referred to them as their son or daughter. Gillian, who was married and in her late 20s at the time of the interview, described doing this despite her social worker's request that she call her foster carers by their given names. Gillian said:

The social workers wanted me to call my (foster carers) by their names, but I have always called them mam and dad, because that is who they are to me.

Gillian went on to describe that her foster carers participate and reinforce this, saying that if anyone asks, her foster parents are asked how many children they have, they always count both their birth children and their foster children, and significantly for Gillian, she said:

They buy me birthday cards with ‘Dear Daughter’ written on the front in big letters.

Importantly, even if the young people did not call their foster carers ‘mam’ and ‘dad’ or similar, they were still recognized as being the primary caregiving parent. Multiple participants described their foster carers ‘as if’ they were their ‘real’ mum and dad, and in return, they described their foster carers as treating them ‘as if’ they were their ‘real’ son or daughter. One participant, Ben, who was in his mid-20s when he was interviewed, said of his foster father:

He is my dad and he always has been my dad, I don't call him that but that is what he is.

Other participants talked about their foster carers, including them in weekly family events. For example, Eve, who was in her late 20s when interviewed, said of her foster carers:

They did everything for me and treated me like their own child … even with sports … they used to bring me to matches and … we had to do chores, and we were given pocket money.

Eve went on to describe why this demonstrated permanence to her:

If you were part of the family you did chores, that was all there was to it.

Thus, the assignment of chores indicated to Eve that she was part of the family, and the acceptance of this indicated to her foster carers that this was also how she viewed herself.

It was in these moments of ordinary parenting that the foster carers engaged in activities that allowed the young people to develop a sense of belonging and permanence within the family. As the foster carers engaged in parenting, the young people also began to feel that their foster home was their home, and, in this way, both parties co-created permanence within their daily family life. Joanne, who was in her late 20s at the time of the interview, demonstrated this by how she described her family to her friends in school. She said that when her friends asked her about her family, she would say:

My (foster carers) are not strangers, they do the exact same things as your mom and dad, they are looking after me, keeping a roof over my head, they are just like your mom and dad, but they have the title of foster mom and foster dad.

5.2 Co-Creating Permanence Through Specific Events and Family Celebrations

Although there were multiple descriptions of how permanence was co-created within day-to-day life, significant family events and occasions were also identified as moments the participants recalled as being particularly significant. For example, Doreen, who was in her late 20s when interviewed, remembered one of her foster siblings, a biological child of her foster carers, having a photographer in the house to mark a family celebration. She described standing to the side watching her foster family take their family photo when her foster mother signalled to her to come over and stand in the picture. This event had a significant impact on Doreen, who said:

To this day that picture is still hanging in their kitchen, it is a big massive picture they were like ‘absolutely you have to get in’ … like the fact they weren't even ashamed to hide [me].

There is a process of co-creation evident in this act—not only did the foster carers invite the participant into the photo but also Doreen chose to enter the photo and continues to ascribe meaning to the event many years after it happened. This moment of co-creation of permanence has resonated beyond childhood.

Doreen also recollected a day when one of her foster parents quickly placed an arm across her when the car they were driving in came to a sudden halt on a dangerous road. This moment further reinforced for Doreen the depth of feeling her foster parent had for her, and this, in turn, allowed her to commit to the family. She said of the incident:

I was like … oh yeah [foster parent] actually cares about me and doesn't want me to be in an accident … that was so significant for me … I know it sounds silly but for me it was so significant.

For other participants, larger family events such as Christmas and birthday parties were key moments in their childhoods that provided opportunities to co-create permanence. Joanne highlighted this saying of her experience within her long-term foster family:

In the family we celebrated Christmas, birthdays and big events like communions¹ … normal family stuff.

Through this description, Joanne echoes findings from across the participants' narratives, which emphasized the value the participants placed on being included in family life and the desire from the foster carers to ensure their foster child experienced their family as a permanent family unit. Through these everyday but significant family events, permanence was co-created within the long-term foster placements.

5.3 Co-Creating Permanence Through Adoption

Study findings indicate that the co-creation of permanence did not require a legal act. However, significantly, the establishment of legal ties within some of the young adults' placements was an important aspect of their process of co-creating permanence. Nine of the 22 participants were adopted by their long-term foster carers. Interestingly, eight of the nine young adults were adopted when they were 17 years old, and within months of turning 18 years, the legal age for exiting care and attaining adulthood in Ireland, they were adopted. However, despite the apparent lateness of these adoptions, establishing legal ties was an important part of co-creating permanence for these young adults. Across participants' accounts, adoption was described not as the beginning of permanence but as a legal recognition of relationships that were already experienced as secure and enduring. Andrea was in her mid-20s when she was interviewed. She was 3 years old when she was placed with her long-term foster family, and she was adopted by them when she was 17 years old. Her comment is representative of the opinion expressed by all of the participants who had been adopted. She said, ‘I always felt a part of the family and being adopted just solidified it’. Fiona, who was in her early 20s at the time of the interview and was also 17 when she was adopted by the foster carers she had been placed with in infancy, described the emotional impact that being adopted had for her as it increased her sense of security in her family:

You feel the same because you have always been a part of the family but it's like the legal aspect means that no one is going to come and take you away, no authority can remove you from your home because this is your home, this is your family.

For Leah, who was also in her early 20s at the time of the interview and was adopted at the age of 17 years by her long-term foster carers, who she was placed with when she was only weeks old, the impact of adoption and the implications for her and her family were clear when her grandfather added her name to the family tree after her adoption:

He made me watch as he did it [add her name the family tree] and he said that this was now the new family tree and it would be sent to everyone … like when I was adopted it was on paper, on the family tree … that I was a part of the family.

For Leah, permanence was co-created with her parents and also with her extended family through the actions of her grandfather. This was also true for those participants who valued their capacity to change their surname to align with their foster carers' surname through adoption. For some participants, having a different surname to their foster carers was a barrier to permanence. Mary was in her early 20s when interviewed and adopted by her long-term foster carers when she was 17 years old, and she described unofficially using her foster carers' surname in school. However, when she went on a school trip abroad, she was worried that her friends would see her passport and notice she had a different surname on it than the one she used in school. However, when she was adopted, her name was legally changed, and this fear was lifted. Mary described going away with school friends after her adoption when she was 19 years old. She said:

I was like, anyone can see my passport, it was no longer a thing I had to keep to myself … [having her foster carers' surname on her passport] gave me peace of mind … it was like a weight had been lifted off me.

For the participants who were adopted, their sense of permanence was strengthened by the involvement of their foster carers in the adoption process, thus emphasizing that being adopted is a co-creation of permanence. As Leah said:

at least if you are adopted it means that someone wants you. I mean my parents went to a lot of hassle to make sure they could keep me.

5.4 Co-Creating Permanence Through Challenging Experiences

Descriptions of challenges throughout their care experiences, and particularly in adolescence, were commonly recounted by the study participants. Alongside these descriptions, the participants discussed their foster carers' willingness to address inappropriate behaviours and to set boundaries and rules that supported their ongoing development and helped them to overcome these challenges. Ingrid, who was in her mid-20s when interviewed, described a tumultuous adolescence that placed a severe strain on her relationship with her foster carers. However, as she reflected back on this, she identified their parenting style as instrumental in supporting her and encouraging her to change her behaviours:

They never gave up on me even though I felt like giving up on myself … they gave me confidence saying ‘you can do it’ … they accepted me for who I was and as a part of the family.

This sentiment was also echoed by Ben, who said of his foster carers' approach to his rebellious teenage years:

They always reiterated the message that I was better than that, that I was more capable … they made me believe in myself.

Like Ingrid, Ben responded to his foster carers' open and supportive approach by making positive changes in his life because, as he described, they made him feel like, ‘okay, these parents are here for the long-term’. In this way, Ben and Ingrid, like several other participants, co-created permanence with their foster carers through these challenging periods.

5.5 Co-Creating a Sense of Belonging With the Inclusion of Birth Family

Many of the participants described the ongoing significance of their birth family in their lives. However, although the ‘emotional co-presence’ (Holland and Crowley 2013) of birth family was evident in all cases, the precise role of birth family involvement varied across the participants. What was common was the capacity of the foster carers to create space for the participants to navigate these complex relationships. Some of the participants described the ways in which their foster carers supported them during contact visits with their birth family throughout their childhood and reassured them that they did not view their foster child's relationship with their birth family as a threat to their relationships within the foster family. Doreen, for example, described her foster carers as saying:

You have moved into this home with us, but we know you have another family, and we are not asking you to leave them at the door now you are living with us.

For Doreen and other participants, this open attitude gave them the freedom to maintain birth family relationships without being worried about their permanence within their foster families. Other participants recalled their foster carers actively encouraging them to go on access visits even when they did not want to. Nora, who was in her early 20s when she was interviewed, recalled the day of her First Holy Communion when her birth mother was in the hospital and unable to attend either the church ceremony or the family party. She recalled her foster carers delaying the start of her party with her friends and other family to bring her to visit her mother. She recalled that at the time she was only 8 years old, and she was angry. However, on reflection, she can see how important it was that her foster carers did this:

I am so glad now that I went, imagine not seeing your child on their communion day.

Although the participants all reported their foster carers being open and inclusive when it came to birth family, they themselves had mixed feelings about their birth parents and birth siblings. In the cases where the participants described not wanting any contact or having feelings of anger or hurt towards their birth family, they valued their foster carers' openness and support to talk about these feelings. Fiona described not wanting any contact with her birth family once she had turned 18 years, but she appreciated knowing that if her feelings changed, she could talk to her foster carers about this. She said:

I am no longer interested [in seeing her birth family] to be honest, but I do know that I can go and talk to my foster mom about it any time.

The examples above are representative of the experiences of all participants, none of whom reported that the inclusion of the birth family in their lives negatively impacted their negotiation of permanence. Conversely, they all asserted that the openness of their foster carers to their birth family only strengthened their ties and supported the co-creation of permanence within their long-term foster care placement.

6 Discussion

This paper presents findings from a qualitative research study with 22 young adults who grew up in long-term foster care and who described experiencing a sense of permanence within their foster care placements. The findings reported focus on how relational permanence was co-created within these long-term foster care placements. This process of co-creation occurred in multiple ways across the duration of the foster care placements through the actions of both the young people and their foster carers.

6.1 Permanence Display

The findings presented in this paper clearly evidence the importance of the shared role of the young person and their foster carers in co-creating permanence across time. In examining this process of co-creation, it is possible to identify specific ways that the foster carers and the young person demonstrate to each other and to the outside world that they were co-creating permanence. Building on Finch's (2007, 65) concept of displaying family and MacDonald's (2016) idea of enacted permanence, the actions of the young people and their foster carers as they co-created permanence can be conceptualized as a form of ‘permanence display’. Finch (2007) uses the term ‘family display’ to conceptualize how family is both ‘done’ and ‘displayed’, and she discusses how non-traditional families, such as step-parent families, for example, display family to validate their family life to external actors and to demonstrate that they are ‘doing’ family. Finch includes examples in day-to-day life, such as the reading of bedtime stories, as well as more significant moments when celebrating family milestones. MacDonald (2016) built on Finch's concept of family display when discussing ‘enacted permanence’ within long-term foster care families, to describe how foster carers demonstrate that they have a sense of felt permanence with their foster children. Permanence display builds on this and describes how, through the co-creation of permanence, both the foster carers and the young people demonstrate to the outside world, and to each other, that their relationship is grounded in permanence. For example, young people called their foster carers ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ when talking about them to friends, even if this was not the term they used when talking to their foster carers. Similarly, participants described their foster carers counting them among their birth children when describing how many children they had, and this was particularly poignant for Gillian, who described her foster mother buying her a birthday card with ‘Dear Daughter’ written on it. This ‘permanence display’ was also visible in actions such as placing a family photo celebrating a significant event including the foster children in a prime position in the family home, or including the child's name on the family tree that is then shared with the extended family unit, or even attending medical or school appointments with the foster child. Although Salazar et al. (2018) argue that young people in care define their permanence goals in terms of relational permanence and not legal permanence, for some of the participants in this current study, being adopted was a core aspect of permanence display. Across participants' accounts, adoption was described not as the origin of permanence but as a legal recognition of relationships that were already experienced as secure and enduring. Adoption represented an opportunity to ensure that the relational permanence they experienced within their family was recognized through their legal status. In that process, the public changing of surname to align with the foster carer's surname acted as a permanence display. Continuing to reinforce the theme of co-creation, in each of these examples of ‘permanence display’, both the young person and the foster family engage in the display of permanence, reinforcing to the outside world and each other that they are co-creating permanence.

Current literature highlights the importance of experiences of permanence in the lives of care-experienced youth and young people (Burge 2020; Moran et al. 2020; Neil and Beek 2020; Pérez 2017; Biehal 2014). Although legal permanence is still prioritized within some child welfare systems, research evidence suggests that care-experienced youth value relational permanence over legal permanence (Pérez 2017). The current article has now added to this knowledge by presenting findings that show how relational permanence was established through a process of co-creation within long-term foster care placements. Developing a deeper understanding of the role relational permanence played within the care experiences of the young people was central to illuminating permanence as a process of co-creation in this study. There was no singular description of what permanence looked like in the lives of these young adults, and neither was permanence something that was bestowed upon the young people via legal permanence. Permanence was co-created across time with both the young people and their foster carers as active participants. Strong relationships built on trust and an emotional connection between the young person and their foster carers were fundamental to the descriptions the participants shared about their experience of permanence while in care, and acts of permanence display allowed them to demonstrate to each other and the outside world that they had co-created permanence within their family.

Understanding permanence as a process of co-creation and conceptualizing the actions of the young people and their foster carers as forms of ‘permanence display’ emphasizes the proactive role young people take when negotiating permanence within their foster care placements. Moran et al. (2020) highlight the disconnect between how young people understand permanence and how policy-makers and practitioners view permanence, but they do not attribute any active role to young people in negotiating permanence. The findings presented in this paper evidence the agency of the young people and the proactive role of their foster carers in co-creating permanence and choosing to display permanence.

6.2 Implications for Practice

The findings of this study yield several implications. Firstly, for the participants in this research, there was no singular pathway to relational permanence, suggesting that policy or practice aimed at the establishment of permanence for young people in care should allow for a diversity of pathways to permanence. Ensuring policy allows for a diversity of pathways has previously been recommended in other policy areas and research related to care-experienced young people, for example, in relation to the educational pathways of care-experienced youth (Brady and Gilligan 2019). Secondly, permanence is co-created by the young person and their foster carers through a variety of agentic actions, suggesting that when planning for permanence, the young person and their foster carers should always be actively involved and included in the decision-making process. Thirdly, although the young people and their foster carers value relational permanence, adoption continues to be an important part of the co-creation of permanence for some young people and their foster carers, even when relational permanence has been established. Child and Family social workers and policy-makers should continue to include adoption as a permanence option, even for older children in foster care with relational permanence.

Although this study foregrounds young people's relational experiences, these relationships develop within statutory care systems. Decisions made by social workers and, where relevant, the courts shape placement stability, contact arrangements and expectations regarding long-term commitment. The findings suggest that professional practices that prioritize continuity and relational commitment may support the co-creation of permanence over time, whereas frequent changes or uncertainty may undermine it.

6.3 Limitations

This was a small-scale qualitative study that was subject to some limitations. Despite considerable effort to recruit a balance of male and female participants, the majority of participants were female. The study sample was also primarily white and Irish. Although there were some participants from minority ethnic groups represented, the small numbers meant that no findings relating to care-experienced young adults from these communities could be discussed. This study also only represents the perspective of the care-experienced young adults, and the foster carers' lived experience is not represented. These limitations indicate the need for future research with foster carers and also with groups of young adults from ethnic minority communities with experience of foster care with permanence.

7 Conclusions

In this paper, data collected from 22 young adults who grew up in long-term foster care and who described experiencing a sense of permanence within their placements were presented. The findings demonstrate how permanence was co-created by young people and their foster carers across time through everyday practices, significant family events and, for some participants, the establishment of legal ties. Building on existing conceptual work, the idea of permanence display is introduced as an analytic lens to explore how permanence is demonstrated both within the foster family and to the outside world.

Although much of the existing literature discusses permanence primarily in terms of decisions made by policy-makers, practitioners and carers, the findings of this study foreground the active role of the young people in co-creating and displaying permanence within their foster families. Although each of the participants described experiencing and co-creating permanence, they did not all describe this in the same terms. For some, the establishment of legal permanence through adoption formed an important part of this process, whereas for others, inclusion in everyday family life and significant family celebrations was more central.

Although this study is situated within the Irish child welfare context, the findings have relevance beyond this setting. Ireland provides a useful case for international audiences as a jurisdiction in which long-term foster care is explicitly recognized as a permanence option, allowing attention to shift from legal status alone to the relational processes through which permanence is experienced and sustained. In this respect, the findings offer insight into how relational permanence may be co-created within long-term foster care relationships across different policy and practice contexts.

This study underscores the importance of relational permanence for young people in long-term foster care and illuminates how such permanence is negotiated and sustained over time. Recognizing the diverse ways that young people and their foster carers co-create permanence and the agentic role young people play in this process has important implications for child and family social work policy and practice, particularly in supporting long-term foster care relationships into adulthood.