Learning to Evaluate Yourself. The Consequences of Institutionalized Understandings of Progression for Young People With Care Experience

ABSTRACT This article examines how young people who have been closely involved with child welfare services throughout their upbringing are required to assess and evaluate their life and progress in institutionalized ways. Within Danish child welfare policy and social work practice, progress is institutionally understood as a linear and one‐dimensional process focusing on ‘development’, ‘independent living’ and ‘motivation’. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 30 care experienced young people aged 18 to 29 years, the analysis demonstrates that these institutionalized understandings of progress are internalized by the young people through both formal and informal processes of self‐assessment with great consequences for their understandings of normality, adulthood, and self‐esteem. Thus, the article finds that institutionalized understandings of progress are experienced by the young people as static and de‐contextualized from their lives and that goals are often unrealistic but still internalized by the young people. A result of the institutionalized assessment practice is that the young people come to see themselves as failing to progress and thus as inadequate compared with their same‐aged peers.