Better Supporting Youth Aging Out of Foster Care in Quebec: A Life Course Perspective

Abstract

Every year, it is estimated that 2,000 youth in Quebec’s child welfare system age out of care. Young people leaving care often face a number of complex challenges that make this transition period particularly difficult, such as pressures to rapidly conform to dominant ideals of ‘adulthood’, insufficient and inadequate support services, a lack of meaningful and supportive relationships, and the lasting impact of unresolved traumas faced during childhood and adolescence. These realities make them particularly susceptible to difficulties such as housing instability, unemployment, substance misuse, school attrition, mental health problems and poverty in adulthood. Although there has been growing recognition of the importance of providing post-majority services to better support youth as they age out of the foster care system in Quebec, such services continue to be largely insufficient to meet the diverse and evolving needs of this population. This major research project seeks to explore the experiences of youth as they age out of care in Quebec through a life course perspective, by adopting a theoretical and inductive approach to investigate the social, structural and relational factors emerging in the literature that act to shape their realities during this transition period. The method of thematic analysis was utilized in order to derive themes and patterns from a selected body of literature, comprising of 12 academic articles and gray literature discussing the experiences of youth leaving care in Quebec.

Keywords: youth, aging out of care, transition to adulthood, foster care, Quebec, programme qualification jeunesse, life course perspective