‘None of this is homely’: The absence of home in residential care

Residential care, a form of out-of-home care, meets demand for children and youth removed from their biological families when Statutory bodies have insufficient kinship or foster care homes. We explored the concept of home while centering children and youth’s experiences in residential care. As part of a larger study, phenomenological interpersonal interviews were held with children and youth with experiences living in residential care (n = 17). Guiding the deductive analysis were Boccagni and Kusenbach’s (2020) multiple dimensions of home including: familiarity, security, control, personal expression, comfort, intimacy and meaningful relationships. Children and youth in residential care understood home as an absence of unsafe environments. While their experiences of home were punctuated with absence or lack across the domains of home such as control, familiarity, intimacy, comfort, security and relationships with workers. Domestic pets, for those youth who had them, provided a sense of comfort, intimacy and relationship, providing consistency and unconditional love within residential care. Piecemeal practices of homemaking occurred within a relational vacuum and absence of familiarity due to a high turnover and inconsistency in residential care staff or movement of youth. Simultaneously, a home and a workplace, residential care created a site of liminal borderlands making building a sense of home challenging. Thus, experiences of home are limited by institutional practices and policies creating unequal social relations and inequities for children and youth in care.