ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 focuses on the children’s experiences in residential care, social structures in residential care, and how it affected the children’s subsequent lives. This analysis features official documents describing how children coped with life in care, as well as interviews with former children in care about their ‘institutional’ life and their struggle to find their place in society. It examines social structures which formed in such institutions and compares them to both life in other types of institutions (such as the army or prison) and life in ‘late socialism’ more generally. This chapter shows that the rigidity and social structures of life in institutions was more similar to other ‘total institutions’ than to life in society, which forced children through a process of adaptation on their way both into and out of the institution. Both implicit social practices and the stigmatization of children in care made this adaptation even more difficult. The state seems to have been of little help in either of these processes. Finally, because of the social isolation of children in care and their ideologized education, children were not prepared well for a life after care, whether they had grown up in a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ institution.
