This article examines wellbeing in relation to a group of care-experienced university students in a modern English university who we conducted biographical narrative interviews with. Initially wellbeing as a concept is critically analysed from different disciplinary and historical perspectives, with a closer focus on how parental and child wellbeing, the interactions between them and their relationship to wellbeing in young adulthood, might be understood and theorised. Despite the allure of such an apparently positive and uplifting concept, the definitional ambiguity and indeterminacy surrounding wellbeing, as well as problems in deciding how it should be understood and measured, limited its applicability to our participants. Our research findings, furthermore, illuminated wellbeing as a multi layered, multiply interpreted, dynamic and often elusive concept. The data also revealed that the majority of these young people’s lives, both with biological kin and in relation to the care system, were devoid of any understanding of wellbeing when they were children. Even as young adult students their narratives often revolved more around survival and ‘getting by’ than any conception of wellbeing.

Despite an evolving array of seemingly progressive and child centred legislation and policy, implemented in England over the last three decades, the state acting in loco parentis seemed unable to provide positive parenting and generate any form of wellbeing for most of the young people we interviewed. Focusing on life course trajectories and perspectives we found that the key positives these young people identified in their lives, were associated not with the care system as such but with the exceptional support, empathy and unconditional positive regard some foster or adoptive parents or intimate partners offered. Although there was some evidence to support the previously identified relationship between permanence, stability and wellbeing, some of our participants talked about how abusive and damaging long term placements they had been in were, identifying people they had known or lived with only for a short period of time as parents or family. Our theorisation around the concept of wellbeing in relation to this research, therefore, exposes wellbeing as a problematic concept both generally and in relation to looked after children and care-experienced adults. We consequently suggest that biographical research and life course perspectives might offer productive ways of understanding the intricacies of these young adults’ lives and the impact of repeated trauma, and that survey based quantitative research on wellbeing can inevitably only offer a partial and limited picture.