Linking Parental Wellbeing with the Wellbeing of Care Leaver and Care Experienced University Students: Analysing Relevance and Interconnections through the Lens of ‘Lived Lives’
This article analyses multidisciplinary research and theoretical perspectives on wellbeing, linking this with the findings from a narrative, biographical study of care-experienced university students in a UK university. In this paper, we examine the relevance of concepts of parental wellbeing, and wellbeing more generally, to \u27linked lives\u27\u27, defined as interrelated life events, experiences, memories and processes of narrativizing life histories both in and across time. While wellbeing is often depicted as an uplifting and uniformly positive concept in policy and research, it is also contested and opaque and is therefore difficult to define and operationalise. Elucidating young people\u27s voices on the complexity and \u27multilayeredness\u27 of everyday life events, we show that parental wellbeing, which is frequently negated from discussions of care experienced young people\u27s educational journeys requires greater critical scrutiny, arguing that temporalities and ever-changing personal and family histories indelibly affect individual care pathways for these young people. We thereby illuminate the significance of seemingly \u27ordinary\u27, everyday life events for care experienced students whilst showing how narrative interviews offer fruitful methodological approaches for understanding young people\u27s educational journeys
