Staying Together No Matter What: Becoming Young Parents on the Streets of Vancouver

Abstract

Among young people who use drugs in the context of entrenched poverty and homelessness, pregnancy is often viewed as an event that can meaningfully change the trajectory of their lives. However, youth’s desires and decision-making do not always align with the perspectives of various professionals and systems regarding how best to intervene during pregnancies and early parenting. Drawing on longitudinal interviews and fieldwork with young people in Vancouver, Canada, we explore how their romantic relationships powerfully shaped understandings of what was right and wrong and which actions to take during pregnancy and early parenting, and how these moral worlds frequently clashed with the imperatives of healthcare, criminal justice, and child protection systems. We demonstrate how a disjuncture between youth’s desires, decision-making and moralities, and the systems that are intended to help them, can further entrench young people in cycles of loss, defeat, and harm. These cycles are powerfully racialized for young Indigenous people in our context.

Making Homes in Un-Homelike Places among Young People in Vancouver: Implications for Homelessness Prevention

“…Young people's homing strategies often involve attempts to create an "intimate sense of normality associated with home" in conditions that are perceived as non-normal, including through particular forms of sociality [43] (p. 594). In particular, close relationships with friends and romantic partners who shared experiences of residential instability and substance use and mental health challenges could powerfully engender a sense of being at home in un-homelike places [68]. This was especially the case for young people who lacked supportive family relationships and had experienced fragmented connections with other young people in the foster care and group home settings they cycled through [65,66,69,70].…”

“…There should be funded programming that supports young people with (re)building and maintaining connections with family and friends who come to visit the places where they are living. Strict visitor regulations in many housing services may inadvertently undermine one of young people's most essential homing strategies, contributing to returns to street-based homelessness rather than ameliorating these [68]. In addition to supporting visits, there are opportunities for housing programs to incorporate peer-and youth-led activities, including those that focus on routines such as regularly cooking and eating and playing sports and games together.…”