ABSTRACT
This article explores how young people with extensive involvement in the Norwegian Child Welfare Services (CWS) narrate a ‘bad childhood’ in relation to dominant cultural ideals of a ‘good childhood’. Based on eight life story interviews with youth aged 18–20, the study combines Butler’s theory of performativity with Mertova and Webster’s critical event narrative analysis to examine how young people make sense of instability, institutional encounters and moments of recognition. Across the interviews, four recurring narrative stages emerge: being discovered but uninformed, receiving emotionless and cold help, searching for and finding a supportive ‘buddy’ and becoming open and grateful for help. These stages are organised around critical events such as early labelling, opaque professional decision-making and later experiences of relational warmth. The findings show that youth narratives do more than recount adversity—they actively cite, resist and reconfigure normative understandings of childhood embedded in Norwegian welfare-state culture. Through storytelling, young people reclaim interpretive agency, challenge institutional framings that once constrained them and articulate alternative ways of understanding care, belonging and identity within child welfare contexts.