Family Troubles? Exploring Changes and Challenges in the Family Lives of Children and Young People

Abstract

Framed by a social science perspective, this edited collection originated from a two-day London-based colloquium during July 2010. The purpose of the collection is to promote dialogue across policy, practice and research boundaries about how ‘troubles’ feature in normal families and ‘normal’ features in troubled families. Meanings about ‘normal’ and ‘trouble’ are considered critically by drawing on diverse family circumstances including parentless families, families with young carers and families separated by migration, divorce and death. Implicit in this are notions that care is relational (Tronto, 1993). With a wealth of insightful essays, the book is filled with careful reflection of the process of change (in its broadest sense) in the everyday lives of children and young people. The book has twenty-six chapters, split into the following five parts. Part One sets the scene of the book by considering the cultural and historical framings of academic work on the family. It also looks at tensions in such academic work by focusing on issues such as research methodology. Part Two, ‘Whose trouble? Contested definitions and practices’, illustrates disconnect between policy, practice agendas and everyday experiences using real-world examples such as the interactions around breastfeeding between UK-based mothers and midwives. Part Three raises questions about when the normal and the troubling become harmful. These questions are considered in a global sense in Part Four to examine tensions and troubles amongst diverse family circumstances across time and space. Finally, Part Five mobilises the family troubles framework established throughout the book, to call for future policy and practice interventions which listen and take note of the everyday experiences of children, young people and carers. This final part of the book commits to concluding the extensive ground covered in the book through discussing ‘what is at stake in family troubles, and what cultural and philosophical resources may be available to address them?’ (p. 17).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 52 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.