Children – our future! The last decade has witnessed a growth in the amount of policy and service initiatives aimed at supporting the health and well-being of children and their families. Much of this work has been based on the assumption that offering a child as good an upbringing as possible has positive outcomes for the child, their family, their community and governments and society in general. The rights of the child have also received welcome attention with wider debates on balancing child and parental rights over a range of issues, not least of which has been disciplining potentially risky or...

In recent theorising about childhood both regulation and agency are said to be greater now than in the past. Some writers have emphasised how much of children’s lives is controlled, yet others – and sometimes the same people – also stress that children have choice and influence over their own environments and development. The apparent paradox derives in part from attention to different timescales and domains, as children are more constrained in some contexts than others. Taking a long-term perspective, childhood is now seen as more regulated than in the past, especially through the creation of schools and, more recently, preschool and...

This chapter presents data from two studies that illustrate the complexity of decisions in respect of whether or not certain individuals form part of ‘the family’. In this case, the individuals in question are non-resident birth fathers. Our perspective is primarily methodological and our focus is the problems faced by those researchers who seek to place ‘families’ in categories. However, these data illustrate several of this book’s key themes, including the difficulty of defining family and family boundaries, particularly as potentially represented by the material space of household.

The notion of ‘family boundary’, derived from family systems theory, refers to...

The parent–child boundary is created, sustained and enforced through norms, roles, individual practices and social institutions. It has symbolic resonance partly because the relationship between parent and child is often portrayed, not without reason, as one of the few remaining social bonds whose boundaries have a weight of obligation and permanence about them (Beck, 1994). Partners may become ex-partners, friends become lovers, lovers become friends, but children are always children and parents are always parents. However, empirical studies of family life show that these boundaries, although vested with so much emotional energy and material resources, are malleable and breakable....

Issues relating to health, illness and well-being affect individuals, their families, wider relationships, communities and societies. The boundaries within families, for example, as expressed through gendered roles, or between families and the wider community may all be challenged and redrawn in response to threats to health and well-being. The maintenance of well-being itself may require boundary construction, to ensure time for self or leisure is maintained despite caring and work commitments.

The three chapters comprising this part of the book focus on very different aspects of health, illness and well-being. The first chapter, by Backett-Milburn, Airey and McKie, provides a...

Luhmann (1982, p 232) has asserted that the “evolution or modernization of society has often been described as a process of increasing system differentiation and pluralization”. One dimension of these dynamic processes is the acquisition and constant renegotiation of ‘boundary roles’. Boundary roles are those that have potential to transform social relations and cultural practices through drawing ideas and experiences across arenas (Luhmann, 1982, p 236). For example, the woman who engages in paid employment while retaining the main responsibility for domestic and caring work may be in such a role. Thus she may identify herself as a worker and...

The impact of a diagnosis of dementia reaches far beyond the person to whom it is given. It permeates through the family system and to relationships outside the boundaries of the family. While illness brings a unique set of stressors to challenge relationship bonds, including chronicity, unpredictability and social stigma (Lyons et al, 1995), the very nature of dementia is such that a diagnosis results in major tensions and trials within family relationships. Smith et al (2001) reported that dementia pervaded every part of couples’ relationships, for both caregiver and the person with dementia, including spiritual, legal, financial, housing, medical...

Recent conflicts in Rwanda, Bosnia and Northern Ireland have brought attention to the role of families in inter-communal violence. Acts of inter-communal violence, and the consequences of these, have become more commonly known as ethnic cleansing. Inter-communal violence is characterised by the eruption of violent acts between those who were former neighbours, friends, even relatives and leads to death and injury, with resultant movement of populations. Violence is rationalised on the basis of religious or ethnic differences and the supposed need to exclude those deemed not to belong to a particular group or community. Familial networks, and the interweaving of...

The challenges thrown up in previous chapters about families in society and the boundaries that may be constructed and confronted are taken even further in this final part. As the title of this book suggests, families should not necessarily be seen as the only or central arena for personal or intimate relationships. The boundaries between familial and friendship relationships may be changing. Some of the preceding chapters presaged such change, such as the importance of friendships to women in the fifties or to those affected by dementia. These themes are developed further in the next four chapters which give a...

This chapter reviews how the concepts of boundaries and boundary work are deployed in theorising intimacy, in order to assess how these concepts further our understanding of intimacy and social change. In everyday current usage, intimacy is often presumed to involve practices of close association, familiarity and privileged knowledge, strong positive emotional attachments, such as love, and a very particular form of ‘closeness’ and being ‘special’ to another person, associated with high levels of trust. Recent discussions of intimacy emphasise one particular practice of generating ‘closeness’ above all others, self-disclosure. Intimacy of the inner self, ‘disclosing intimacy’ or ‘self expressing...

There is a growing proportion of adults living alone, at ages that have conventionally been associated with coupledom, marriage and childrearing, as well as among older people and, given differential mortality, particularly older women. To what extent does the increase in people living alone mean a redrawing of boundaries around ‘family’ and ‘household’? Those who live in one person households are not in ‘family households’ but to what extent have they stepped outside of families? If people now move in and out of situations in which they live alone across their adult life, has this reshaped the boundaries between youth...

As other chapters in this book have shown, patterns of partnership, family and household constitution have altered quite dramatically over the last generation. In particular, partnership behaviour has changed with lower levels of marriage, higher rates of divorce and a far greater incidence of cohabitation (Allan and Crow, 2001). One consequence of this is the decreasing overlap between sex, marriage and birth, a trinity that had previously been strongly linked (Lewis and Kiernan, 1996). Importantly too, there are now more individuals living alone out of choice (see Wasoff, Jamieson and Smith in this volume) or who are sharing households with...

In the west, at the start of the 21st century, more and more people are spending longer periods of their lives outside the conventional family unit.¹ Processes of individualisation are challenging the romantic, heterosexual couple and the modern family formation it has supported. The normative grip of the sexual and gender order that has underpinned the modern family is weakening. In this context, much that matters to people in their personal lives increasingly takes place beyond the boundaries of ‘the family’, between partners who are not living together ‘as family’, and within networks of friends.

This chapter pushes at the...

The Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) is committed to building links between academic research, policy and practice. The ideas behind this book emerged from ongoing discussions about furthering links across organisations and agencies concerned with policy and practice, research, and the exploration of families more generally. Given the range of research on families and relationships that we at CRFR and other colleagues are engaged in we were keen to disseminate work as widely as possible. The theme of boundaries offers one way to capture the fluidity of ‘families and relationships’ and the concept of boundary work to...