1 - Troubling normalities and normal family troubles: diversities,experiences and tensions

Summary

Introduction

In setting out to explore changes and challenges in the family lives of children and young people, and whether and how it may be important, useful and productive to consider such experiences as troubling or troublesome, we started from some basic assumptions for framing our thinking across diverse topics and circumstances. The first is that change is an inescapable feature of life, and these changes will often be highly challenging, although in some circumstances, it may be the absence of change that is troubling. The second is that troubles, conflict and painful experiences are common features of children's and young people's lives as these occur in the particular contexts of their families and close relationships, and all families are likely to be troubled at times. Yet, an idealised notion of childhood as a time of protection and innocence in contemporary Western cultures sometimes undermines the ability to acknowledge this and to equip children to deal with such trouble when they encounter it, and this failure may itself exacerbate the impact of trouble. This raises a significant tension between how far to understand troubles as pervasive and, indeed, universal and to build expectations of and for children's lives on this basis, and how far to see troubles as avoidable and unacceptable and requiring clear interventions that will state this unequivocally, and seek to remedy and/or prevent such troubles.

A further tension concerns how to understand and prioritise children's needs in the context of their family relationships. Recent decades in affluent Western societies have seen a dramatic shift in public policy and popular media towards the nature of parenting and the ‘skills’ needed to perform it satisfactorily, promoting what has been described as ‘intensive mothering’ (Hays, 1996) and ‘concerted cultivation’ (Lareau, 2003). The demanding nature of such parenting in terms of parents’ (generally mothers’) time and devoted attention, and the increased expectations of parenting skills, has occurred amidst a process of increased surveillance and regulation of parents (Burman, 2007) and moral discourses that have led to a ‘responsibilisation’ of parents (Ribbens McCarthy, 2008). The belief that changes in parenting will rectify many, if not most, societal problems is proffered at the expense of attention to the impacts of poverty and inequality on the challenges of parenting.