Family Troubles?

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

Ribbens McCarthy, Jane, Hooper, Carol-Ann, Jane Ribbens McCarthy, Carol-Ann Hooper, Val Gillies

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781447304449
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781447320456
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As the everyday family lives of children and young people come to be increasingly defined as matters of public policy and concern, it is important to raise the question of how we can understand the contested terrain between "normal" family troubles and troubled and troubling families. In this important, timely and thought-provoking publication, a wide range of contributors explore how "troubles" feature in "normal" families, and how the "normal" features in "troubled" families. Drawing on research on a wide range of substantive topics - including infant care, sibling conflict, divorce, disability, illness, migration and asylum-seeking, substance misuse, violence, kinship care, and forced marriage - the contributors aim to promote dialogue between researchers addressing mainstream family change and diversity in everyday lives, and those specialising in specific problems which prompt professional interventions. In tackling these contentious and difficult issues across a variety of topics, the book addresses a wide audience, including policy makers, service users and practitioners, as well as family studies scholars more generally who are interested in issues of family change.

CHAPTER ONE

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

Jane Ribbens McCarthy, Carol-Ann Hooper and Val Gillies

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 cultures1 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. At the same time, there have been important gains in the raised aspirations for childhood reflected in international frameworks such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (discussed further by Ribbens McCarthy, Chapter Twenty-Six), and in the growth of attention to children and young people’s experience as worthy of attention in its own right, rather than simply for its implications for their futures, brought by the new sociology of childhood (James et al, 1998; Uprichard, 2008; Kassem et al, 2010).

Our further assumptions were:

• that all children and young people will experience family troubles of some shape or form (using ‘family’ to refer broadly to their personal relationships with those responsible for their care);
• that besides the major significance of material resources in how such troubles are lived and experienced, there may be variable cultural resources available – across the globe as well as within differing groups within societies – to help children, young people and other family members to make sense of troubles in their lives;
• that troubles are not restricted to particular issues, families or situations, but that some troubles in some contexts may, nevertheless, be seen (by family members or others) to raise particular concerns about the potential for harm; and
• that researchers, policymakers and professionals, as well as family members themselves, may struggle to know when to stress the continuities of broad human experiences in response to the changes and challenges of young people’s relational lives, and how and when to draw the lines and boundaries around particular family troubles that may invoke interventions.

In this volume, we do not envisage answering such questions in any fixed way, even though policymakers and professionals may want firm answers. Since we began this project, the UK government has established a dedicated ‘Troubled Families Unit’ to target 120,000 households deemed to be clearly identifiable as having serious problems, with local authorities being tasked to ‘turn their lives around’. Behind this initiative lies a troubling attempt to define, measure and map families who are seen to cause society the most problems – although the definition used to locate such families clearly targets the most socially and economically disadvantaged. In the process, the concepts of ‘troubled’ and ‘troublesome’ are conflated through an equation of multiple disadvantage with disorder and anti-social behaviour (Levitas, 2012; Portes, 2012).

While we continue to draw on the language of troubles from which our project started, we are very aware of the developing political associations, even as we seek to carve out a particular space for careful reflection and critical engagement. The goal of our project on family troubles is thus very different: not to ‘other’ the troubled, however defined, but to invite debate and to explore how the normal and the troubling are perceived, experienced and presented by different actors in different contexts, whose definition of trouble prevails in particular contexts, where responsibility is located for particular troubles, with what consequences and so on.

In this opening chapter, we set out some of the debates invoked by these contentious and complex issues, and begin to consider what theoretical and conceptual frameworks are available to help us to think about these questions. Many of the chapters in this volume are based in the UK, where the original Colloquium was held; others are written by authors based in other countries and continents. Some take an explicitly cross-cultural or historical approach, while one section of the book is specifically devoted to family troubles across space and culture, including mobilities across the globe. While some of the issues discussed in relation to social policies and professional interventions are specific to particular national contexts, the breadth of the topics and contexts at stake are highly productive in helping us to unsettle assumptions and be open to the ambiguities of children’s relational and family lives, and hence to think creatively on ever-changing territory.

In the first part of this introductory chapter, we consider some of the basic concepts underpinning the debates presented in this book: children and families, and the meanings implicated by individuality and relationality; and change and challenges, and how far they may be understood to constitute troubles and what conceptual frameworks may be pertinent to this question. We then consider some of the gains and losses that may be seen to have occurred in specific debates and research studies that have sought to normalise troubles, or trouble the normal. This then sets the scene for moving onto processes of power in how definitions of normality and trouble emerge and become institutionalised, and how such definitions and boundaries may be perceived by diverse social actors. We conclude the chapter by introducing the main structure and outline of the book as a whole.

Children, families and relationality

Children and families are concepts at the heart of this book, although these terms are often taken for granted in a more or less implicit way (Ribbens McCarthy et al, 2012). They are, however, embedded in, and productive of, particular – and highly charged – sets of meanings, implicating understandings of connections, dependencies and what it means to be an ‘individual’ or a member of a collectivity (Ribbens McCarthy, 2012). Some such meanings are institutionalised and powerful, while some are very much taken for granted in mundane aspects of daily lives.

In Western societies, the lives of children have been predominantly theorised and researched from the perspective of child development, rooted in a psychological disciplinary framework. This perspective has become almost hegemonic in such societies, while also extending its reach worldwide. It is important here to distinguish between the use of ‘development’ to indicate, on the one hand, that the early years are important for life in later years and, on the other, a model of progressive movement towards developmental goals with each stage being seen to be of a higher order than the previous stages (Ribbens McCarthy and Edwards, 2011). As a discipline, child development generally builds on the latter idea of development, and it has grown as a field into a highly complex and sophisticated body of work, underpinned by an extensive research basis largely premised on the basis of ‘good science’ (Rutter, Chapter Four). This field of study has not been without its critics within psychology, however, not least because of the potential for unrecognised cultural myopia (eg Burman, 2007; Woodhead, 2009). Thus, while Woodhead warns of the danger of throwing the developmental baby out with the bathwater, he also points out that ‘as a generalization, it is fair to say that knowledge of developmental experiences for the great majority of the world’s children has been and still is in very short supply’ (2009, p 52) (see also Korbin, Chapter Two).

The cultural critique of developmental models includes theoretical concerns about the nature of ‘the child’ that is implicated, and the goals to which he or she is seen to be progressing, as well as the significance and meanings of the varying contexts and relationships in which children’s lives are embedded. Some forms of developmental psychology have sought to build on different theoretical models to take account of such issues (eg Rogoff [2003], who takes a Vygotskyan approach), while others have sought to ‘strip back’ the fundamentals that can be said to be universally applicable in terms of children’s needs (eg Woodhead, 1990), opening up greater space for considering how far understandings of children’s ‘needs’ are themselves culturally constructed.

One such approach, for example, concerns the importance of ‘attachment’ in early life for children’s future mental health and social adjustment. There is now a significant body of work on the underpinning theoretical model, building on the original work of Bowlby (Oates, 2007) and relevant empirical work in various different cultures around the world (discussed by Burman, 2007; van Ijzendoorn et al, 2007). Some of this work has pointed to surprising cultural variabilities, for example, in terms of how Japanese children react to separation from their mothers compared to children from North America, alongside evidence of the widespread relevance across the globe of this theoretical approach to children’s development. Some writers continue to urge caution in assessing the universal relevance of attachment theory, for example, avoiding the presumption that ‘only one [attachment] style is truly adaptive and of value to society’ (Barrett, 2006, p 196), as well as the need to bear in mind how many questions surrounding attachment theory still need further research. It is noteworthy also that it is families living in poverty and situations of deprivation who are the most likely to be compromised in their ability to provide the care appropriate for secure attachments (Belsky, 2007). Helen Barrett (Chair of the International Attachment Network) comments:

Specifically, we … make a plea for greater tolerance of diversity and for more efforts to be made towards understanding minority group attachment patterns. It would be a pity if a theory conceived so ambitiously with the aim of improving chances of psychological health and so potentially empowering of parents and children turned out only to make disadvantaged parents feel even more alienated. (2006, p 359)

The needs of very young children for care for their survival, and the extent to which this is linked to the deeply social nature of human beings, are not in doubt, however. Various psychological and sociological theories also point to the significance of some level of security and reliability for human well-being, including Giddens’ (1991) concept of ontological security, which posits a need for a degree of continuity in the events, and meanings given to them, in a person’s life (see Chase and Statham, Chapter Eighteen). Both psychological and sociological theories – including Schutz’s (1954) notion of ‘typifications’, Kelly’s (1955) ‘personal construct’ theory and Janoff-Bulman’s (1992) work on ‘assumptive worlds’ – also suggest a human endeavour, from the earliest years of life onwards, to develop some sort of workable framework for ordering perceptions, understandings...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Troubling normalities and normal family troubles: diversities, experiences and tensions
• PART ONE: APPROACHING FAMILY TROUBLES? CONTEXTS AND METHODOLOGIES
• PART TWO: WHOSE TROUBLE? CONTESTED DEFINITIONS AND PRACTICES
• PART THREE: THE NORMAL, THE TROUBLING AND THE HARMFUL?
• PART FOUR: TROUBLES AND TRANSITIONS ACROSS SPACE AND CULTURE
• PART FIVE: WORKING WITH FAMILIES