Negotiating Families and Personal Lives in the 21st Century

Exploring Diversity, Social Change and Inequalities

Sheila Quaid, Catriona Hugman, Angela Wilcock, Sheila Quaid, Catriona Hugman, Angela Wilcock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032182292
• eBook ISBN: 9781000518160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is a vital new resource in the sociological study of family life in the 21st century. The chapters in this volume explore a diverse range of family and intimate life experiences, such as personal choices about reproduction and how life choices and family forms are mediated by factors including geographical location, race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, income and government policy.

Through a series of evidence-based chapters, leading sociologists explore a diverse range of family and intimate life experiences and the contexts within which they are lived and experienced. Each chapter delves into the lives and experiences of people whose choices in some way seem to disrupt normative and traditional ideas of family, parenting and childhood. Family patterns and experiences of living apart together, troubled families, children in care, culture, coupledom, same-sex families and digital technology are covered and examined innovatively through theoretical engagement.

Chapters also incorporate innovative technologies and their use within family spaces that shape the nature of human relationships and interactions. These negotiations within the family are globally contextualised within the political and ideological frameworks of societies at any given moment in time. The work recognises the sensitivity of family and personal lives and incorporates the increasing need of the impact of emotionality that forms part of knowledge production. Additionally, innovative methods are showcased in chapters on researching the family through socially just methods, researcher emotionality and visual data.

By bringing together thought-provoking research findings and innovative methodological and theoretical approaches, this collection of essays raises and articulates relevant, timely and future thinking for its readers. This book will therefore be indispensable for students and researchers as well as professionals and policymakers interested in understanding family life in the 21st century.

Part 1

1 Introduction
Negotiating families and personal lives in the 21st century

Sheila Quaid, Catriona Hugman and Angela Wilcock

DOI: 10.4324/9781003039433-2

Each of these contributions to the sociological studying of the family disrupts the individualisation thesis through contributors’ analytical attention to subjectivity, emotion and structure in family life. Whilst the work is not culturally comparative, we consider the global impact of neoliberal ideology on our perceptions of family and parenting in the 21st century. The international dimension illustrates causes and consequences of globalisation and its consequent effect on the economic and personal lives of individuals and families. The empirical evidence base of this volume covers the time span from the early 2000s to the present day and offers a critical analysis, current thinking and research in the field of personal, intimate and family lives.

We are coming through a global pandemic and each of the authors in this book conducted their research prior to it. It is not lost on us that this collection would have been different if the research was conducted under Covid-19 restrictions. The lockdowns of 2020/21 were times when family lives changed, public life changed, and routines and normalities were suspended. The restrictions placed on all of us were profound in their effects. Reports in the media and a surge of sociological and policy research highlighted aspects of family life (Holt and Murray, 2021; Savage, 2021; Children’s Commissioner for England, 2020). Most research and reports thus far revealed evidence of compounded inequalities, unequal domestic divisions of responsibilities, physical and emotional danger in the home and stresses associated with balancing paid and unpaid work. These were revealed under Covid-19 restrictions in ways that were not presented to the public in the same way before. The spring and summer of 2021 are hopefully the time for moving on from pandemic to a new normality and this is the context in which we publish this volume.

This volume is positioned within the shifting and challenging context of the 21st century.

We are living through times when family research is crucial to aid the understanding of social change, and how personal life is constructed in relationship to professional life and politics. We curated this volume with the intention of offering a new resource on matters of the personal and private in the 21st century, illustrating theoretical and methodological innovation, and including consideration of work from diverse geographical locations. Inclusion of work from other parts of the world accentuates globalisation and how it shapes possibilities in different ways depending on the geographical location of our participants.

Our collective approach is shaped by the recognition that forces both global and local produce and reproduce inequalities. Geographically diverse research in our chapters revealing the continued problem of inequality suggests much social change has occurred but also continuities are found. Each of the authors researched the lives and experiences of people whose choices in some way seem to disrupt the normative and traditional ideas of family, parenting and childhood. This is accentuated, for example, in Hugman’s chapter about narratives of childhoods in ‘care’. Themes and connections between the chapters capture this, but also a sense of change, and in some cases pinpoint historical and contemporary moments of change. Whilst much quantitative and empirical work in recent years provides an evidence base of change and diversity, this collection focuses more on the lived experiences of these changes. We see changing patterns of personal life, changes to traditional life courses, changing ideologies, and changing legislation and policies. In the midst of this, the authors skilfully elicited very personal stories and accounts of how changing times are experienced at the personal level. Our contention, as editors, is that in spite of changes in the acceptability of different family forms and changing family roles, how there continues to be a stratification in the status of what is culturally deemed to be a good family (Smyth, 2016; Featherstone et al., 2018). The different global positions and socio-economic status of participants in this collected research offer insights into differences and commonalities of experiences.

Our imperative for developing this edited collection came about through our time researching and teaching about families from sociological perspectives. One module entitled ‘Sex, Families and the Construction of Personal Lives’ at the University of Sunderland was the central example that provided our sustained interest in teaching sociology of families. With our students, we examined the forces of history, ideology and policy and how possibilities and limitations on personal lives can be understood. We often observed that our own experiences of family and personal lives were not represented either in the core sources or as transgressions from a norm. This book was proposed and developed in order to contribute to sociological learning and practice. As a part of this, we were motivated to provide accessible work for students that included current research that is methodologically innovative and theoretically stimulating. The book offers a range of relevant and timely issues for our readers and we hope that it encourages students to become critical thinkers; to be informed; to couch their studies in theoretical and challenging frameworks; to ask questions and to continue to ask questions. The collection provides evidence of social and legal change, but also new marginalities and leads to questions of an imagined future where freedom of choice is the norm. We have a narrative of liberalisation in late modern society, but we also have a narrative of marginalisation and each author in their own specialism reflects the contradictory nature of social change. The chapters offer learning and teaching material for those in Higher Education who are teaching sociology and social policy in relation to family life. This collection builds on the discursive and empirical work of sociologists both in the UK (Smyth, 2016; Bottero, 2015) and internationally (Ehrenberg, 2012; Chambers, 2012) that demonstrate changes and continuities in how people make sense, interpret and do family.

Contributors consider the emergence and impact of neoliberal ideology on our perceptions of families, coupledom and parenting. We critique family as a homogenous concept and look instead at diverse ‘family practices’ (Morgan, 1996). Current understandings of personal choice in relation to reproduction, ‘choice’, identity and the construction of ‘family’ are critically analysed through a range of empirical and theoretical contributions. Questions are raised about how we continue to open up cultural and social policy spaces for diversity and fluidity, expanding the possibilities for people to choose personal and family lives of their own, and how personal choices are negotiated with partners, husbands, wives, children and kinship networks. New technologies in reproduction enable different possibilities for human reproduction and creation of new family forms, the use of technology within family spaces shape the nature of human relationships and interactions, in particular, 21st-century ways. People navigate and negotiate the use of technology in different ways. These negotiations are contextualised within the political and ideological frameworks of societies at any given moment in time. Personal choice about reproduction, life choices and new family forms are mediated by geographical position, ‘race’, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, income, policy and the national regulation of any nation state. Despite the proliferation of ‘choice’ brought about through legislative reform and shifts in cultural values, there remain undercurrents of political and cultural ideas about what makes a ‘good’ family continue, and this continues to shape possibilities for family lives. Moreover, evidence in recent years suggests that there are an increasing number of families living in poverty; this is mirrored in an increase of cases of abuse by neglect, yet the focus remains on poor parenting, particularly mother blaming (Jensen, 2013; Featherstone et al., 2018). These detract from examining the wider social systems that intersect to shape parents’ ability to manage on low incomes (Featherstone et al., 2018). Precarity in employment and the uncertain base of the economy shape the possibilities for family life for many.

Contributors in this volume consider the emergence and impact of neoliberal ideology on our perceptions. We delve into lived experiences of families, coupledom and parenting in these neoliberal times as ideologies of family are shifting and changing at a particularly fast pace. In the midst of this, people are making decisions. Material inequality and marginality is considered by Crossley, for example, through the lens of the ‘social harm’ perspective. Neoliberal rationality and new social conservatism shape family and personal lives with new polarising discourses about good and bad parents/mothers, and policymakers use terms of ‘parent citizenship’, ‘parental responsibility’ and ‘parental governance’ (Jensen and Tyler, 2013). We are seeing these terms along with others such as ‘responsibilsation’ and ‘cultures of dependency’ being used to dialogically reframe parenting identities in these times of individualisation, difference and struggle.

The nuances of considering inequalities and diversity lead us to reiterate the continual need for ‘conceptualising of the interrelationships of gender, class race, ethnicity and other social divisions’ (Yuval-Davis, 2006: 195) across the range of chapters and to consider racialisation in the experiences of our participants. This is present in Quaid’s chapter where she indicated that lesbian couples created joint-parented family projects based on egalitarian ideals; however, other definers of identity, such as culture, disability, ethnicity, class, gender and religious background, caused contradictions and tensions. Crossley, in his introduction, identified the racialised stigmatising of troubled families. Moore, in the South African context, highlighted the ongoing silencing and marginalisation of people of colour from theoretical and production of knowledge in this area of investigation. Diversity is reflected in research on families that transgress normative expectation, including lesbian families, Living Apart Together (LAT) couples, adults brought up in care and middle-aged women. We recognise that there have been significant changes, a liberalisation of norms in UK family types, in part, through substantive changes to legislative and policy changes over the last 20 years inter alia: civil partnership, reproductive choice and assisted technology; equality legislation; and paternity policy. However, these changes are not reflected equitably in the UK and more globally. As we go into a new stage of globalised organisation of the world, people’s lives are shaped by forces most often beyond their control. Each author makes clear the geographical location of their research and collectively we are able to offer a snapshot of the global and local forces, both economic and cultural, that shape the very individual decisions and lives people can make for themselves and their children. Social reproduction and biological reproduction create the life force of any society, and families in whatever form they take, remain the central organising institution for reproduction of the next generation. Family patterns and experiences of living apart together, ‘troubled families’, children in ‘care’, culture, coupledom, same-sex families, violence and abuse, and influences of digital technology are examined innovatively through theoretical engagement.

In Personal Life (2007), Smart outlined the conceptual journey of sociological approaches to families from Young and Wilmott (1973), through to the work of Giddens (1992) and to the later conceptual shifts created by the development of ‘family practices’ (Morgan, 1996) and of ‘display’ by Finch (2007). These scholars, along with the definitive work by Finch and Mason (1989), laid the ground for the study of families to delve into the lived day-to-day experiences. The impact of feminist scholars (Oakley, 1974; Delphy and Leonard, 1992) was significant with inherent critiques of normative ideologies of family as oppressive for women an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• PART 1
• PART 2
• Index