ABSTRACT
Representations of children function in relation to representations of those who look after and live with them. Indeed, a family is often de®ned in terms of caregiving roles for dependent children, to the extent that couples living together without children are rarely classed as a `family' (Van Every 1992). We saw in Part I how the individual-centred focus of developmental psychology sets up an opposition between `child' and `environment' such that the separation between `child' and `context' seems taken as pre-given. This `context' has come in for much scrutiny and evaluation, not least in terms of its purported child-rearing qualities. While the `environment' for children's development has often been treated as synonymous with the mother (e.g. Yarrow et al. 1975), the family as the context for child rearing is central to social policy and welfare provision and is also the site for heated debate about social relations and social change. The signi®cance of these national and international social policy debates ± in particular at the level of speci®c national policies ± and the ways they enter into developmental research is the topic of this chapter. State and family interact in complex ways.
