ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the interviewees expressed their understandings of their lives, in the context of their interwoven personal histories of shifting parenting and partnership relationships, and changeable household membership and residential arrangements. The view of the extended family as a loose-knit set of relationships across re-partnered households was only found among some of the more liberal, middle-class interviewees. The chapter draws on the own and earlier studies to help identify aspects of what it may mean to 'be a family' in contemporary Western societies, to map out some of the overarching issues involved. The constructions of step-families as different due to biology or complexity, and somewhat problematic as a result, were very largely a middle-class preoccupation. Yet people's discussion of 'family' suggests that it is meant to be natural and effortless, based on biology and/or natural affection by adults for children in their care.
