ABSTRACT
This chapter focusses on children’s vacant rooms in situations of shared custody. In that context, resulting from marital separation, children’s residence is equally shared between their parents’ respective homes. In each parent’s home, the children’s room is alternately occupied or left vacant. So far, research has tended to focus mostly on the way children experience these ‘two worlds’, and little attention has been paid to the way parents experience their children’s temporary presence/absence. Based on a qualitative study, this chapter examines parents’ relation to their children’s room when the latter are not there. More specifically, it aims at shedding light on the uses and representations of this space when it is left empty. This chapter address the following questions: to what extent is the vacant room integrated into the home’s common space? Is it avoided, forbidden, or sanctuarised? We situate empirically the children’s room within the space of the parental home, and examine how parents use that space when their children are away.
