ABSTRACT
Family life no longer happens in one place but is scattered between several different locations.
(Beck and Beck Gernsheim 2002: 92)
In this chapter we will address what it means for children to experience their family lives as scattered between several different locations and how they manage the inevitable problems and challenges of sustaining relationships through the apportioning of time and space. Our focus is on post-divorce family life where parents live in different locations and parent-child relationships are maintained in large part through the dividing of children’s time more or less equally between households. We refer to this practice as co-parenting after divorce or separation. Our main focus will be on the accounts of the children we have interviewed in two studies1 in which they talk about what it is like to be shared between their parents and to live their lives across different households with different kin and step-kin. But the context in which this empirical data is discussed is an ethical one, namely the concept of fairness.We draw this concept of fairness from the narratives of the children themselves and we shall pay attention to the ways in which they conceptualize this moral concept, and also what it means when they actually set it into operation. However, before we turn to this data, we shall focus on the idea of fairness and why it seems to have entered so powerfully into the imagination of the children of divorced parents.
