ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus on processes of democratic learning within changing and ever more complex family contexts. It is thereby assumed that democracy cannot be reduced to a formal legalistic system of ordering society, but that it also has a strong cultural component and is learned through discourses, everyday practices and performances. The family as a micro-system or social sphere is one of the places where learning about democracy and democratic practices can or—from a normative perspective—should take place. A distinction is therefore made between the family as a social system that can take very different forms—from very authoritarian to radically democratic—and the inherently normative concept of democratic familyship. The latter can be understood as an ideal-typical concept to describe situations where conflicts are negotiated and resolved through dialogue embedded in semi-egalitarian power relations between all actors within the family. Within the notion of democratic familyship, learning about democracy, dialogue and negotiation keeps the dialectics of control, as well as the power relations that drive them, in balance.
