ABSTRACT
Usually women have been responsible for tidiness and cleanliness of the dwelling, and as mothers, have been in charge of bedtime routines for children. Like the other regimes of practice, tidiness arose frequently in the course of daily domestic family interaction and practice, and for one family it was a fundamental part of their everyday existence. Bedtimes were an important part of daily family life but proved to be more contested in some families than others. Generally speaking, the discourses on tidiness and bedtimes were not as important as the eating regime. This was evidenced by significantly fewer episodes of parent and child conflict occurring about tidiness and bedtimes, and the smaller amount of time families devoted to tidying tasks compared with eating preparation and procedures. In this chapter I relate some of the stories about tidiness and bedtimes and the conflict these routines produced.
