ABSTRACT
The central focus of the book is children and their connection to family life: both the ways they are connected to families of different kinds and the connections they make themselves in terms of meanings, intentions and actions. While children and family life are typically bracketed together in academic and popular discourse, children themselves are rarely very visible. Moreover, as the absence of a child perspective in both the study of family life and other contexts bears witness to, the notion that children have the possibilities for agency and hold views, sentiments and opinions is at most misconceived or at least contentious. This book is about the ways in which children reflect upon family life both in terms of its meaning and importance to them, but also in terms of the ways in which they consider family life ‘ought’ to be enacted in the context of moral or normative guidelines. Based upon children’s accounts of family life, the book describes and analyses the ways in which children, as competent and reflexive actors, make family connections: how they define family and family relationships and, in the context of those meanings, how they connect themselves to others in terms of the practice of social relationships. As we shall show, inclusive notions of family may be matched by inclusive practices so that many children define family connections well beyond the boundaries of the household.
