Understanding Children's Personal Lives and Relationships

Hayley Davies

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137030078
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Lavoro in ambito sociale

Informed by ethnographic research with children, Davies offers new sociological insights into children's personal relationships, as well as closely examining methodological approaches to researching with children and researching relationships.

1

Introduction

Looking up from my desk, I glimpse a picture of a black and grey battle ship set against a vibrant blue sky with a glowing sun in the corner. It’s been drawn and given to me by Laura, one of my research participants at Queen’s Park Primary, whom I came to know well and like very much. The picture now takes pride of place on my office pin board. As on many occasions before, I’m transported back eight years, this time to a day when I visited Laura’s family home after we’d been making ‘family books’ with her peers, Tom and Stephanie:

Laura (age nine) rides her bike alongside me, telling me it’s ‘OK’ for her to ride on the road, as she always does. We reach her house, which has an expansive driveway and a large inflatable Christmas archway by the door. Laura tells me to come in for a cup of tea. She opens the door. Joseph (age 11), who also knows me from school, is standing there, saying, ‘What are you doing here?’ in a gruff voice. He then laughs, and ushers me in with one hand. Stood beside him is Laura’s younger sister Jane (age three), a round toddler wearing Winnie the Pooh pyjamas. Jane uses the same hand motion to beckon me in as Joseph did. Laura’s nan appears at a door to my right. I murmur something about not wanting to impose and Nan tells me to come in for tea, but warns me, ‘It’s a mad house in here.’ I go in. Laura asks what I would like to drink. I ask for a cup of tea and Jane stands there staring at me. She tells me to take off my coat. I do, and then she says, ‘Take your shoes off!’ Laura re-emerges from the kitchen where she’s making tea: ‘Sorry, yeah, we have to take our shoes off.’ Jane tells me to put my bag down, so I leave it by the pile of shoes at the bottom of the stairs. I stand at the boundary of the hallway and the kitchen, chatting to Laura. The kitchen is modern but small for the seven of them who share their home. Kelly, Laura’s older sister, is also in the kitchen, cutting a Scooby-Doo cake. She asks if I’d like some. I decline. She says: ‘I’m just trying to cut it into small pieces ’cause there’s so many of us.’

Laura’s nan invites me to come and sit down in the living room. They have their Christmas decorations up early and Nan says, ‘Turn the tree on Joseph’, and tells me, ‘It’s a fibre optic one.’ ‘This is all the decorations we’re having,’ said Joseph disappointedly. Jane, whom I had not previously met, perches her bum on the edge of my knee, wriggling her cheeks upwards, seemingly wanting to be lifted properly onto my lap. Chloe (age five) is running around the rectangular living room, excitedly whipping her pyjama bottoms up and down and exposing herself. Nan scolds her. Joseph grabs Chloe; he lies on the floor, lifts her into the air above him and she giggles. Jane steadies herself on my knee (she’s really heavy) and demands, ‘Take those off’, referring to my glasses. I tell her, ‘I can’t see without them and if I take them off I won’t be able to see you.’ She looks bemused. Laura brings in my tea and I thank her, warning Jane that she may need to move off my lap whilst I drink hot tea, as I don’t want to spill it on her. I drink my tea quickly, trying to avoid Chloe pushing my arm. Laura warns Chloe, ‘Don’t, Chloe, or you’ll end up like I did with burns from tea!’

‘Do you wanna see my website?’ Kelly (age 12) asks me. ‘Me and my friends put pictures of ourselves on there and stuff, but we don’t put any of our personal details or anything.’ She shows me the computer and her and her friends’ web pages. On the screen is a picture of Kelly with her profile:

Name:	Kelly (wouldn’t you like to know)
Age:	Twelve
Lives:	Not telling ya.

Alongside this information are pictures of Kelly and her friends and of celebrities they admire. Whilst I’m kneeling by Kelly’s side to see the screen, Jane reacquires her seat on my lap. I give my cup to Laura and thank her for the tea. Jane runs into the kitchen after Laura, followed by Nan who warns, ‘There’s hot things in there.’ Laura runs back into the living room to ask me if she can show Nan her story about getting burnt which she included in her family book. [This is a story that involves Laura’s Nan caring for Laura aged five following a burn from a hot drink.] I can hear Laura discussing the story with her nan in the kitchen. Nan corrects Laura’s written account, which perhaps hasn’t been well remembered by Laura. When Laura returns, I ask her about whether she’d remembered the story correctly. She says, ‘I dunno, I thought it was right.’ I offer her the chance to change it if she would like to, but she declines, accepting her version of the memory.

(Extract from field notes on a research visit to Laura’s home)

Children’s contributions to family life, their embodied sibling interactions, their management of embodied and personal knowledge and the transmission and co-production of family memories are all key themes that appear in this extract and resonate with many of those that run throughout this book. Extracts such as the one above call for an approach that is able to bring together disparate themes from the social studies of childhood, family and personal relationships. In recent years, a new sociology of personal life has emerged which, with its focus on connectedness and embeddedness, biography, emotions, memory and bodies (see Smart, 2007), offers a framework for researching children’s relationships that serves this agenda. This book appropriates and aims to develop the sociology of personal life approach to examine and illuminate children’s personal relationships.

Using this approach and looking across data generated for two qualitative school-based projects which examine the perspectives and experiences of children aged 8–10 years old, the book sets out to identify the processes and practices through which children come to know others in their personal circles and through which they develop and maintain intimate connections across distance, in transitional or changed circumstances. In doing so, I uncover how children constitute significant personal relationships – both those that are emotionally close and more distant – and I consider what the role of shared biographical experiences is in making those relationships. I endeavour to reconstruct children’s biographies, piecing together their ongoing narratives to create biographical accounts which will come to life through this book. These accounts reflect the society and culture in which these particular children are growing up and living out their relational lives. Lastly, I reflect upon the implications of these situated experiences and offer avenues for re-considering academic, practice and policy approaches to children’s family and kin relationships and friendships, schooling and experiences at school.

Children’s personal lives

Examining personal life is a relatively new approach to studying relationships; it is more all-encompassing than family and kinship studies. It is offered as a means to address the greater fluidity in relationships, and encompass the range of relationships that may be recognised or claimed as family or like-family, both of which have led to the stretching and dilution of the concept of family (Jamieson et al., 2006; Smart, 2007). Personal life may include the study of the ‘whole constellation of personal relationships’ (Jamieson et al., 2006, 1.1) including ‘all sorts of families, all sorts of relationships and intimacies, diverse sexualities, friendships and acquaintanceships’ (Smart, 2007, p. 188). The benefit of studying personal life for the childhood researcher is its capacity to cut across children’s friendships, peer relationships and romantic relationships, their family and kin relationships, and those acquaintanceships that children share with neighbours, friends of the family, teachers or others they come into contact with in their daily lives. The approach taken here is not a conceptual shift away from considering family, but one that encompasses both children’s family relationships and other significant relationships children have – it is an approach that offers more tools for examining complex relationships, and which enables researchers to zoom in on family relationships and draw from the personal life ‘toolbox’ (Smart, 2007, p.30) to examine the way in which these relationships may function in their own right or in similar ways to other relationships people share. In previous work, I have used family ‘practices’ (Morgan, 1996) as the analytical focus in published research (Davies, 2011, 2012, 2013) examining how children make sense of and participate in everyday family practices and imaginings of family and kinship. I now want to consider children’s experiences in a wider relational context, with a more extensive set of tools. It is perhaps only in this wider frame that the true significance of family relationships can become evident.

Examining children’s personal lives involves engaging with conceptual approaches in the fields of childhood, family and personal relationships research, and identifying points of intersection between these fields, and conceptual tools from studies of personal life that will enrich understandings of children’s relationships. Childhood studies traditionally focused on illuminating children’s agency, hearing children’s ‘voices’ and emphasising the diversity of childhoods made possible by different social and cultural settings, and mediated by institutional arrangements. More recently, scholars have sought to develop understandings of childhood by overcoming a key weakness they identified, a socially (or biologically) reductionist perspective; they have examined the intersection between the social, cultural, biological, material and technological (Prout, 2005) in attempting to overcome the ‘bio-social dualism’ (Lee and Motzkau, 2011, p. 7). A ‘new wave’ of childhood studies scholars (Ryan, 2012) has harnessed concepts such as ‘hybridity’ to capture the essence of contemporary childhoods (Kraftl, 2013) and to examine how the intersection of the social, cultural, biological, material and technological produce hybrid experiences that extend or limit children’s capacity in the world.

Childhood studies has a wide remit, focusing on all aspect of children’s lives, including their friendships and peer relationships as well as family relationships. Although there are exceptions, much of the research conducted into children’s family relationships is undertaken by researchers who also research adults’ family relationships. In childhood studies, children’s friendships and family relationships are often examined separately from one another, but personal life opens up an analytical frame on children’s relationships which takes accounts of all relationships that are significant or that matter in some way; this could encompass all relationships that are significant, although not necessarily close. A sociology of personal life recognises the potential significance of relationships outside of the family and kin group, and does not foreground family as the most important of all personal relationships nor deny the importance of family relationships (Jamieson et al., 2006; Smart, 2007).

Personal life also encourages a vertical and horizontal analysis which draws into focus relationships that exist across the generations in children’s (and their families’) pasts as well as relationships that are significant to children but which are unconnected to their family relationships (for example, relationships with teachers). Therefore, personal life elaborates how people feel (or simply are) connected to or disconnected from others (Mason, 2008). This allows the examination of the interplay between these various relationships in terms of recognising the qualities and practices that children identify as characterising their personal relationships or distinguishing one set of relationships from another.

Personal life, Smart claims, overcomes the ideological trappings of ‘the family’, which she suggests conjures up images of ‘idealized white, nuclear heterosexual families of Western cultures’ and implies ‘degrees of biological relatedness combined with degrees of co-residence’ (Smart, 2007, p.6). Family may well be a rather culturally specific formulation of how people are connected to one another, regardless of whether we take a local or global perspective. But others have argued that the language of personal life is not universally appropriate, because conceptions of the individual self do not exist globally. In some societies, people are conceived of as members of communities, where the personal is inseparable from the collectivity, and the ‘question of whether the individual is subsumed within the collectivity does not make sense’ (Ribbens McCarthy, 2012, p.78). My understanding of Smart’s conceptualisation of personal life is that it is not a question of whether or not the self is part of a collectivity; the self is presumed to be embedded in the social, the collective (to borrow Ribbens McCarthy’s terms), and it is the ways in which this individual is connected to others that are interrogated in analyses that take personal life as a framework. Seeing the self as embedded in personal relationships – which are ‘key sites for the transmission of social values, social integration or exclusion and … the reproduction of equality and inequality’ (Jamieson and Milne, 2012, p. 265) – means that we can then consider the issue of social and financial ‘resources’ and ‘inequalities’ that are important within many analyses of relationality and which Ribbens McCarthy has feared would be lost in a focus on personal life (2012, pp. 79–81). Far from personal life being a limiting framework for examining and taking account of children’s experiences, it is argued that a focus on children and young people’s personal relationships can tell us much about global social change. Jamieson and Milne suggest that mapping the relational processes in any ‘economic, political and cultural system’ is one means of ‘evidencing and refining claims about global changes’ (2012, pp. 267, 273).

This notion of the individual person embedded in relationships tends to characterise ‘Euro-North American social science’, including symbolic interactionist and phenomenological approaches (Jamieson, 2011, 1.4), and resonates with approaches within the social studies of childhood that emphasise children’s interdependence (James and Prout, 1996; Mayall, 2000; Christensen, 2004a). Scholars working within this tradition have focused upon children’s scope for self-determination in a social world which privileges adult power over children in law, policy, and professional and family practice. For example, younger children rely upon adults to facilitate their personal relationships and contact with close others living outside the household (Jamieson et al., 2006; Davies, 2013). A focus on embeddedness in personal life – the way in which individuals are located in sets of interdependent relationships – suggests that we do not operate as individuals, separate from others. Examining the roots of this embeddedness in children’s (or adults’) relationships reveals their opportunities for and limitations to determining their own personal lives. In examining these roots, we can see that self-determination is mediated by children’s relational pasts as well as their presents, and by the imagined relationships that are culturally available to them and to which they aspire. This presumes that relational stories, memories and material ‘things’ are all constitutive of people’s pasts, and fundamentally connected to their present and ongoing biographies.

Locating children analytically within wider personal communities is important for making sense of how they form relational practices and ways of being (James, 2013). Seeing children as embedded not just in family relationships but also in wider community relations, and taking account of those influences on children’s lives (Connolly, 2006), can powerfully challenge individualising narratives that, for example, attribute blame to families for children’s behaviour or interactions with others, and can illuminate the role of institutions and particular cultures in producing these kinds of responses in children. It is also the case that schools – and possibly other institutionalised contexts – as well those who work with children in those spaces can secure important resources for them in particular times of need (Jamieson and Highet, 2013).

There are a number of areas of social life that have fallen ‘below the sociological radar’ – including sexuality, bodies, emotions and intimacy, all of which Smart suggests personal life should focus upon (2007, p. 29) and to which this book will contribute understandings. In establishing a separate field of personal life, Smart suggests that these areas of social life might be brought within mainstream sociological studies of relationships. In childhood sociology, sexuality and childhood have been something of a taboo, but the study of sexuality amongst primary-aged children as well as young people is now becoming more established, and this work has incorporated analyses of the gendered and sexualised body (see Epstein and Johnson, 1998; Renold, 2005). Whilst this book does not focus upon sexuality, it takes a great interest in children’s embodied, sensed and interphysical experiences of their relationships. In 2000, Alan Prout published an edited collection, The Body, Childhood and Society, suggesting that childhood studies had, in adopting a social constructionist perspective, focused too heavily on discourse and overlooked the material body. Throughout the book, there are examples revealing the various ways in which the body mattered in children’s relations with others. Since then, the body has received greater attention within childhood studies, but it remains marginalised. Explorations of sensory experience have the potential to reach beyond and further unravel bodily encounters and ways of knowing about how people experience their relationships through their senses – which senses are foregrounded and associated with love, fear or hate, for example. Investigating the sensory allows researchers to ‘come closer’ to the lived experiences of their participants (Pink, 2010, p. 23). In studies of children’s relationships, the senses are near ignored. The exceptions show the extent to which sensory references appear in, and are meaningful within, children’s accounts of family, relationships (Mason and Tipper, 2008a, 2008b; Davies, 2012) and troubling family problems (Wilson et al., 2012). I suggest that the senses are an important element of this focus on the body and should be written into a sociology of children’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Exploring Key Concepts and Understandings
• 3 Researching Children’s Personal Relationships
• 4 Siblings: Bodies, Senses and Emotions
• 5 Navigating Change: Making and Maintaining Connections
• 6 Children Navigating Touch in ‘New’ Family Forms
• 7 Problem-Solving Processes in Friendships and Peer Relationships
• 8 Conclusion
• References
• Index