Children, Young People and Families > Child Welfare

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The heterogeneity of grandparent caregivers in rural China increases the challenges in exploring and assisting this group. To address this, the study used data from 38 in-depth interviews conducted in three diverse Chinese villages, identifying four ideal types of grandparents: leading, sacrificial, reciprocal and reluctant. These types are based on grandparents’ ideologies and family structures, reflecting different stages of societal change. The findings indicate that the diversity of grandparents and their varied caregiving experiences in rural China reflect the transformation trends of rural families and individuals. Additionally, this study introduced a new analytical tool for future research on rural Chinese grandparents.

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This article explores the ways residents of Finnish small-scale communes navigate boundaries between personal separateness and the group’s togetherness within a domestic space. Studies on communal living have shed light on the ambivalence in communal relations, where people choose to live together but simultaneously remain independent from one another. However, the ways space affects their navigations of this ambivalence have not yet been analysed in detail. Based on 31 semi-structured interviews with residents of Finnish small-scale communes, floor plans drawn by interviewees of their homes and two ethnographic fieldwork periods, I argue that navigations of the residents’ separateness and unity are deeply intertwined with spatial processes and that the sensory and embodied spatial connections complicate the possibilities of distinguishing the individual from the group. Communal dwellers navigated their mutual boundaries through their daily use of the spaces, which centred embodied acts, spatial orientations and sensory experiences.

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This study explores middle-SES Turkish women’s perceptions of being a good mother within a context-specific version of intensive motherhood and the intercessions of expert advice with their motherly subjectivities through a phenomenological approach. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with three groups of 12 mothers each with children aged 0–6, 7–12 and 13–18, a total of 36 women living in Istanbul. According to findings, middle-SES Turkish mothers, in line with expert advice, shift their prioritisation of the child’s secure attachment to supporting the child’s future chances through education as they grow older. Mothers’ agency out of these concerns is a culturally positioned resource that enables social mobility. However, with the experience of mothering, these concerns are negotiated in everyday life and mothering practices are reflexively (re)constructed in a logic in which the subjective wellbeing of the mother and the child are sought to be brought together. This study argues that these negotiations are tied to increasing experience in mothering and the availability of conflicting expert advice.

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Secrets are important for understanding interpersonal and family relationships. They give insights into the dynamics, processes, interactions and bonds that are developed, interrupted or revisited throughout life. We address family secrets as observatories of interpersonal relationships in two ways. One relates to how the disclosed secrets reveal social norms and social changes in family relationships. The second relates to telling an individual or family secret during a research interaction and what ethical issues and practices this disclosure implied. We address these issues through the secrets that emerged from 49 interviews carried out within a family histories research project with 15 Portuguese families. We identified a variety of family secrets related in particular to family and reproduction, money and addiction. The emergence of secrets in the interviewees’ narratives reveals the fundamental role of secrets in attributing meanings to biographies and family histories.

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Marital paradigm theory (MPT) asserts that societal and cultural norms and values contribute to marital beliefs. The current research examines a tenet of MPT that marital salience – a belief about the importance of getting married – and marital centrality – a belief about the importance or weight assigned to the spousal role once married – are related but distinct concepts such that individuals can diverge in their endorsement of each (for example, highly endorse one but not the other). Data from an online, anonymous survey of 4,060 emerging adults were used to group participants into a typology of low salience-low centrality, high salience-high centrality, low salience-high centrality, and high salience-low centrality. Groups were compared across background characteristics and marital meaning beliefs. Several patterns of differences among predictors were identified and discussed in the context of how the high salience-low centrality group compared with the other groups. Overall findings were consistent with MPT.

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This study examines the childhood care experiences of women between 20 and 30 years of age from low-income households in Santiago, Chile, by employing semi-structured interviews and qualitative analysis. At present, women understand their caregiving roles as older sisters, one which burdened them with agency practices, shaping critical reflections regarding the social organisation of care and influencing their present identity. They also articulate a desire for emotional resilience, a coping mechanism previously observed in low-income neighbourhoods in Chile. While downplaying their caregiving past, they subtly reveal the weight and regret associated with their responsibilities, influencing their reluctance to become mothers in the present. This study underscores the intricate interplay of past care experiences with present decisions, revealing the impacts of empowering discourses on women’s ideals and achievements, and the inherent fragility they carry.

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The article is based on original, contemporaneous data in the form of personal diaries from the perspective of a middle-class secondary schoolgirl living in North London in the 1920s. It first considers the use of personal diaries in social science. The article’s particular contribution is to demonstrate the value of diaries to understanding everyday social practices in relation to family life, school and friends and to make sense of them through the intersecting lenses of gender, social class, time and place. The article’s overall argument is that a focus on a particular case enables the researcher to set everyday social practices within a particular social context.

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Research on social mobility continues to foreground the role of familial relationships. Studies of students who are first-in-family to attend university have often highlighted the intensity of familial obligations. Drawing on longitudinal research with upwardly mobile young men from working-class (and working-poor) backgrounds, this article presents three case studies focused on their relationship with their brothers who were on different, less upwardly mobile pathways. We understand gender to be discursively constructed and relationally negotiated through various interactions and the roles individuals come to embody. Research into caring masculinities foregrounds the various ways men are no longer disconnected from traditional feminine practices, particularly those concentrated on caring for others. We draw on the words of three upwardly working-class young men regarding how they perceived their relationship with their younger brothers, focusing specifically on the subjectivities they present as protector, supporter and familial caregiver.

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Due to changes in family planning policy, families with multiple children are re-emerging in China. This article looked at parental stress and parenting practices in Chinese families with one child, two children and three children, and explored to what extent, controlling for socioeconomic factors, the number of children and parenting practices influenced parental stress. Using a sample from southern China, we measured parental stress and parenting practices among parents who have at least one child in primary school. Results showed that having multiple children increased parental pressure, and this was partially caused by a change in parenting practices: compared with their counterparts with only one child, parents with multiple children tended to use less positive encouragement but more coercive parenting. Findings suggested that in the context of low fertility, ‘parenting’ is more important than ‘fertility’. Effective parenting practices help reduce pressure, which in turn reduce a family’s fear of childbearing.

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This article discusses phase two of the ARCH project (Archiving Residential Children’s Homes), and in particular, the development of a co-designed ‘digital archive’ that stores everyday, shared events and experiences for care experienced young people who live in residential children’s homes. We present research with young people living in residential care, care workers and care experienced adults about the types of everyday information or records they would like to be able to store, share and access in the future. There was a desire for the digital archive to have a different feel and purpose to content recorded in individual case files, with easy access to the archive deemed important. There were mixed views about the representation of events and experiences and whether these should contain mainly ‘light-hearted’ events and experiences. Our research gives an insight into memory-keeping practices within a residential children’s home and invites questions about whose responsibility it is for gathering, filtering and treasuring childhood experiences.

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