As the everyday family lives of children and young people come to be increasingly defined as matters of public policy and concern, it is important to raise the question of how we can understand the contested terrain between "normal" family troubles and troubled and troubling families. In this important, timely and thought-provoking publication, a wide range of contributors explore how "troubles" feature in "normal" families, and how the "normal" features in "troubled" families. Drawing on research on a wide range of substantive topics - including infant care, sibling conflict, divorce, disability, illness, migration and asylum-seeking, substance misuse, violence, kinship care, and forced marriage - the contributors aim to promote dialogue between researchers addressing mainstream family change and diversity in everyday lives, and those specialising in specific problems which prompt professional interventions. In tackling these contentious and difficult issues across a variety of topics, the book addresses a wide audience, including policy makers, service users and practitioners, as well as family studies scholars more generally who are interested in issues of family change.
Preface
Troubling normalities and normal family troubles: diversities, experiences and tensions ~ Jane Ribbens McCarthy, Carol-Ann Hooper and Val Gillies
Part 1: Approaching Family Troubles? Contexts and Methodologies
Cultural context, families and troubles ~ Jill Korbin
Representing family troubles through the 20th century ~ Janet Fink
The role of science in understanding family troubles ~ Michael Rutter
Family troubles, methods trouble: qualitative research and the methodological divide ~ Ara Francis
Part 2: Whose Trouble? Contested Definitions and Practices
Disabled parents and normative family life: the obscuring of lived experiences of parents and children within policy and research accounts ~ Harriet Clarke and Lindsay O'Dell
Normal problems or problem children? Parents and the micro-politics of deviance and disability ~ Ara Francis
Troubled talk and talk about troubles: moral cultures of infant feeding in professional, policy and parenting discourses ~ Helen Lomax
Children's non-conforming behaviour: personal trouble or public issue? ~ Geraldine Brady
Revealing the lived reality of kinship care through children and young people's narratives: "It's not all nice, it's not all easy-going, it's a difficult journey to go on" ~ Karin Cooper
Part 3: The Normal, the Troubling and the Harmful?
Troubling loss? Children's experiences of major disruptions in family life ~ Lynn Jamieson and Gill Highet
The permeating presence of past domestic and familial violence: "So like I'd never let anyone hit me but I've hit them, and I shouldn't have done" ~ Dawn Mannay
Thinking about sociological work on personal and family life in the light of research on young people's experience of parental substance misuse ~ Sarah Wilson
The trouble with siblings: some psychosocial thoughts about sisters, aggression and femininity ~ Helen Lucey
Children and family transitions: contact and togetherness ~ Hayley Davies
Part 4: Troubles and transitions across space and culture
'Troubling' or 'ordinary'? Children's views on migration and intergenerational ethnic identities ~ Umut Erel
Colombian families dealing with parents' international migration ~ Maria Claudia Duque-Páramo
Families left behind: unaccompanied young people seeking asylum in the UK ~ Elaine Chase and June Statham
Young people's caring relations and transitions within families affected by HIV ~ Ruth Evans
Estimating the prevalence of forced marriage in England ~ Peter Keogh, Anne Kazimirski, Susan Purdon and Ruth Maisey
Part 5: Working with Families
European perspectives on parenting and family support ~ Janet Boddy
What supports resilient coping among family members? A systemic practitioner's perspective ~ Arlene Vetere
Troubled and troublesome teens: mothers' and professionals' understandings of parenting teenagers and teenage troubles ~ Harriet Churchill and Karen Clarke
Contested family practices and moral reasoning: updating concepts for working with family-related social problems ~ Hannele Forsberg
Working with fathers: risk or resource? ~ Brid Featherstone
What is at stake in family troubles? Existential issues and value frameworks ~ Jane Ribbens McCarthy
