Children's perspectives of the family: A phenomenological inquiry

Abstract

Families and everyday life are inextricably linked. Family occurrences, im? ages, and stories are the grist of the conversations of daily life. These conver? sations teach people their roles within families. Discourse provides information about the practice of family living and help to shape and transform families. Whether the transformation comes through learning gender roles or life ex? pectations, the conversations generate and perpetuate the practice. The purpose of this study is to examine the integration of children's lived experience into the family discourse; the specific focus will be on the ways in which they enter and are transformed by the practice of everyday life. An understanding of children's situatedness in families will depend on the abil? ity to disentangle the intertwining threads traversing the multiple and contra? dictory everyday practices. An analysis of children's discursive content, its forms and its presence, will help to explicate the production and situatedness of their everyday life. Children's perspectives provide a unique and privileged place from which to observe and understand family practice and relationships. Children's con? structions of "family" are not presently known. The ideology of "common sense" (Belsey, 1989) suggests that what is already known, assumed, and taken for granted about families is true. For instance, a common assumption is that the family of origin will influence understanding of, family roles in, and organization in later family households (Fields, 1986). Common sense is produced in a specific society by the way it talks about and experiences the family.