Home Talk

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores what home means for children by considering the significance for children of the old adage—the home is where the heart is. This suggests that bricks and mortar, space and place, are of less relevance to ideas of home than the affective relationships of connectedness through which ideas and feelings of “home” are constituted. In this view, the home, as opposed to the house, is an emotionally loaded construct that unfolds through the everyday relationships taking place within the house's walls. This article develops these themes by exploring what home looks like from the perspectives of two ten-year-old girls, examining not only the circumstances in which these two children find themselves, but those which they themselves have helped create. The discussion is framed by the paradigm shift towards seeing children as social actors embraced by contemporary childhood studies in the 1990s.