The Ecology of Family Relationships

Abstract

In this chapter we explore young people’s perspectives of ‘family relationships’, the influences and role of their family in relation to their offending and the impacts on them and their families of official interventions. Young people’s accounts highlight important routines, rules and events that shape their relationships at home and outside their families. As we shall see for most of our cohort, links between family influences and offending are highly tenuous. The strong ‘anchors’ that family life provides, even for those young people who are in conflict, is often protective though not always strong enough to influence the circumstances in which young people become ‘young offenders’. In contrast to deficit representations of working-class family habitus, the young people’s perspectives and some parents’ show how families actively negotiate difficult circumstances and official intervention. The social structurings of gender, and class that are manifest in ‘habitus’ inform diverse family dynamics shaping youth, parenting and family relations. In this context, we will see that constructs of ‘pro-or anti-social bonding’, ‘parental supervision’ or ‘parental involvement’ are weak proxies for the diversity of human interactions, meanings, emotions, practical exchanges, changing roles, adversities and achievements that constitute everyday family relationships and the management of intervention.