Last week I was invited to be a discussant at Prof. Janet Boddy’s book launch Thinking Through Family: Narratives of Care Experienced Lives.[1]
Understanding what ‘family’ means – and how best to support families – depends on challenging politicised assumptions that frame ‘ordinary’ families in comparison to an imagined problematic ‘other’. Learning from the perspectives of people who were in care in childhood, this innovative book helps redefine the concept of family. Linking two longitudinal studies involving young adults in England, it reveals important new insights into the diverse and dynamic complexity of family lives, identities and practices in time – through childhood and beyond. Paving the way for future policy and practice, this book makes an important contribution to the theorisation of family in the 21st century.
I have always admired Prof. Boddy’s work because of the huge amount of respect she and her colleagues have for the Care Experienced participants in their projects and being a researcher with experience of care myself, that is hugely important.
Reading Thinking Through Family, made me look through my thesis to see what I have said about family and it was quite an interesting process. Marianne, my protagonist has to find ways to manage without family – enduring through reading and art and eventually creating a found family in the ‘house of happy endings’.
Boddy is looking through the family lens, not the sometimes stigmatising, old traditional one, her aim is thinking through meanings of family and care experienced lives, respect and sensitivity a part of the narrative. They use a new lens which which moves away from the Single Story about family; quite simply the reader is told: ‘This is a book about family.’
The first chapter in Thinking Through Family begins with a quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk.[2] Back at the beginning of my PhD journey I too watched ‘The Danger of a Single Story’.[3] Adichie speaks of how she wrote stories as a child of characters who were ‘white and blue-eyed’ and who ‘drank a lot of ginger beer’ because she was only exposed to ‘foreign’ characters. This made me laugh because I recognised The Famous Five, who were also part of my childhood reading. A watershed moment, I recognised the ‘single story’ often told about children in care, one of stereotyping, stigma and criminalisation and wrote a blog: ‘…as in the case of the young girls in Rotherham who were victims of grooming gangs who were it was said, ‘making lifestyle choices’ because they were ‘bad girls from troublesome backgrounds’…Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become’.[4] And this is where the quote at the beginning of Thinking Through Family began. Boddy though is looking at how society often ‘others’ those not in ‘traditional’ families. Her book rejects that old view with ‘more nuanced narrative understandings of what ‘family’ means for care experienced people’ and moving beyond the ‘single story’ and this is done by listening to what participants from two studies have to say and how they make sense of ‘difficult and disrupted experiences…how that sense-making may shift over time… and apparent inconsistencies in participants accounts reflect lived experiences that cannot be told through narratives of neat coherence.’ The book also discusses ‘young people’s experiences within their families of origin to engage with the significance of ‘ordinary’ memories within extraordinary childhoods, encompassing narratives of regular, ritual and habitual family practises and the importance of these within participants accounts.’[5]
This ordinariness was a starting point for my PhD novel, I wanted to write about an ordinary care leaver. It’s 1974: the narrative follows sixteen-year-old Marianne who is leaving a children’s home in Muswell Hill where she has spent the last eight years. The creative practice also includes a collection of postcards which enable Marianne to write to an imaginary mother. Marianne’s boyfriends correspond with the music genres of the time (a chance for me to re-live the 1970s soul music and disco era) – chapter headings taken from popular songs. Family figures are made up of cultural icons from the era.
Music features in Thinking Through Family too, one example of this involved asking participants in the first study ‘Against all odds?’ to bring a piece of music of significance with positive associations. Music of course is very evocative and can transport the listener back in time and for this research team it was a way to disrupt conventional modes of interviewing and power relationships.
I only have to think of Don’t Sleep in the Subway Darling[6] and I am back in front of the fire in the kitchen area of an aunt’s house in Clacton on Sea where I am being told not to mix the washing – keep the whites and coloureds separate. I wheel the washing in a pram to the launderette where I work out that putting two lots of washing into a machine will save money and all I can think about is the aunt will be so pleased. I pull the finished washing out of the machine, and it is orange! I am doing the mundane task of washing even though I am very young. I am involved in the family, I am invested, I am doing family. Or at least I think I am.
Thinking Through Family looks at the significance of the ordinary, looks at the young people’s experiences within their family of origin and ordinary memories ‘within extraordinary childhoods’ inviting them to talk about what is important to them – to understand themselves, a powerful acquisition, and reflecting habitual practices – ritual practices and special occasions.
Like Ella who agonised over the plans for her wedding and eventually wrote a letter to some family members telling them they weren’t invited. This was a brave decision. And sometimes this is what happens in families. We see Ella’s experience like that of other brides who have had to negotiate and think hard of how to overcome possible future problems. Ella finds a way with friends who will keep a lookout, they are holding her, on a very special celebration day.
Stories are defined by power, and it is power that makes the definitive story of a person:
- How they are told
- Who tells them
- When they are told
- How many stories are told
Here it is the Care Experienced people telling their stories, they are constructing life stories that feature themes of personal agency and exploration. Narrative identity theorists claim that those who find redemptive meanings in suffering and adversity, and who construct life stories that feature themes of personal agency and exploration, tend to enjoy higher levels of mental health, well-being, and maturity.[7] And this is what I’ve always liked about Boddy’s work that within ‘the research’ those who take part are also getting something back. Like the story of the young man who ironed his clothes every day, a story Boddy shared some years ago. He cared about his appearance, it was a good thing, he cared about himself. A family of one.
Megan does the ironing, and in this instance is caring for others. She shares her daily routine from when she wakes up which includes getting children ready for school, having dinner, doing their reading before getting them ready for bed. Once they are settled in bed Megan does the ironing for the following day and then does her studying.[8] It is the same strict routine every day. This reflection highlights the ordinariness of bringing up a family.
The book continually challenges the Single Story of Care Experience, and how ‘ordinary events and practices may be distinctively shaped by people and experiences associated with having been in care.’ By removing the ‘other’ children in care regardless of where that is i.e. foster care, adoption, kinship, or residential, are simply ‘doing family’ and often with more than one. It’s beautifully done and written, and I wish it had been available before I submitted my thesis!
You can hear Prof. Boddy speak about the book here.
Janet Boddy is Professor of Child, Youth and Family Studies at the University of Sussex and Adjunct Professor in the Childhood, Family and Welfare Division of NOVA at Oslo Metropolitan University. In 2020 she was made a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Fidelma Hanrahan is Senior Research Officer at Research in Practice.
Bella Wheeler is Research Associate in the Methodologies Division in the Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care at King’s College London.
[1] Boddy, Janet, and Bella Wheeler Fidelma Hanrahan, ‘Thinking Through Family’, Bristol University Press (Bristol University Press) <https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/thinking-through-family> [accessed 8 December 2023]
[2] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. ‘Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story | TED Talk’. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/c. TED Talk 2019 [accessed 20 March 2015.]
[3] 2, Adichie.
[4] Rosie Canning. ‘The Danger of the Single Story’. Orphans & Care Experience in Literature (blog), 27 March 2015. https://careleaversinfiction.wordpress.com/2015/03/27/how-can-we-change-a-culture-of-denial-for-our-most-vulnerable-children/. [Accessed 2 November 2022]
[5] 1, Boddy, p.45
[6] Tony Hatch, Jackie Trent, Don’t Sleep in the Subway (Cambridge: Pye, 1967) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Sleep_in_the_Subway> [accessed 6 December 2023].
[7] McAdams, Dan P., Ruthellen Josselson, and Amia Lieblich, Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narrative, [The Narrative Study of Lives, v. 4], 1st ed, 1 online resource (x, 284 pages) : illustrations vols (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2006) <https://search.ebscohost.com/direct.asp?db=pzh&jid=%22200601746%22&scope=site> [accessed 13 October 2023]
[8] 1, Boddy, p.136
Orphans & Care Experience in Literature 