Understanding Children’s Kinship

1. Understanding Children’s Kinship Jennifer Mason The Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life www.manchester.ac.uk/morgancentre

2. Orientations • ‘New’ sociology of childhood – children’s agency, perspectives and experiences • Sociological/anthropological approaches to kinship and relatedness – negotiated, situated and lived out in relational practices • Focus on who matters (in a kinship like way). Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

3. Who matters in children’s kinship? • Active engagement with eg grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, step and half kin. Routinely/enthusiastically mapped into inner circles of maps. Also friends, family friends, godparents, pets/animals (31 of 49 mentioned like-family relationships. 44 of 49 mentioned animals). Some teachers/unrelated adults in outer circles. • Circles maps – differentiated more than genealogical • Emotional closeness ≠ genealogical closeness • Personal maps, not the family or the kinship network. The activity of ‘reckoning’ kinship. Decisions and judgements based on experience. Not just reflecting parents’ view. Awareness of contested understandings and moral judgements. • Ordinary complexity Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

4. Children’s experience of contact and communication with kin – contact and closeness • Contact not always equivalent to emotional closeness • Frequency – an easy framework • Effort • Longevity Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

5. Effort and longevity: William’s Uncle Gary William: He’s [Special Uncle Gary is] like more important to me because he was the first person after my mum and dad to see me when I was born. And like we do stuff like we go to Spain and it’s really special that we see him. Even though it’s special that we see Aunty Mel and uncle Graham and Paige and Callum, it’s not as special as it is seeing [Special] Uncle Gary because we don’t have to pay any money to go and see them!

6. Contact and communication – what it’s like • Routine, informal face to face contact characteristic of locally based kinship. More orchestrated and often involving overnight stays characteristic of geographically distant kinship. • 12 of the 16 for whom kinship was a predominantly local experience were working class. 15 of the 17 for whom a predominantly distant experience were middle class. Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

7. Contact and communication – what it’s like • Playing ,eating, drinking, talking, watching TV, having outings, being in each other’s houses. • Adult females and cooking, shopping, listening, hugginess. • Adult males and sport, using computers, giving information. • Ceremonies, consolidation, celebration, different hubs. Sometimes fun, especially with cousins. Also boredom, irritation, embarrassment – depending who was involved, whether they felt easy with them, quality of relationship between participants, what you have to do, eat, whether presents. Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

8. Contact and communication – what it’s like • Often reported to be on adult terms. Language and articulacy. Bored and marginalised in adult conversation. Age related etiquette and rules. Significance of cousins for some. • Awkward phone conversations (Danielle) • Importance of msn and texting with adults and children, distant and local. Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

9. Contact and communication – what it’s like Danielle’s awkward phone conversations Danielle: Sometimes like she [grandmother] phones and I tell her about school things, Mum always tells me to talk to her. Becky: And do you like to talk? Danielle: Well I like to talk with her, but sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed if I talk to her and don’t know what to say. And once I had a conversation with my grandpa’s brother, like my great uncle or something…And we went for about a minute and none of us said anything ‘cause we didn’t know what to say! (laughs) Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

10. Contact and communication – children’s tactile/ sensory experience and knowledge • Appearances, bodies, smells, voices • Spaces and places • Things and material objects • Food • Interests, hobbies, preferences • Behaviour towards children • animals. Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

11. Contact and communication – children’s tactile/ sensory experience and knowledge Important because. • This tells us something of what kinship is and means for children (and adults too). Shouldn’t be dismissed as trivial or beside the point • Children in the study differentiated between people (and animals) who mattered and contacts they enjoyed or otherwise on the basis on sensory and tactile criteria, and used this means to express their reasoning Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

12. What children know about people Jasmine’s Grandfather Jasmine: when we go over, he’s like he’s not bothered in what we do but he will just jump straight to “do you want to see my art?” programme or something… and he kept me and Conrad in there, we slept over and he kept me and Conrad upstairs for like an hour showing us all the different paintings he’s done. It was like (bored groan) “mmmm”. It was awful. Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

13. What children know about people Matthew’s Aunties, Mandy and Sharon: Matthew: (Aunty Mandy) She’s nicer than Aunty Sharon...Because, like, aunty Sharon she’s got like a deeper voice...She (Aunty Mandy) doesn’t shout hardly at all, she bought me a music stand at Christmas... Becky: So and what is it about Sharon that makes her not such-? Matthew: She shouts at me when, because sometimes when I’m playing with the train track with Ethan I want to have something and then Ethan has a moody and then she shouts at me sometimes. Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

14. What children know about people Claire’s grandfather Claire: He (grandfather) like lives on his own now. Cause his wife, cause his wife died, yeah. He lives on his own and his house is a tip and it’s not really, he’s a bit... (pulls disgusted face) I don’t really see him often, I don’t want to go there. Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

15. What children know about people Naomi’s (deceased) granddad Nigel Naomi: My Grandma Rhoda told me that he never, ever, ever shouted. When my Dad was, like, taking books off the shelf cause he was only little, he said (using a very gentle voice) ‘Don’t do that David’. He was really nice, my Grandpa Nigel. Cause that’s what my Grandma Rhoda told me’. Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

16. What children know about people • Moral character, reliability, niceness, grumpiness, shouting, self-centredness, behaviour towards children, behaviour towards others • Highly sensory forms of relationship knowledge – eg appearance, mannerisms, habits, bodies, voices, things, places • Children explicitly interested in this kind of knowledge and experience • Children use this as a form of expression. This is more their language of kinship (than formal genealogies or abstract discussions of quality of relationships for example) • Complex meanings wrapped up in this. Hints of compulsion. Hints of subversion Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

17. Negotiating Children’s Contact with Kin • Children present themselves at a remove or on the periphery of decisions about and management of contact • Orchestration that just happens, or awareness of complexities of negotiations • Kinkeeping of others (esp. aunts and grandmothers), and significance of different hubs of family activity and contact Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

18. Negotiating Children’s Contact with Kin Independent contact enhanced by: • Proximity • Holidaying/overnighting with relatives • Access to electronic communication (pictures of phones) • Philosophies of proximate (situational) and democratic (cultivated) independence Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

21. Power and the Social Relations of OrchestrationCase Study: Jasmine, mother Penny and aunt Emma Jasmine: I wouldn’t be so bothered that I would ring her up and ask her, but I wouldn’t be awful about it that if she asked me I’d just say no. If it turns up. Like one of them things, say if someone turns up and asks you to be in a film, you’d say “yes” but you wouldn’t like expect it you know? Becky: You wouldn’t go out looking for it? Jasmine: Yes.

22. Case Study: Jasmine, mother Penny and aunt Emma Penny: We sent Christmas cards and birthday cards but that’s it, and then last Christmas Emma sent a Christmas card through and she put a little note in which was really nice and it was addressed to all of us and then it said ‘Dear Conrad and Jasmine, would love to see you, miss you loads, get your mum to ring me and drop you round or we’ll come and pick you up’. The kids were made up ‘Yeah auntie Emma, auntie Emma, let’s go can we see auntie Emma?’ so I said course you can, there’s her number, ring and make an arrangement and I’ll gladly take you and pick you up, I have no problem with that. They’re really fine with the fact that I don’t like my sister but it doesn’t mean to say they don’t have to dislike her, but don’t expect me to go along with you, and they’re great with that, they have no problem with that. I hope they have no problem or they’ll grow up mentally disturbed! (laughs)....so the kids made an arrangement with Emma over the Christmas holidays and they were so pleased, they were so, so happy to go and they were buzzing......

23. Case Study: Jasmine, mother Penny and aunt Emma and then she cancelled on the morning of them going.... we’d gone out to the shops or something and we came back and we were going at 2 o’clock and they were so looking forward to it and Conrad checked the answerphone message and Emma had rung and she’d said ‘Hi kids’ and he goes (excited) ‘Oh it’s Emma mum!’ (whispering) I tried to be happy for them, but she’s so irritating! (laughter). Anyway, then the message said ‘Sorry kids we have to cancel today, I’m working. I’ll ring you and we’ll rearrange it’, and they were gutted and I didn’t say anything to them, I said to Al (husband), ‘she works in a bank’; surely she would have known she was working when she made the arrangement 2 weeks ago?’ .....and it was really, really unfair because the kids were gutted and asking me for answers and I found it really difficult to hold my tongue. I didn’t want to say ‘oh well that’s your Auntie Emma she’s just a cow and that’s it’, I just kept saying to them ‘I don’t know why she’s cancelled, she must have made a mistake’ I’m trying to protect them aren’t I because they’re really, really hurt but I can’t answer for her and I said ‘She said she’ll ring’ but she never did. She never rang and the kids went for a few days and then I said ‘Well if you want ring her’ and they were of the opinion that she kind of said she’ll ring us so if we ring her we might be bugging her and annoy her and so they never did.

24. Case Study: Jasmine, mother Penny and aunt Emma in the summer holidays Conrad mentioned it, he said ‘Mum, Auntie Emma never rang us’ and I said ‘Well no she didn’t. Would you like me to ring and make an arrangement?’ and they both kind of looked at me and they both sort of said independently of each other but said in agreement with each other said ‘She’s obviously not bothered about us’.

25. Conclusion: the social relations of (children’s kinship) • Kinship involves multiple sets of relationships between agentic people (adults and children) • Kinship involves imagined, remembered and anticipated ways of relating as well as practices and behaviours • A bigger kinship story or narrative over time – parents (mothers) and children aware of this (and others) • Parents – responsibilities to kinship, to personal heritage, as well as to children. Can be ambivalent and difficult. Responsibility without control. • Children – also a sense of responsibility to kinship. Sometimes in very enthusiastic and affirmative ways. Sometimes going along with things or putting up with relatives they don’t like. • Children – their particular sensory/tactile/embodied forms of knowledge and experience. Can be penetrating, candid and critical. These constitute the lived reality of kinship too and have implications for everyone, and are part of the future narrative as well as the past and present. Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

26. Some methodological issues • Kinship is relational, temporal, and not in the possession of individuals. But it is personal, not an objective structure. • Challenge to the idea of individuals as unit of analysis (or household for that matter). • Challenge to interview/survey methods that rely on individual reports and variables about individuals. • Importance of other accounts (but how far to go with this? And how do we aggregate different accounts?) • Importance of interactional data (versus ideas about asking children to speak privately). Relates to what/where kinship is, how it is done. • Importance of sensory elements. Role of pictures, visuals and the interactions around them. Care with how we ‘read’ them. Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life

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