Bara i Bon : En intervjustudie med 11-åringar om familj, fostran och dagligt liv

Sammanfattning: The thesis aims to describe, analyse and interpret the conditions of the upbringing process and the socialization process in a group of eleven-year-olds while the process is still ongoing, and to do this with the help of the eleven-year-olds? narrations about their families and about how the children themselves view their families and their upbringing. The research approach is inspired by phenomenology and hermeneutics. The research problem in the present study can be described as follows: How do children narrate their experiences of family life and upbringing, and what do they narrate? A thematic half-structured interview has been used in the study. The questions asked have three themes: The children's family life, their daily life and how they viewed their future families. The children participating in the study were all born in 1988. They were eleven years of age when they were interviewed during the late autumn and winter of 1999. A total of 118 children: 53 girls and 65 boys participated in the study. They came from six school forms in three schools in the municipality. The children of this study narrated about their families with loyalty, coherence and meaning. They also see themselves living in future families of their own, as adults. The results of the study make visible: the chimeric democracy of family life, the diversity, flexibility and confusion of the family life, more parenting per child and more vicarious parenting per child. In conclusion it is argued that the notion of the nuclear family has being a narrow and short-sighted family notion. In a longer time perspective, we have to try out a broader family notion where circles of families, network families and linked family systems can be fruitful notions. These family notions include the generative aspect ? in which parents always will be parents even though they become grandparents and great grandparents ? as well as the fact that families are reformed as the child comes into existence and during its childhood. This was reality for more than one third of the children in the study. As people live longer and are increasingly socially mobile, we can no longer reliably use a family notion that does not take into account the fact that family lives both change and last over time.