Environment in the Lives of Children and Families

Abstract

This book presents innovative international research into how the term “environment” is understood within families and how that plays out in everyday lives. Based on a study that involved creative qualitative work with families in India and the United Kingdom, the book shows how environmental practices are negotiated in families, and how they relate to values, identities, and society. Through that analysis, we begin to see the ways in which families and childhood are constructed as sites for intervention in debates about climate change. The book explores the situated, dynamic, and relational complexities, and of the ways in which space, place, and time intersect with meanings of environment in the everyday lives of children and families. It looks at the sort of environmental issues that families in India and the UK negotiate, and how children are often responsibilised in environmental policy and media discourses in both India and the UK.

‘Generation Z’ and ‘second generation’: an agenda for learning from cross-cultural negotiations of the climate crisis in the lives of second generation immigrants

“…This understanding is supported in studies that have considered household responses to environmental concerns. In research in India and the UK, Phoenix and colleagues critically considered household negotiations of practices in light of often individualistic presentations of children as pro-environmental 'agents of change', and found that pro-environmental household practices had greater longevity when family members committed to them together, even amid everyday disputes around practices (Phoenix et al 2017;Walker 2017). Reviewing a wealth of social scientific literature on family and other personal relationships, Jamieson (2019, 221) argues that these relationships are 'the essential creativity-enabling context of being human and human capacities for effecting social change', yet states that studies of family negotiations around environment, sustainability and climate change remain relatively few in number.…”

“…Meanwhile, the household as a site of learning about climate change has received relatively little scholarly attention. Some scholarsnotably family sociologistshave analysed household-level intergenerational responses to climate change (Burningham 2017;Phoenix et al 2017;Shirani et al 2017), however, no studies have considered how families with generations born in different countries negotiate environmental knowledge and concerns formed in different times and places, and how they enact intergenerational responses.…”

Complex ‘everyday’ lives meet multiple networks: the social and educational lives of young children in foster care and their foster carers

“…We set out to explore how the everyday in routines and habits help us identify the facilitators, barriers and limitations to providing good early education in a foster care environment. Our study draws on a growing body of scholarly work exploring the practice of 'everyday' life in families (Phoenix et al 2017). Scott (2009) suggests that because everyday life is often seen as trivial, it can be easily forgotten and omitted in research, but is important as it comprises the ways in which people typically act, think, and feel on a daily basis.…”

Sociologies of Personal Relationships and the Challenge of Climate Change

“…She found an entanglement of practices of friendship and environmentalism creating a community of like-minded similarly ethical people seeking ‘a good life’ that is both virtuous and enjoyable, and may or may not involve future children. The study of Ann Phoenix and her colleagues (2017) shows how family practices work with dominant understandings of climate change and media portrayals of environmentalism. The authors map the overlap between family practice and environmental practices and the meaning of ‘environment’ for parents and children in 24 families with school-age children in different socio-economic circumstances in India and England.…”

“…In households with the highest carbon footprint, affluent parents often present narratives of ‘responsible privilege’, that create moral distance between themselves and both the ‘unconcerned’ or ‘ignorant’ and ‘hair shirt environmentalists’ who advocate a frugality that would interfere with the future-oriented advantages they seek to pass on to their children or modify ‘necessary’ consumption for the comfort of their present-day family. In emphasising ‘the relational commitments that underpin everyday practices’, Phoenix and co-authors (2017: 139) could also have been speaking for Dow. The more active pro-environmentalism of Dow’s research participants reflects their different relational circumstances and what Phoenix and colleagues (2017: 137) refer to as ‘environmental affordance, including risks, material opportunities, socioeconomic and temporal resources, and priorities of care’.…”