Exploring Key Concepts and Understandings

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I suggested that in appropriating personal life for the examination of children’s relationships, I am straddling the fields of study that encompass family, personal relationships and childhood. I have shown in the introduction to this book where the points of convergence between childhood, family studies and personal life might be, in order to illustrate that the personal life approach could be highly appropriate for the study of children’s relationships and in accordance with the existing interests of childhood researchers. In addition to areas set out by Smart (2007), I suggested areas of focus that could be fruitfully included in the personal life framework and especially analytically generative in the exploration of children’s personal lives, including, for example, sensory and interphysical aspects of relatedness, issues of bodily proximity and co-presence.