The Family Living Room: A Child's Playpen?

Abstract

For a long time, the Dutch family living room has been the most prestigious domestic space, reflecting in its furnishing and decoration the status and class of the male breadwinner without any material indication of the presence of children in the household. In the latter part of the twentieth century, children were increasingly acknowledged as family members in their own right and allowed to extend their play into the living room. More recently, the situation has developed into the extreme opposite of the pristine family living rooms of yore. Nowadays, with baby equipment visibly predominant, the living room of a young family looks more like a day-care center, the playpen taking a focal position, surrounded by large toys and > baby furniture. This article presents a sociological explanation of the material transformation of the living room in its relation to the rise in labor participation of young Dutch mothers over the last two decades, as well as a cultural interpretation of the material living room as a reflection of Dutch family life in the twentieth century.

“My Two Homes”Children’s Picture Books and Non/Normative Imaginaries of Home in Post-Divorce/Separation Families

“…The domestic space of home is an important everyday site for the 'doing' of family through family practices, yet is frequently taken-for-granted as the backdrop to family life (Morgan 2013). Empirical evidence of the centrality of home in the spatial production of parenting and childhood more specifically is highlighted by research on: domestic space as a site of young children's toys and play (Cieraad 2013b;Hancock and Gillen 2007;Plowman and Stevenson 2013;Stevenson and Prout 2013); the routines, rules and relations of 'family time' spent at home (Christensen et al 2000;Dowling and Power 2012;Harden et al 2013;Kyrönlampi-Kylmänen and Määttä 2012;McNamee 1998;Sibley 1995;Wood and Beck 1994); and home as an affective, embodied and sensory space of family relationships (James 2013;Valentine et al 2012;). Yet, the diversity of families and consequent variations in children's home lives has not yet been deeply explored in these interdisciplinary literatures.…”