The concept of agency is widely used in the social sciences, but what might it mean in the context of family relationships? Gender and child-parent relationships have been claimed to be relationships involving strong cultural ideals and embodying power asymmetries. The family identity categories of mother, father and child, created by societal and cultural factors, shape the possibilities for agency of the individual family members. The picture is complicated by the changes that have taken place in the relations between women and men in families, and by the advent of children’s rights and their increasing voice in the family, which have made relations between parents and children more reciprocal and egalitarian.

This presentation applies a relational perspective on agency to explore the position of mothers, fathers and children in present-day families and how the concept of agency could help in understanding family relationships. The presentation utilizes data gathered with multiple methods from young children and their parents (18 children, 15 mothers and 10 fathers) in Finland, and shows how the family identities of mothers, fathers and children and their possibilities for agency are manifested in everyday life. Gender and generational orders along with power affect how the everyday, pragmatic agency of different family members is negotiated. Examples are given of identity categories and of agency with respect to, e.g., power, initiative, creative adjustment, negotiation and resistance, by different family members in everyday family life.

What emotion first springs to mind when you think about your everyday (family) life? This research initiative aims to find out what different family members think about their daily family life, how they conceptualize it and describe their actions and, above all, emotions.

Emotions may be seen as irrational, unreliable subjective states, but they are nevertheless highly meaningful. They highlight the kinds of meanings that occupy the foreground in practical, everyday life, while also revealing new insights into cultural beliefs and prejudices (González 2013).

This presentation focuses on how individuals in the same family experience their everyday lives. The data consist of interviews with six nuclear families (12 parents, 8 children) and three divorced families (6 parents, 8 children). Each family member was individually interviewed twice (overall 68 interviews). The second interview was a so called photonarrative interview, for which each participant took photographs pertaining to their daily life (approx. 300 photos).

Content analysis of the data revealed that the everyday life of the different family members appears to be divided into three categories: personal, family and spousal. Each category consists of both pleasurable and burdensome elements. Surprisingly, the interviewees highlighted the importance of their ‘own daily life’, which was characterized by various emotions from pleasure to irritation. At its best, having one’s own time was seen as the foundation for wellbeing of both the individual and the family as a whole.

Many families in Finland and other European countries face difficulties to adapt their life with all demands and expectations of the society and surrounding communities like working life, schools and day-care system. The timing is essential and you need e.g. to be able to plan all your duties according to opening and service hours. The family work services aim to help families that are under risk of becoming marginalized or that have difficulties because of sudden illness or other unexpected situations.

The so called sequence method aims to empower family members so that they could find their capacities and that they would be able to seek help outside the home if needed. The key element in the sequence method is doing together (family members and family workers) all kinds of household work that are difficult for family members. The doing is based on the using of the sequence map, where daily and weekly chores are planned for certain time periods of the day. Discussions are the third element to support and to help the family. The discussions contain evaluation of the co-operation process, reflections about targets and achievements, as well as listening of all family members.

The objective of my paper is to give an overview of the working method and the dimensions and capacities of the sequence map tool. As a multi-dimensional tool it carries more functions than expected at first sight. The analysis base on qualitative methods.

By everyday practices and routines, the family can be defined as a largely stable unit which is the basis for the experience and the management of individual and interpersonal everyday life and the familial relationship constellations (Sabla 2015). Family rituals, normalized shared sequences of actions (Keddi 2014), are understood as way of doing family. Their meaning can also be shaped by the influence from outside parties and institutional work processes.

In different contexts families are involved in socio-educational institutions delivered by Social Work. Here families are accompanied in their everyday life by social-education professionals. The professionals are biased by social norms and values and their own perceptions and evaluations of families they work with. This mental image affects the work with certain families and can thereby affect the design and implementation of family dynamics and everyday practices and routines.

Through an ethnographic approach (participant observation) in selected families a deeper understanding about the family realities can be achieved. The pilot study focusses on the importance of everyday action processes for individual family members and the role of family rituals on educational processes within families. Another focus of the research project is on the relationship between the production and realization of family rituals and the existing institutional assistance. The guiding question is in what way family rituals stand out as an resource available for socio-educational services carried out by the institutional framework and how they are shaped and even used by the socio-educational professionals as a support for coping with everyday family life.

Seen as a contextual organism, dwelling configuration and family syntaxes are being determined in relation to its multiple influential spheres: macrosystem, exosystem, mezosystem, microsystem and chronosystem (Bronfenbrenner 1979). Focusing from macro to microresidential system, there can be identified a diversity of space affinities and space privatizations, belonging to different family members, constantly filtered by family syntaxes, by family dynamics and by family life cycle.

Using a wide pallette of methods to collect relevant examples and data,

from documentation to direct observation, from questionnaire to cohort study, the present study is aiming to translate different residential gestures, relating them to distinct roles inside the family. Preliminary results of the study revealed that classic paradigm of the family comes along for example with a pronounced teritorializations of the father, with wife's appropriations of the kitchen and attenuated appropriations of the child. There are also cultural variations of the classic paradigm, where for example the wife is being isolated inside the home and in extreme cases, the house became a negative environment. And afterwards, western cultures are facing an intense de-traditionalisation of family models, where for example children appropriations are becoming alued and prioritized, identifying intensified personalisations of the child’s area. Equalizations of father's and mother's role inside the family is also reverberating into residential configurations, a lot of activities being externalized because of female decreasing internal role. The house is adapting all these changes inside the family roles configuration and is reflecting the pattern of gender role and family syntax.