Affinities,seeing and feeling like family: Exploring why children value face-to-face contact

Introduction

This article explores how face-to-face contact or ‘seeing’ is implicated in children’s constitution of family, kinship and other relationships. Drawing on empirical research, I show that face-to-face contact is one way in which children experience and imagine family and kinship in a manner which is suggestive of the given, negotiated and created, and sensory forms of affinity that Mason (2008) argues (in part) comprise kinship.

Face-to-face contact or seeing implies the visual dimensions of relationships, yet, I suggest, its meaning is multidimensional. Throughout the article I use seeing and face-to-face contact interchangeably but I suggest that face-to-face contact is analytically useful for examining the non-visual sensory dimensions of children’s interaction. Face-to-face contact provides an opportunity for social interaction, spending time together and sharing in both everyday and special family activities, which allow for, but do not guarantee, the development of close relationships. Face-to-face contact encapsulates both the practical and symbolic elements of family life. Seeking a child’s perspective on the nature of face-to-face contact as a family (and relational) practice, I illuminate why children value face-to-face contact as a way of practising and imagining family and kin relationships. While this article also attends to children’s friendships, children emphasized an expectation to see family which was distinctive from their expectations of friendship.

An existing study of the creative and negotiated character of children’s constitution of kinship shows face-to-face encounters provided a context for children’s shared ‘biographies’, which enabled them to make sense of and creatively constitute their kin relationships and interpret and assign kin-like relationships (Mason and Tipper, 2008b: 455). Face-to-face encounters were constructed as ‘highly significant in children’s kinship experiences’ (Mason and Tipper, 2008a: 141). Aside from the latter research, and allusions to the importance of face-to-face contact for children (Edwards et al., 2006; Morrow, 1998; Smart et al., 2001), the insights offered by an analysis of face-to-face contact have remained, until recently, unexplored. This article aims to address this gap.

Philosophical work suggests that face-to-face contact offers a way of knowing others that cannot be captured in mere description (Merleau-Ponty, 2004 [1948]). Social interaction comprises observations of facial expressions, body language, tactility, demeanour, tone of voice and silences (Goffman, 1982; Urry, 2003). Urry devised the concept of co-presence to describe face-to-face and body-to-body encounters, characterized by ‘physical proximity’, interpretation of social interaction and ‘emotional work’ and allowing for the development of trust, intimacy, connection and commitment (Urry, 2003: 163–4). In his view, face-to-face and ‘body-to-body’ ‘co-presence’ are brought about by social and familial obligations and normative expectations of contact (Urry, 2003: 163).

The negotiation of intergenerational transnational family relationships is a good example of how familial obligations, such as acts of care, require face-to-face rather than virtual contact (Baldassar, 2007a; 2007b). The ‘need to “hear” and to “see” each other’ is valued both on special occasions and during a ‘crisis’ (Baldassar, 2007b: 390–1, 399). Furthermore, ‘literally see[ing]’ one’s geographically distant relatives allows for the development of ‘mutual and shared knowledge’ of one another ‘vital for really “knowing” ’ them (Mason, 2004: 424–5). For British-born Bangladeshi children, visiting as well as talking to relatives on the telephone were key strategies used to maintain family ties (Mand, 2010). While children reported telephone contact as the most ‘common way . . . [of] keeping in touch with grandmas, granddads, aunts and uncles in Bangladesh’, it was also challenging for them because of the lack of ‘common referents’ children shared with their relatives (Mand, 2010: 281). Nonetheless, visits to family members abroad and regular telephone calls constitute a ‘display’ to family members and to ‘relevant others’ of the importance attached to these relationships (Finch, 2007: 66).

While these studies prove face-to-face contact is not exclusively constitutive of family and kin ties, they highlight the meaning embedded in face-to-face interactions as a characteristic of family and kinship. They provoke enquiry into whether face-to-face contact may be more important in family and kin relationships mediated by social expectations and cultural norms about the emotional connections, trust, commitment and intimacy that should characterize family. By attending to the moral and normative dimensions of children’s conceptualizations of family, it is possible to better understand the role of face-to-face contact in these relationships.

Face-to-face contact is shown to be meaningful to children’s family and kin interactions. Children’s accounts emphasize relatives’ ‘appearances, bodies, voices, smells’ and practices including ‘hugging, laughing, tickling, using funny voices, shouting, smacking, which hint at’ what children view as distinctive to kinship (Mason and Tipper, 2008a: 145). During this contact, children experience and observe interactions with and between kin, gaining ‘sensory and experiential’ knowledge of these people (Mason and Tipper, 2008a: 147). I suggest that this ‘sensory and experiential’ knowledge of family members is part of the practising of intimacy. Intimacy has been described as ‘practices of close association, familiarity and privileged knowledge’ (Jamieson, 2005: 189) as well as the ordinary practices of love, practical care and interdependence (Jamieson, 1998: 174). Not everyone who participates in these practices and interactions may be considered by children as ‘intimate’ or emotionally close, which makes it valuable to identify the conditions that make possible a sense of intimacy in children’s relationships.

Seeking to develop understandings of how kinship is ‘imagined’ and ‘practised’, Mason (2008: 32) has outlined four dimensions of affinity. Fixed, negotiated and creative, ethereal and sensory forms of affinity provide a sociological tool for interrogating what family and kinship involve (Mason, 2008). A fixed affinity is a connection that is ‘regarded as or feels, fixed’ and encompasses those relationships that are not ‘chosen’ (Mason, 2008: 33). Negotiated and creative affinities ‘run alongside and intersect with fixity’ (Mason, 2008: 36). Commitments negotiated over time may gain a feeling of fixity similar to that experienced in more formal family or kin relationships. Ethereal affinities encompass experiences which are ‘mysterious, magical, psychic, metaphysical, spiritual and . . . ethereal – matters that are considered beyond (rational) explanation’ (Mason, 2008: 37). A sensory affinity refers to connections between bodies, or connections of a physical, material or sensory nature experienced by kin (Mason, 2008: 40). This encompasses the types of connections made through physical or bodily interaction or responses to facial expressions, tone of voice, as described previously in children’s kinship experiences (Mason and Tipper, 2008a, 2008b). I elaborate how children express their family and kin relationships in terms of these affinities, and through examining face-to-face contact, will further expose how ‘the sensory is implicated in relationships’ (Mason, 2008: 40).

In most European countries, children’s contact with parents, siblings and grandparents is constructed as an important family practice and an expected feature of family life. Legal provisions are made to ensure children’s contact with biological parents (for Norway, see Moxnes, 2003) and grandparents’ contact with grandchildren (for Germany, Italy and the US, see Ferguson et al., 2004). In the UK, a Green Paper (DCSF, 2010: 38) proposed to confer a legal right upon grandparents to have contact with their grandchildren following separation and divorce, a right that the current coalition government have in principle upheld. Furthermore, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has declared that ‘States Parties shall ensure that a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will’, unless it is perceived to be in the child’s best interests (United Nations, 1989). Enshrined in children’s rights and in legislation, children’s contact with certain family members might feel or be experienced by children as a fixed element of those family relationships. These provisions are predicated on moral and normative assumptions that children’s contact with family members is in their ‘best interests’.

Both the rights framework and legislation neglect to attend to the generational power structures of children’s social relationships, and the underpinning social, structural and material conditions which make possible or impede children’s ability to achieve or refuse contact with family members (Alanen, 1998). These understandings of contact as being in children’s best interests form the social and cultural context in which this study of children’s constitution of family and close relationships is undertaken. An analysis of face-to-face contact provides a context to examine the fixed or negotiated character of children’s family and kin relationships. Given the fluidity of family life, the meaning attributed to face-to-face contact may be shifting and the role of face-to-face contact in constituting contemporary children’s family relationships requires further consideration.

On a related note, Finch has asked: ‘what forms of direct social interaction are used to convey the meaning that this is a “family-like” relationship? What, for example, is the relative importance of face-to-face interaction, and other forms such as telephone calls, emails or text messages?’ (Finch, 2007: 75). Finch’s questions pose an important line of enquiry in children’s relationships also. Given children’s ‘digital literacy’ (Drotner, 2005: 42) and sophisticated understanding of technologically mediated communication (Holloway and Valentine, 2003; Rheingold, 2002), we might expect them to favour the use of text, email and web cameras. Young people do prefer to use text messages to communicate with parents over ‘sensitive issues’ (Devitt and Roker, 2009: 198). These new forms of communication may be used, as adults use them, to ‘supplement’ rather than replace more traditional forms of communication such as letters and photographs (Baldassar, 2007b: 401). Our understanding of the relative importance children attach to various types of communication and the types of communication that characterize ‘family-like’ interaction remains impoverished.

The study and methods

This article is based on accounts generated for an ESRC-funded study titled ‘Constituting Family: Children’s Normative Expectations and Lived Experiences of Close Relationships’ (2006–7). This qualitative school-based study was located in a Midlands (UK) state primary school with approximately 130 pupils. It involved 24 girls and boys 8–10 years of age, of whom 20 were white British and four were British South Asian. Sixteen of these children had experienced some family fluidity, either through parental separation, divorce, bereavement, or parental conflict with other kin members; of these, 13 had experienced a parent re-partnering; 11 had acquired new half- and/or step-siblings; and 15 had a non-resident sibling or parent.

The majority of the children’s families had resided in or around the town of current residence and had relatives living locally. Seven children had family members living abroad, four of whom had many family members abroad. Family members living locally did not ensure that children shared frequent contact with them. Many of the children’s material circumstances shaped their opportunities for contact; the school and the majority of children’s homes were located in the bottom third of the most deprived areas in England. Nine of the 22 families did not own a car, which restricted the number of visits children made to family members, as did the cost of public transport. These broader socioeconomic contexts mediated children’s experiences of social (Ridge, 2002) and family life (Haugen, 2005; Moxnes, 2003) and the children’s perceptions of proximity and access to family members.

The children were invited to participate in the research through an information leaflet for children and parents that explained the research (Davies, 2008). A reply slip formed part of the leaflet and parents/guardians were asked to provide or refuse consent for their children’s participation. Children’s informed consent, or refusal to participate, was negotiated through ongoing discussion, and through addressing children’s questions about the research, particularly prior to recording research activities.

Methods for generating data included: participant observation in school 1–2 days per week over a period of 18 months; informal semi-structured paired interviews focusing on the meaning of family and close relationships; children’s family drawings and accompanying discussions of who they considered as ‘family’; visits to six of the children’s family homes where I was shown photographs and other important family mementos; the production of family books, a record of children’s significant family and relational experiences, memories and stories (similar to Thomson and Holland’s [2005] memory books).

Seeing: A family practice

The children’s accounts were full of normative expectations and comparisons of the type, frequency, longevity of contact and the consequent familiarity and quality of relationships they shared in a range of relationships. The children assessed to whom they felt close and classified their relationships based on knowledge most often accumulated through face-to-face contact; it facilitated children’s ongoing and reflexive process of working out who they valued as family. The emphasis children placed on seeing family highlighted its importance in conducting these relationships and, I argue, as a key family (and relational) practice. These children shared a cultural expectation that seeing and talking to family members was part of the meaning of family and that close genealogical relatives would share these forms of contact.

It is through face-to-face contact that children claimed they were able to develop and practise their close relationships. Seeing was considered an important part of enacting a relationship and enabled children to spend time, know, talk to, observe changes in appearance and interact with family members. The children used ‘seeing’ as a colloquial term for practising their close relationships and it was regarded as an integral element of a relationship, as expressed by Kayla, ¹ who defined family as ‘the people I always see’ (Kayla, interview). I use this brief excerpt to show the centrality of ‘seeing’ to children’s definitions of family, their construction of seeing as a quality associated with ‘family’ relationships, a way of relating to and connecting with others. I do not imply that everyone who Kayla sees often counts as family. Neither do I suggest that only relationships characterized by face-to-face contact are meaningful as family relationships; examples from research with children experiencing bereavement show this not to be the case (Ribbens-McCarthy, 2006).

One classification children applied in their relationships was distinguishing between family whom they saw regularly and those they seldom saw, as Hannah does in her family drawing. Hannah asked me:

This is a brief extract from Hannah’s ongoing narrative about her troubling relationship with her father. Hannah’s distinction between family she does and does not see is a reference to her limited contact with her father. While Hannah had intended to draw her father, she later decided not to include him in her family drawing. Hannah’s extract reveals her actively negotiating her constitution of family: on the one hand, she recognized the ‘given’ or fixed affinity she shared with her father through their biological relationship, the visible manifestation of this for Hannah was their shared surname, which verified to others their family connection (Davies, 2011). On the other hand, the opportunity to represent her family permitted some creativity and scope for negotiating who and what constituted family.

Face-to-face contact was used as a way of distinguishing emotionally close from less close family members. For example, when children had infrequent or no face-to-face contact with half-siblings, they demonstrated creative licence in their constitution of family. Some children omitted siblings from family drawings explaining that they were not close, or not family. This is apparent in my conversation with Oliver:

Seeing was an important family practice and central to children’s constitution of family. Children’s differentiations, in both positive and negative ways, between their non-resident and resident or nearby siblings encapsulated some children’s ambivalence about siblings whom they saw infrequently.

Nathalie is Tanya’s younger half-sister from her mother’s subsequent relationship and Eli is Tanya’s older half-sister from her father’s previous relationship. Tanya had last seen Eli three months before our discussion, but shared regular contact with Nathalie, who lived a short distance away from Tanya.

Routine contact and ‘shared biographical’ experiences with resident siblings (relative to limited contact with non-resident siblings) gave fixity to sibling relationships, which non-resident sibling relationships did not possess.

While children recognized differences in the quality and closeness of relationships according to the degree of contact, siblings were not held accountable for this lack of contact, as parents or grandparents might be. Children’s discussions imply a shared understanding that developing close relationships with their non-resident parents and siblings would, ideally, be based upon face-to-face contact. This illuminates the moral and normative expectations children have about sharing contact with their family members. Some children discussed relying on and holding accountable a parent or step-parent for facilitating or failing to facilitate contact with half- or step-siblings. Children acknowledged their own and their siblings’ relational position as children, and their limited agency to negotiate contact. Children recognized that their agency to contribute to decisions about with whom they would live or share contact was contingent on their age; many had engaged in discussions with parents about at what age they could make important choices.

A lack of contact with certain family members culminated in some children attributing increased value to these relationships. In the extract below, Bridget discusses her siblings from her father’s previous relationship, whom she has never met. Bridget’s account is an example of some children’s longing to see, and feeling of loss at not being able to maintain or make contact with close family members:

Sometimes when I think of my brother and sister who I’ve never seen it makes me feel quite sad ’cause I’ve never ever seen them. (Interview)

In such cases, children suggested that the quality of parents’ post-separation/divorce relationships played a role in whether children saw their half- and step-siblings. Children’s conceptualizations of family rested upon complex assessments of their expectations of how often they should and did see family members, the perceived agency of those family members in instigating contact and the quality of contact shared.

Knowing family: Contact in children’s relationship trajectories

Face-to-face contact was reflected upon in the broader temporal context of children’s relationship trajectories. All participating children agreed that long-standing, current or past face-to-face contact was an important factor influencing their emotional closeness to and knowledge of their family members. Some close relationships were established across time with children sharing contact with individuals once weekly or less frequently. Regular face-to-face contact in the past was regarded similarly to routine current contact as an opportunity to develop intimate and everyday knowledge of family members, and was important in children’s assessments of who they ‘knew best’ in their families. Oliver said:

Bridget was co-parented, seeing her parents for equal amounts of time each week. Bridget said in response to my question of who she ‘knew best’:

Probably my mum, ’cause my dad, I started seeing him when I was about five and I’ve been with my mum all my life. (Interview)

The children’s accounts suggest that family did not comprise those with whom children currently spent most of their time; family time together accrued, and the passing of time represented the accumulation of both mundane and special intimate knowledge which was constitutive of family.

Catherine has ascribed her step-parents with the status of family; her in-depth knowledge of them was expressed as a fixed affinity, based on the regularities of routine family life. This ‘family-like’ knowledge, built up over time, permitted children to feel as if these relationships had a similar basis to ‘given’ biological or legal family connections.

Seeing was not only a family practice which allowed children to know family members, it was also part of children’s vocabulary which indicated that they were sharing a relationship with someone. For the children in this study, face-to-face contact was an important part of enacting a family relationship and was desirable for facilitating and securing knowledge of family members.

Seeing and a hierarchy of sensory contact

Children regarded face-to-face contact as superior relative to telephone calls, letters or email contact; the absence of face-to-face contact was often regarded as an impediment to developing a close relationship with someone. Below are explanations of how face-to-face contact allowed the children to develop knowledge of people. While not all of these extracts are specific to family relationships, they offer important insights into face-to-face contact in children’s social interactions, which aid an understanding of family relationships. Leena explains:

You can tell when you look at their face, you know what they’re like. I’m talking about personality and how people act and that, you know what they’re like if you look at their face. (Interview)

Bridget and Cara consider the relative value of face-to-face and telephone contact:

James and Catherine are discussing ways of knowing and developing relationships with friends:

These are examples of a prominent theme in my data, that children were reflexive about the process and value of seeing as a form of relating to, engaging with and getting to know people; in short, developing affinities with people. Face-to-face contact allowed for a multi-sensorial experience, which permitted children to develop subjective and objective knowledge of people, to ‘look at their face’, interpret ‘facial effects’, see ‘what they look like’, assess ‘how they act’ and their overall ‘personality’. In grappling to explain what she means, Leena hints at occasions when we meet people and we just ‘know what they’re like’, describing a visceral, intuitive or if broadly conceived, an ethereal affinity with a person.

Face-to-face contact is characterized by conversation and children commented on family members’ tones of voice, which contributed to creating a profile of a person’s character. Seeing and experiencing someone face-to-face was a way of exposing who they were and what they were like. Leena, James and Catherine discuss face-to-face contact as an opportunity for them to observe, assess and know a person. Cara and Bridget recognize face-to-face contact as an interactive, engaging, mutual sensory experience which also exposes the child to the person they are meeting, opening up the child’s behaviour to interpretation and assessment also.

As James and Catherine reveal, the type of contact and interaction children expected to share with people varied according to the stage of their relationship, recognizing the fluidity of relationships across time. These accounts point to a hierarchy of sensory contact with face-to-face contact and verbal communication considered as fundamentally important in conducting relationships. Face-to-face contact was not only a way of developing a closer relationship, but the type of interaction that characterized such contact could provide some indication of the closeness of that relationship.

In comparing the quality of her relationships with her two granddads, Laura drew my attention to proximity and distance as mediating factors in children’s family interaction. When asked who in her family she knew the least, Laura, who had never met her granddad Jim who lived in Ottawa, responded:

Granddad Timothy, aunty Carol and granddad Jim. Actually, I do know my aunty Carol the best even though my aunty Carol is in Sweden. I don’t know my granddad Timothy the best because he never comes round really. My granddad Jim is in Ottawa, even though I don’t know him that well ’cause I never really saw him, I just speak to him on the phone at my dad’s. And, I know one Christmas present that he’d really like is for him to go over to England or us to go over to Ottawa to see him. (Interview)

Laura’s account suggests that face-to-face contact is the optimal (although not the only) way in which ‘family-like’ interaction, ‘family-like’ knowledge and affinities with family members are achieved. Face-to-face contact was desirable and necessary to know family members well; telephone contact did not compare in these respects.

Laura’s assessment of the quality of her relationships with her two granddads demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the factors facilitating and inhibiting contact with them. Granddad Timothy’s close geographical proximity meant he was able, but chose not to have contact with Laura and her family. However, the considerable geographical distance between herself and her granddad Jim acted as a real and legitimate barrier to seeing him. Granddad Timothy was failing to see her and was therefore not acting in a ‘family-like’ way. Laura expressed that there was a mutual understanding that granddad Jim would like to see her and her family, and this desire ‘displayed’ to Laura that he regarded her and her family as important and part of his kin group.

Knowing appearances: Developing intimate knowledge?

Face-to-face contact allowed children to gain and maintain corporal knowledge of a person and their character. Descriptions of appearances were central to children’s interview accounts and their discussions during drawing sessions. Intimate knowledge of someone’s physical appearance, developed through regular face-to-face contact, characterized many close relationships. Knowing someone and their body in such depth also allowed room for creativity, for children to encompass that someone as family. Children were highly cognizant of bodies; their relationships and affinities with family and kin were based in the sensory, the bodily and the physical. This is not to suggest that intimate knowledge of someone, their body or appearance only occurs in kinship or ensures a positive affinity with others.

While drawing her family Laura (see Figure 1) provided a commentary, informing me that she would draw her father’s ‘lump’ (Adam’s apple), his ‘hairy arms’, her grandmother’s flip flops which ‘she always wears’ and her grandfather’s ‘funny hair’. Laura said about her grandfather’s hair ‘I can’t quite draw it, it sort of comes over like this’ (Notes on drawings). Laura like many other children attended to her family members presentations of their selves. In their drawings, the children discussed the details of family members’ appearances and presentation including a step-father’s ‘handsome’ smile, a parent’s ‘work jumper’, a dad’s ‘big nose’ and a brother’s ‘scowl’.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Laura’s drawing

Laura’s ongoing and daily contact with all of these family members (with the exception of her father), enabled her to observe, recall and record the regularities of their appearances. Children’s drawings elicited the sensory nature of children’s relationships. Children suggested that their family members were related to through their bodies, bodily features and the clothing that they characteristically wore. In discussing and representing these bodily features children demonstrated family-like knowledge of those people. Children assumed, and thought it important that they would know and could recall family members’ appearances. This assumption was conveyed in Stephanie’s account of her like-family friend Sara. Stephanie deliberated over whether to include Sara as family:

Sara’s sort of family, well half of my family, she’s half my cousin, yeah she is family . . . but I’ve forgotten what she looks like. I haven’t seen her for a long time . . . she’s not my family like. (Notes on drawings)

This extract exposes sensory knowledge of appearance as important to children’s constitution of family and highlights the interpretive and creative nature of who counts as family. Practically speaking, when children were unable to remember people’s appearances or had never seen family members, they were unable to represent them in their drawings, calling into question the status of such individuals as family members. In my conversations with children during fieldwork, they mentioned the difficulty of claiming someone as family if they had no knowledge of their physical appearance.

Practising family: Seeing and speaking to family members

Seeing was a way of enacting a relationship and a highly valued form of contact for developing affinities with family; it was a term in common parlance in children’s relationship vocabulary. Children often mentioned ‘not seeing’, or ‘not talking/speaking to’ extended family members in describing the deterioration or termination of parents’ relationships with those people.

Many of the children had extended kin living nearby whom they did not see because of intra-family conflict, some of whom were consequently denied family status. Neil said ‘I don’t really see my dad’s brother anymore’ (Family books) and Catherine noted, ‘my mum don’t speak to her dad any more’ (Interview). In a paired interview, Hannah and Laura discussed incidences which had led to a breakdown in communication between a parent and a family member. Laura stated:

Aunty Valerie, I just don’t see her any more ’cause she accused my mum of nicking forty pounds out of her purse. (Interview)

Tanisha considered that she and her cousin (referred to as ‘him’) were also implicated in the ‘break up’ between her parents and her aunt and uncle:

Children explained that family feuds were marked by the severing of contact. When relationships ‘broke up’ it was assumed that contact would discontinue, reinforcing face-to-face contact as an important constituent of family-like relationships. While these relationships were no longer practised, the fixity of these ties meant that they remained family relationships. Children did not generally refuse to see or speak to family members but were indirect participants in family conflict which diminished their ability to share contact with estranged kin. The children understood how relationships were created and denied, and actively used these forms of interaction in conducting their own close relationships, mainly with other children. In the extract below Hannah is discussing a conversation with her estranged father, with whom Hannah’s mother shared an acrimonious relationship. Hannah’s father had upset her, and consequently, she told him that she no longer wanted to speak to him and later regretted this:

I saw him and said, ‘sorry to say this but I really don’t want to talk to you’. And I really wanna see him but I can’t tell my mum ’cause she’d just say ‘stop being silly’. (Interview)

Hannah’s statement offers an insight into the importance attached to ‘talking’ in close relationships and the way in which Hannah was denying her father an important form of family contact. This extract demonstrates how a child’s desire to see a family member can be quashed by a resident parent who is relied upon to organize contact, but who may feel ambivalent about a family member. It makes apparent that children’s constitution of family occurs within a relational context where children’s parents’ relationships determine children’s relationships and contact.

Family-like, sensory and intimate relationships

This article has focused on face-to-face contact as a way in which children practise, imagine and constitute their family relationships. It has explored the ways in which children’s accounts of face-to-face contact express different forms of affinity with family and kin and has elicited the intersections between sensory, negotiated and creative, and fixed affinities. It found face-to-face contact as not only valuable in children’s relationships (Mason and Tipper, 2008a, 2008b) but also embedded in their normative and moral understandings of what family and kin ought to do. Face-to-face contact was constructed as a family practice; a form of interaction which characterized family.

Face-to-face contact permitted children to develop sensory affinities – a connection based in the physical, bodily and sensory (Mason, 2008); it allowed for a multi-sensorial experience including sharing time, talking, (often unconscious) observations of one another’s actions and interactions, facial expressions, appearances, tone of voice and ‘displays’ of family. This interaction provided a context for children to develop a holistic knowledge of a family member’s character and appearance, knowledge which characterized many intimate family and kin relationships. An examination of the sensory illuminates an avenue for exploring intimacy in children’s family and kin relationships, an area of research which has been overlooked.

Children suggested that face-to-face contact as a form of interaction was most desirable for facilitating and securing knowledge of family members; those shared experiences solidified family-like relationships over time. Children who had in the past shared close relationships with family members often expressed an ongoing emotional bond with that person which was based on this previous, rather than current, shared contact. In a global world, not all children are able to share face-to-face contact with family and will conduct relationships at a distance. As the transnational literature shows, people maintain their family relationships in a number of creative, practical and symbolic ways. Research needs to address the forms of contact that enable children to maintain distant or transnational family relationships.

While face-to-face contact was deemed a quality of family relationships and a way in which close relationships are formed, the shared time and exposure to a person who was, or could be considered family, did not always develop close family-like relationships. On the other hand, as found by Mason and Tipper (2008b), non-family relationships characterized by closeness, and by family-like interaction over time, could become imbued with a fixity comparable to a given family relationship.

Children’s moral and normative expectations that family members would share face-to-face contact is a perspective which can be traced to predominant cultural discourses including: the idealized ‘nuclear’ family form who live alongside one another sharing everyday contact; moral and normative constructions of ‘absent’ parents who children see rarely, if ever; and a rights and socio-legal discourse ensuring that parents and grandparents are able to maintain contact with children and grandchildren respectively. These discourses reinforce the role of face-to-face contact in already ‘given’ biological relationships, and legal provisions to secure parental and grandparental rights to contact with children serve to establish contact as a family practice. These discourses lend another dimension of fixity to children’s biological relationships with these family members. There is a need to further examine the implications of (face-to-face) contact being constructed as a family practice within the UK, in particular the emotional consequences for children who do not share the contact that they may expect, and which is regarded as socially and culturally appropriate.

The children in this study, aged 8–10, showed that they were relatively (although not completely) unable to negotiate contact in their family relationships. The children had limited capacity to make decisions, not only to organize contact, but also to avoid contact with family members or shared residence with ‘family’ not of their choosing. Adult family members were predominantly the engineers of family contact. Children’s positionality as children is of course temporal, and children recognized and looked forward to a growing capacity to make and determine decisions within their families in the future, recognizing the fluidity of relationships, the changing nature, quality and frequency of contact over time.

Children were able to exercise creativity in their representations of family to their friends, peers and to me. The opportunity to discuss and draw ‘my family’ translated into a chance to discuss the quality of their family relationships. A lack of face-to-face contact with some biological relations permitted children creative licence to discount those people as family, but despite this creativity in their drawings, children also acknowledged in interviews their given family relationships which they or other people recognized as family relationships.

This article suggests that face-to-face contact is important to practising, imagining and constituting family relationships. In response to Finch’s (2007) question, ‘what forms of direct social interaction are used to convey the meaning that this is a “family-like” relationship?’, I suggest that face-to-face contact is a key way of conveying the family-like nature of relationships. This examination of the role of face-to-face contact in the development of affinities has shown how children’s affinities with others are socially and culturally produced as well as generationally specific. These factors are likely to alter as children gain independence and are better able to negotiate the terms and conditions of family contact. The ways in which social, cultural and legal constructions of the family permeate children’s lived experiences of family and kinship requires exploration.