Chapter 9: Families and Flow: The Temporalities of Everyday Family Practices

The study of family mobilities necessitates an examination of how practices are orchestrated in time as well as space. Conventional approaches to the study of family time use either quantitative analysis of time-use data or qualitative studies of time pressure and work/life balance. The limitation with these approaches is that they assume a rather static family structure that is dominated by parents with young children. Moreover, these studies do not capture the dualistic quality of time; that time constitutes and is a constituent of family life. In this chapter, I use one-day diaries on organising and experiencing time, collated as part of the UK Mass Observation Project in Autumn 2017, to interrogate the relationality of family time. The analysis examines how family practices maybe sequential, synchronous, planned or serendipitous and how these different temporalities permeate the busyness of time pressure. These one-day accounts confirm how time is experienced through and by family and intimate relationships.