Situating Children’s Family Troubles: Poverty and Serial Migration

This article aims to contribute to understandings of how children experience family troubles. It considers how children’s family troubles are socially situated and interlinked with the resources children and other family members have available and the societal contexts in which they live. Since this is an under researched area, the article aims to understand how bringing together different sources of evidence can illuminate children’s perspectives. It first introduces the issue of children’s family troubles and then considers how children feel about their families when they experience two globally common but underresearched kinds of family troubles; living in poverty and rejoining their parents following a period of separation in the process of serial migration, where family members migrate consecutively, rather than together. The chapter illuminates commonalities and differences in how children make sense of family troubles in which they are situated, and the relevance of ideas of “family.”