Preface Troubling normalities and normal family troubles: diversities, experiences and tensions ~ Jane Ribbens McCarthy, Carol-Ann Hooper and Val Gillies Part 1: Approaching Family Troubles? Contexts and Methodologies Cultural context, families and troubles ~ Jill Korbin Representing family troubles through the 20th century ~ Janet Fink The role of science in understanding family troubles ~ Michael Rutter Family troubles, methods trouble: qualitative research and the methodological divide ~ Ara Francis Part 2: Whose Trouble? Contested Definitions and Practices Disabled parents and normative family life: the obscuring of lived experiences of parents and children within policy and research accounts ~ Harriet Clarke and Lindsay O’Dell Normal problems or problem children? Parents and the micro-politics of deviance and disability ~ Ara Francis Troubled talk and talk about troubles: moral cultures of infant feeding in professional, policy and parenting discourses ~ Helen Lomax Children’s non-conforming behaviour: personal trouble or public issue? ~ Geraldine Brady Revealing the lived reality of kinship care through children and young people’s narratives: “It’s not all nice, it’s not all easy-going, it’s a difficult journey to go on” ~ Karin Cooper Part 3: The Normal, the Troubling and the Harmful? Troubling loss? Children’s experiences of major disruptions in family life ~ Lynn Jamieson and Gill Highet The permeating presence of past domestic and familial violence: “So like I’d never let anyone hit me but I’ve hit them, and I shouldn’t have done” ~ Dawn Mannay Thinking about sociological work on personal and family life in the light of research on young people’s experience of parental substance misuse ~ Sarah Wilson The trouble with siblings: some psychosocial thoughts about sisters, aggression and femininity ~ Helen Lucey Children and family transitions: contact and togetherness ~ Hayley Davies Part 4: Troubles and transitions across space and culture ‘Troubling’ or ‘ordinary’? Children’s views on migration and intergenerational ethnic identities ~ Umut Erel Colombian families dealing with parents’ international migration ~ Maria Claudia Duque-Páramo Families left behind: unaccompanied young people seeking asylum in the UK ~ Elaine Chase and June Statham Young people’s caring relations and transitions within families affected by HIV ~ Ruth Evans Estimating the prevalence of forced marriage in England ~ Peter Keogh, Anne Kazimirski, Susan Purdon and Ruth Maisey Part 5: Working with Families European perspectives on parenting and family support ~ Janet Boddy What supports resilient coping among family members? A systemic practitioner’s perspective ~ Arlene Vetere Troubled and troublesome teens: mothers’ and professionals’ understandings of parenting teenagers and teenage troubles ~ Harriet Churchill and Karen Clarke Contested family practices and moral reasoning: updating concepts for working with family-related social problems ~ Hannele Forsberg Working with fathers: risk or resource? ~ Brid Featherstone What is at stake in family troubles? Existential issues and value frameworks ~ Jane Ribbens McCarthy