Sharing Spaces: Children and Young People negotiating Intimate Relationships and Privacy in the Family Home

This chapter discusses children and young people’s experiences of and opportunities for privacy and intimacy within their family homes, a topic that so far has been relatively neglected in research with children. Using contemporary conceptualizations of intimacy and privacy, the chapter explores how these notions are negotiated by children and young people within the family and through different spatial constellations. The chapter also demonstrates how public risk discourses associated with young people’s maturation and sexuality inform the propriety of intergenerational and gendered family practices. While children and young people often report valuing time with other family members, and the opportunity to develop relationships of intimacy, they also seek time and space for privacy, peace, and quiet within and outside of the home. The chapter argues that recent and emerging changes in how families live require new understandings of what privacy and intimacy mean to children and young people, for example, in relation to young adults moving back to the family home to live with their parents, children living across households post divorce or post migration, and the emergent new online spaces. There is therefore a need for research to pay greater attention to how children and young people themselves achieve, manage, and negotiate intimacy and privacy in their everyday family lives. Such new knowledge is needed in order to inform future research, policy, and practice in these areas