Needs or Wants? Children and Parents Understanding and Negotiating Needs and Necessities

This paper discusses the notion of needs as understood by children and parents, drawing on data from the qualitative strand of Fair Shares and Families (FSAF), a longitudinal mixed-methods project conducted in England between October 2016 and September 2018, focused on a child-centred perspective of intra-family resources allocation. The paper presents the main aspects of The Pyramid of Needs, a cards game developed for the purpose of the study, and discusses the main results that emerged from interviews and the card game in terms of how needs are understood by children and their parents, and the aspects of consensus and conflict that we identified among these understandings. In this regard, we discuss two distinctions that resulted relevant in approaching this theme. At an empirical level, children and parents made a clear distinction between what they understood as needs and wants. At an analytical level, we reflect on the notions of needs and necessities as a useful distinction for understanding the tensions in how children and parents conceptualise and prioritise their needs. On the other hand, the paper discusses the methodological aspects of the card game, its strengths as well as limitations, for approaching phenomena such as needs and IFRA from the perspectives of multiple actors within families.