Introduction

The parent–child boundary is created, sustained and enforced through norms, roles, individual practices and social institutions. It has symbolic resonance partly because the relationship between parent and child is often portrayed, not without reason, as one of the few remaining social bonds whose boundaries have a weight of obligation and permanence about them (Beck, 1994). Partners may become ex-partners, friends become lovers, lovers become friends, but children are always children and parents are always parents. However, empirical studies of family life show that these boundaries, although vested with so much emotional energy and material resources, are malleable and breakable. Circumstances in which this has been explored include family breakup and reformation (Smart et al, 2001), situations where children take on caring roles (Becker et al, 1998), and parental substance misuse (Bekir et al, 1993), the subject of this chapter.

Parental substance misuse is transgressive, both of boundaries within the family and in how the problem is constructed. Boundaries of the family can be reworked – for some in our study, ‘the family’ was redefined to exclude some members of the original family and include others, for instance aunts and uncles, neighbours, or service workers. Problems of substance misuse in the family are usually assumed to emanate from the behaviour of adolescents and young people, rather than parents. Children and other family members then have to deal with its doubly transgressive nature.

In this chapter we explore the challenges to and reshaping of parent–child boundaries in young people's accounts of the impact of parental substance misuse on them. We examine four dimensions along which parent–child boundaries are shaped. These are: roles and responsibilities; risk; knowledge; and space/time. The experience of parental substance misuse can be usefully examined in terms of them, but they can also be used for thinking through other disruptions that impact on family life, including parental separation, conflict, illness and so on, as well as more normalised but potentially problematic experiences, such as lifecourse transition. The taken for granted realities of family life can be revealed in these circumstances, for example, the assumptions around expected roles and responsibilities can be challenged by the dynamics of substance misuse.