Children – our future! The last decade has witnessed a growth in the amount of policy and service initiatives aimed at supporting the health and well-being of children and their families. Much of this work has been based on the assumption that offering a child as good an upbringing as possible has positive outcomes for the child, their family, their community and governments and society in general. The rights of the child have also received welcome attention with wider debates on balancing child and parental rights over a range of issues, not least of which has been disciplining potentially risky or dangerous behaviours.

This part of the book builds on the data and ideas considered in Part One. The following three chapters start from the perspective of the child or children involved in a research study or through a critical review of recent work on childhood, families and boundaries. The focus is very much on the experiences of children and what these might mean for policy and practice work as well as future research. The first chapter, by Hill (Chapter Five), draws attention to children's own creation of boundaries, then considers parents’ perspectives and subsequently gives brief attention to family boundaries. Hill engages with a range of literature offering a comprehensive and indepth review of theoretical and empirical work on childhood, families and boundaries. The chapter reflects on how children and parents negotiate crucial distinctions as regards the familiar and trusted, on the one hand, and the strange or threatening, on the other. Boundaries established among relationships and spaces in children's lives are fluid at any one time and evolve as time goes by. The boundaries created mediate the exchange of ideas, emotion, trust and practical assistance. In his conclusions Hill suggests the need to integrate understandings of children in their own right and as located within relationships. He also notes previous limited engagement in research and policy work on notions of boundaries, children and families asserting that the boundary metaphor offers a new and potentially useful dimension to researching childhood and family life.

Sweeting and Seaman (Chapter Six) present data from two studies that illustrate the complexity of decisions in respect of whether or not certain individuals form part of ‘the family’.