Children in the liquid modernity: mobile and uprooted?

Ann-Magritt Jensen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Children’s weakening contact with fathers after divorce is assumed detrimental to their welfare. Could children’s mobility between parents involve conflicting aspects of children’s lives? It is estimated, in the case of Norway, that about 40 per cent of the children will not live with their father throughout their childhood. Consequences of this situation are traced in particular in children’s material welfare, and their time and space activities. Increasingly children spend their childhood travelling between two homes that may display considerable differences in material standard as well as routines and everyday life. In Norway, a rather large, but sparsely populated country, the ‘mobile children’ are a common sight at every airport during weekends. This presentation will analyze a new survey on Child Custody and Financial Support, 2004, supplemented with an ongoing project on Children’s Welfare (COST A19), allowing to explore a particular case, while posing the findings in a larger context.