The objective of my paper is to describe how everyday family life is experienced on the edge of exclusion. I will elaborate some features that manifest that everyday life in family is unstructured and unexpected things follow each other without somebody’s control. What does it mean for family members and above all for the children? Special emphasis is also put on how families and individuals can get empowerment for their lives in critical situations (e.g. unemployment, psychological problems or divorce).

As a theoretical frame of reference, I will use socio-cultural concepts taking into account that every individual and family has dealings with many different activity systems and they all affect on the daily life of the family. The target groups in the study are families that have difficulties to cope with everyday life. There is a lack of routines and rhythm in the families and the home might be in chaos.  These “drifting families” may have little interaction outside home and relations are motivated by necessity and are often negative in content. 

The data is collected in the context of a family work project by the Family Federation of Finland (Väestöliitto). The main purpose of this project is to develop concrete skills of daily life and household routines together with the families. This data consists of recorded discussions between family social workers and family members. It contains also transcripts of meetings where social and welfare authorities were present. The data guides my analysing process and the analyses are based on conversations.

The paper assesses the differences in perception of everyday life in families from the viewpoint of social workers, authorities, and family members, and draws the attention on the discrepancies of the observations of “outsiders” on the one hand, and of the experiences of the family members on the other hand. These differences lead to a need to reconsider the workings of the authorities. Who can define how the socially and culturally acceptable family life is and when there is a need for intervention by authorities?