This chapter investigates the meaning and significance of family relationships in terms of supportive relationships among adults and especially those outside the immediate or nuclear family. This is examined mainly through the prism of whether and how people’s familial relationships involve the giving or receiving of resources and support, including money, other forms of material support, and emotional support. This chapter is essentially focused on the ebb and flow of instrumental and affective forms of support within families and establishing what is of most importance to people in regard to maintaining the exchanges that are understood to constitute family life and family relationships under conditions where the supply of resources is limited. Among the topics that will be investigated are the nature of the support received (if any) and the relational context within which it takes place. Much of this chapter turns on questions about the chains of family relationships that people are involved in, how these figure as part of a support network and the extent of reliance on relatives. As well as looking at the congregation of resource exchange and usage, the chapter is especially interested in investigating the understandings that people have of receiving and giving help from and to relatives and the particular norms that govern exchanges among family members.

Family relationships tend to be entwined with social obligations in a way that other relationships are not. Such social obligations are changing, however. Familial networks of support cannot be assumed to operate today, unlike the past when extended kinship networks of support were seen, as Allan (1996, p 29) notes, as ‘an unremarkable, largely takenfor- granted feature of people's routine activities’. As discussed earlier, the degree of change in this and other regards is such that the category of family itself is destabilised, becoming the source of a vibrant body of research around the question of what is family (Gubrium and Holstein, 1990; Weeks et al, 2001; Morgan, 2010). Playing a causal role here are general societal trends towards individualisation and pluralisation. Both tend to weaken family bonds, the former in emphasising and placing value on autonomous functioning and an individualised identity, the latter in rendering traditional family values and practices somewhat out-moded in the face of autonomy.