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A growing body of research indicates that children of formerly deployed soldiers are at risk of experiencing negative outcomes, but studies are lacking in terms of the exploration of children’s emotions from their own perspective. This article is based on qualitative interviews with 26 children (age 7–20) from 19 Danish families with formerly deployed fathers. The children’s emotions are complex and ambiguous. While deployment leads to a distanced relationship between children and their fathers, following it, some form a close relationship following deployment. However, other children become responsible for maintaining their relationship with their father, altering the generational order.

This article explores the complicated process of post-deployment homecoming in military families in Denmark. Based on qualitative interviews with spouses and children of formerly deployed soldiers, the article analyses some of the main challenges related to homecoming and military-to-family transitions in military families. It illuminates how deployment affects family practices and social relations by especially focusing on gender equality, fatherhood, and masculinity. Based on interviews with spouses and children, the article outlines three masculinity positions available to Danish homecoming veterans: gender equality masculinities, militarized masculinities, and troubled masculinities.

Military deployment increases the risk of exposure to potentially traumatising events as well as the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental illnesses. This may have adverse consequences for the family of the deployed, including negatively affecting the well-being of children. Well-being among children of formerly deployed military personnel has mainly been studied in the United States. Research from Europe and especially Scandinavian countries is scarce, and no knowledge of the well-being of children of formerly deployed military Danish personnel exists. Since 1992, Denmark has deployed more than 30,000 soldiers and other personnel to international conflicts/warzones, and at least 14% were parents when deployed. Exploiting survey data, we examined well-being among a representative sample of 1590 children (age 11 and 15) of formerly deployed Danish fathers, compared with a representative sample of 4722 children (age 11 and 15) from the background population (controls). Well-being was examined through children’s subjective well-being measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), as well as through their perception of their family, self-evaluated school outcomes and relationships with friends. The analyses show that children of formerly deployed fathers, in general, are doing as well as children of the background population; however, the 11-year-old children of formerly deployed fathers are more challenged compared with children of the background population, both for subjective well-being and in having more conflicts with their parents.

Parental imprisonment has damaging effects on children’s lives and family relationships. Drawing on Morgan’s theories of family and on the sociology of childhood, this article argues that children of male prisoners actively construct relationships through family practices of display, intimacy and risk. Using the voices of children whose fathers are in prison, the article shows how this group of children may conform to, evade and resist practices of family, changing their relationships with their fathers. Further, as these theories on family and children typically are used in relation to middle-class families and to show how families are constructed and maintained, this article shows how family practices may also contribute to the reversal of parent–child relationships and the erosion of intimacy. The article draws on qualitative in-depth interview data from a Danish study of children and young people aged 5–27, whose fathers/stepfathers presently or previously are/were incarcerated.

Using a temporal lens, the article shows how fathers’ incarceration leads to a loss of attunement to the temporal rhythms of their children's everyday lives. This lack of synchrony has implications for both the being and the becoming of the child. Through in-depth interviews, the article draws on data from a Danish study of mothers and children, aged 5–27, whose father/stepfather was incarcerated. Findings show the significance of a multifaceted understanding of time showing the implications of fathers’ imprisonment for children, suggesting that policy initiatives would be enriched by a focus on challenges to synchrony from the child's perspective.

This chapter seeks to build on and extend the increasingly child-oriented perspective on prisoners’ children. It does so by focusing on the social exclusion experienced by this particular group of children, as social relationships are crucial to child well-being. The study is set in Denmark, where it is estimated that five to six per cent of every birth cohort experiences parental imprisonment during childhood and that the share of children facing this strain is similar to that of children taken into care or living in poverty. Thus, the chapter examines whether the child is socially excluded from important relationships in children’s lives, and less on the child’s encounter with the criminal justice system. This is done not only by adopting a child-centred perspective, but also by using children as informants in a survey from a representative sample of Danish children of prisoners.

This paper explores suburban middle-class residents’ narratives about housing choice, everyday life and belonging in residential areas of Greater Copenhagen, Denmark, to understand how residential processes of social differentiation are constituted. Using Savage et al.’s concepts of discursive reflexivity and elective belonging, the paper shows differences in similar residential areas between the narratives of university-educated and non-university-educated residents. This finding suggests that belonging in a residential area is closely linked to the cultural capital that people possess and not only to the area itself. In addition, rather than seeing suburban residential areas as homogenous, greater attention should be paid to differences within such areas.