“It seems that things take care of themselves”: routines as resources for the management of busy family life.

Domestic routines are resources that weave the threads of everyday family life. Without them, each day would need to be reinvented and each action arranged, explicated and clarified every time, leaving family life chaotic and unmanageable. In this study we analyze how 15 working mothers talk about the ways in which routines contribute to sustaining the accomplishment of busy domestic lives. Through a functional analysis of narratives produced within focus groups, we identify some of the ways in which routines support the accomplishment of domestic work. In particular, we will analyze their function of coordinating multiple lines of activity, their property of anticipating the unexpected and incorporating alternative responses, and their character of being a local resource for practical thinking and action. We then discuss the role that moral personal positioning and ideologies of parenthood, time management and efficiency might have in accounting for the variety and diversification of routines among families.