The Family Living Room: A Child's Playpen?

For a long time, the Dutch family living room has been the most prestigious domestic space, reflecting in its furnishing and decoration the status and class of the male breadwinner without any material indication of the presence of children in the household. In the latter part of the twentieth century, children were increasingly acknowledged as family members in their own right and allowed to extend their play into the living room. More recently, the situation has developed into the extreme opposite of the pristine family living rooms of yore. Nowadays, with baby equipment visibly predominant, the living room of a young family looks more like a day-care center, the playpen taking a focal position, surrounded by large toys and baby furniture. This article presents a sociological explanation of the material transformation of the living room in its relation to the rise in labor participation of young Dutch mothers over the last two decades, as well as a cultural interpretation of the material living room as a reflection of Dutch family life in the twentieth century.