Affective Practices and Poverty in Family Life: An Analysis of Parental Narratives in Times of Austerity

ABSTRACT This article examines how parents living in poverty in Finland describe their daily family life. Drawing on affect theory and Wetherell's concept of affective practices, the study explores how emotions are enacted, circulated and embedded in daily routines of care, survival and encounters with welfare institutions. The data consist of 38 written narratives provided by parents experiencing financial hardship. The article asks: What kinds of affective practices do parents develop, and how do these affects connect to their agency under conditions of structural constraint? Reflexive thematic analysis identifies three interrelated affective formations: embodied endurance , affective resistance and the temporal horizon of hope and despair . Endurance manifests as a bodily and relational effort to sustain life in conditions of scarcity, wherein exhaustion intertwines with care and responsibility. Resistance emerges through emotions such as anger and moral justification, revealing friction with institutional power and policy control. Finally, hope and despair form an ambivalent temporal field in which parents imagine the future amid ongoing uncertainty. By tracing these affective practices, the article shows how poverty is lived not only as material deprivation but also as an affective labour that both constrains and sustains agency. The analysis demonstrates that austerity reshapes affective conditions as well as material resources, illustrating why social policy must attend to the emotional and relational consequences of welfare state restructuring.