‘Everybody’s Always Here with Me!’: Pandemic Proximity and the Lockdown Family

Social distancing has been the central public health strategy for tackling the coronavirus pandemic worldwide. But the ‘Stay Home, Stay Safe’ order in the United Kingdom and the consequent closure of nurseries and schools also created an unprecedented degree of proximity within households. Based on interviews with mothers of young children in Scotland, this article provides early insight into the ways that mothers manage the forced intimacies of family life under lockdown and the opportunities they create through the innovative management of space and time. The result is a more expansive understanding of the family in contemporary Scotland and a notion of intimacy characterised as much by the necessity of distance and distinction as by proximity and mutuality.