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1. Introduction
The importance of families in adapting to new norms, addressing cultural traditions, providing socialisation, and helping to cope with daily challenges is beyond doubt; however, several scholars have suggested, in recent years, that family life can also be a source of stress [1], a battle ground for competitive co-parenting [2] or a trial in balancing parental goals and adolescents’ desire for autonomy [3]. Gazso and McDaniel [4], on the other hand, see families as a necessity for dealing with the constraints and structures of the neoliberal welfare state. How essential, and at the same time, difficult, family life may be, kin ties in contemporary Western societies are weakening [5,6,7]. In a paper on evolutionary sociology, Maryanski (in [8]) challenged “some long held beliefs in sociology about humans’ needs for extended kinship, intimate ties, collectivism and solidarity, arguing that human nature is, in fact, predisposed towards freedom, autonomy, restricted kinship networks, weak ties, and mobility in space” [5] (p. 419). Thick solidarity of close kinship bonds and collectivism is connected to existential hardship [9,10]. Conversely, thin solidarity is linked to individualism and the absent of such hardship [11]. The weakening of kin ties has created space for ambivalent commitments: the choice to support each other is feasible as much as the possibility not to do so. The social structures of solidarity are easily undermined, in spite of shared life events, but these structures can also be restored. Shared life events are not yet always possible because of geographic distances between family members and the changes in family composition, due to the transformations of family arrangements associated with divorces and migration [12,13].
Where Bauman [14,15] describes how the loss of solidarity that comes with the context of individualisation and detraditionalisation is connected to the ‘liquidity’ of love and life, Gazso and McDaniel [4] underline the protective features that families and wider social relationships have in dealing with the uncertainties of life in late modern societies, especially under neoliberal conditions. This raises the need for the strengthening of families and near communities in dealing with the precarity these conditions bring. Since 2009, an ongoing study has been conducted in The Netherlands in an attempt to reach out and reunite extremely marginalised people with their primary groups,...