Amid ongoing transformations of welfare state institutions—marked by managerial governance and shifting normative expectations—family life emerges as a critical site for examining the intersection of social policy and everyday practice. This paper explores how care, upbringing, and participation are negotiated within families navigating institutional demands in everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic and practice-research with children and parents, the analysis foregrounds the subjective meanings of structural conditions for everyday family life.

The presentation includes a Danish case study of an early childhood intervention targeting minority ethnic children and their parents. Termed the ‘mandatory learning programme’, this initiative exemplifies contemporary European policy efforts to enhance children’s future school performance and combat inequality. Through document analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, the study investigates how political representations of social problems are translated into everyday interventions—and how these interventions shape, and are shaped by, familial routines and relationships.

Findings reveal that while the programme aims to foster inclusion, it paradoxically risks reinforcing exclusion by placing demands that challenge parents’ ability to sustain engagement in education and employment. By theorizing the micropolitics of everyday life, the paper contributes to a nuanced understanding of how broader political and institutional dynamics materialize in daily conditions, and how familial narratives offer insight into contemporary configurations of welfare, responsibility, and social inclusion.