Family studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

For the last four years I have worked in a nursery room for two- and three-year-olds, and I have spent a lot of that time talking to parents in the doorway. The same subjects come round again and again: shift patterns that do not fit the funded hours, grandparents doing three days of childcare a week, a mother worried that her son is the only child in the room whose father lives elsewhere. I began to notice that the difficulties families brought to us were rarely about individual parenting at all. They were about housing, transport, work contracts and what people assumed a family should look like. That is what made me want to study family life properly rather than just absorb it in passing. Family studies attracts me because it takes the household seriously as a place where wider social arrangements are worked out. I want to understand how ideas of obligation and care are shaped, why unpaid work inside families is distributed as it is, and how policy assumes a family structure that many people do not have. I am also interested in how definitions have changed: what counted as kinship for my grandmother's generation is not what my own children will recognise. I am not coming to this to confirm what I already think. My Access course has already unsettled several of my assumptions, particularly about what the evidence actually shows regarding family structure and children's outcomes, and I would rather be argued out of a comfortable view than left with it.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I am studying an Access to Higher Education Diploma in Social Science at my local college, with units in sociology, psychology and research methods. Returning to formal study at 35 was harder than I expected in terms of habits rather than ability: I had to relearn how to read academically, how to plan an essay before writing it, and how to accept that a first draft is not finished work. My sociology tutor's feedback on referencing was blunt and useful, and my marks have improved steadily across the year. The methods unit has been the most valuable part. I completed a small assignment designing a questionnaire on household division of domestic tasks, and discovered how easily my own wording pushed respondents towards the answers I anticipated. Rewriting it taught me more about bias than any reading had. In the sociology unit I wrote about the changing family and used Ann Oakley's work on housework as unpaid labour to think about why domestic tasks are still counted differently from paid employment. Alongside the course I have been reading beyond the set list, including work on the sociology of personal life, which introduced me to the idea of 'families of choice' and made me reconsider how narrowly I had been defining relatedness. I hold A-levels in English Literature, Geography and General Studies from 2006, and although they are some years old, the English in particular gave me a habit of close reading that I have been glad to recover.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

My paid work has all involved people. I spent eight years in a supermarket, several of them on the customer service desk, where I dealt with complaints, refunds and the sort of long conversations that arise when someone has had a bad week. It taught me to stay steady when a situation is tense and to listen for what a person is actually asking for. Since 2020 I have worked as a nursery assistant, now three days a week around college. That role involves daily observation records, handover conversations with parents and sitting in on meetings where a child's progress is discussed with outside professionals. I have seen how carefully information about a family has to be handled, and how differently the same household can be described by different services. On Wednesday mornings I help run a toddler group at a community centre near us. I set up, make the tea, and increasingly find myself signposting people to the food bank, the local library's baby rhyme time or the health visitor. The group is the only place some of the parents speak to another adult all week, which has shown me plainly how much informal support does that no service is funded to do. At home I share care of my two children with my partner, whose hours are irregular, so our week is a constant negotiation of who covers what. Studying part of the time from the kitchen table has made me organised, and I have no illusions about the effort a degree will take.

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