Enriching Children, Institutionalizing Childhood? Geographies of Play, Extracurricular Activities, and Parenting in England

Abstract

Geographical research on children, youth, and families has done much to highlight the ways in which children's lives have changed over the last twenty-five years. A key strand of research concerns children's play and traces, in the Global North, a decline in children's independent access to, and mobility through, public space. This article shifts the terrain of that debate from an analysis of what has been lost to an exploration of what has replaced it. Specifically, it focuses on children's participation in enrichment activities, including both individual and collective extracurricular sporting, cultural, and leisure opportunities in England. The research reveals that middle-class children have much higher participation rates in enrichment activities than their working-class counterparts. Parents value enrichment activities in very similar ways across the class spectrum-seeing them as fun, healthy, and social opportunities. The ability to pay for enrichment, however, means that it is incorporated into, and transforms, middle-class family life in ways not open to working-class families. Nevertheless, support across the class spectrum for these instrumental forms of play that institutionalize childhood in school, community, and commercial spaces leads to calls for subsidized provision for low-income children through schools. The article thus traces the "enrichment" and "institutionalization" of childhood and draws out the implications of this for how we think about play, education, parenting, and class in geography.La investigación geográfica relacionada con niños, jóvenes y familias ha contribuido mucho en destacar las maneras como las vidas de los chicos han cambiado durante los pasados veinticinco años. Un cabo clave de la investigación a este respecto se relaciona con el juego de los niños e indica, en el Norte Global, una declinación en el acceso independiente de los niños al espacio público y a su movilidad a través del mismo. Este artículo cambia el escenario del debate, remplazando el análisis sobre lo que se ha perdido con una exploración de aquello que lo ha remplazado. Se enfoca específicamente en la participación de los niños en actividades enriquecedoras en Inglaterra, incluyendo a la vez oportunidades individuales y colectivas extracurriculares en aspectos deportivos, culturales y de esparcimiento. La investigación revela que los niños de clase media tienen tasas de participación mucho más altas en actividades de enriquecimiento que sus contrapartes de la clase obrera. Los padres valoran las actividades enriquecedoras de modo muy similar a través del espectro de clases-considerándolas como oportunidades divertidas, saludables y sociales. Sin embargo, la capacidad de pagar por el enriquecimiento significa su incorporación en la vida de la familia de clase media, transformándola, en términos no accesibles para las familias de clase obrera. No obstante, el apoyo que se presta a través del espectro de clase para estas formas

Changing children's geographies

“…Middle-class children have higher participation rates: 98% participate in at least 1 activity per week, with 79% taking part in 3 or more and 42% in 5 or more per week. Working-class children have lower participation rates: 74% are involved in 2 or fewer activities per week, with 22% participating in none at all (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2014a).…”

“…Financial costs were not the only ones involved, however, as children's participation involved a considerable amount of work for parents, in particular mothers, including sourcing and booking activities, preparing children and kit for attendance, chauffeuring them to activities and sometimes watching them participate in, and helping to organise, their enrichment activity (Mattsson 2002;Lareau and Weininger 2008). The implication was that children's activities shaped many middle-class families' use of time-space, producing busy social lives for the children, and often frenetic (though sometimes sociable) caring work for the parents (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2014a).…”

“…Moreover, the clubs were also seen to have longer term benefits for children's social and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986), as they extended children's social networks beyond their primary schools, at the same time as they developed their social skills (e.g. coping without parents, mixing harmoniously, teamwork, being a good winner and loser) (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2014a). This enthusiasm for enrichment activities was tempered by appreciation of another core feature of contemporary parenting discourses, that parents should be responsive to the needs of their child (Furedi 2008;Hays 1996), and our interviews with parents and children highlighted the importance of children's views in decisions about which and how many clubs they attended.…”

Three playgrounds: Researching the multiple geographies of children’s outdoor play

“…We suggest, therefore, that the differential usage/experiences of the playgrounds can be understood as significant articulations, constituents and manifestations of multiple, cross-cutting, local geographies of childhood, community in/exclusion and childcare cultures (Holloway, 1998;Matthews and Tucker, 2007;Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2014;Visser et al, 2015). While social-cultural geographies of outdoor play have been widely evidenced in geographical scholarship (Thomson and Philo, 2004;Thomson, 2005), we are particularly struck by the localised differentiation of play encountered in our study: such that quite distinctive social-material-affective geographies of outdoor play were evident at three similar playgrounds, just two miles apart.…”

Jives, jeans and Jewishness? Moral geographies, atmospheres and the politics of mixing at the Jewish Lads’ Brigade & Club 1954–1969

“…Brigade is still active across the UK as a fully co-educational space, but one that has retained its religious identity or 'atmosphere' as part of an increasingly competitive landscape of 'extra-curricular activities' (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2014). Other youth organisations, such as the Scout Association, have become increasingly 'fuzzy' or secular (or at least less overtly Christian) in an attempt to welcome those from non-Christian faiths (Mills 2012) and are now fully co-educational.…”