Favoured Free-time: Comparing Children’s Activity Preferences in the UK and the USA

Abstract

This study presents a comparative study of the free‐time activity preferences of 9‐ to 11‐year‐old children in the UK and USA, as drawn by them in art workshops. Six themes emerged relating to sport, outdoor play, family/peers, media, special occasions and other (indefinable) activities. The children’s talk about their drawings revealed additional preferences for ‘obsessive hobbies’, ‘doing nothing’, relationships with others, and the local environment. Whilst the emergent patterns displayed strong cross‐cultural similarities in free‐time activity choices and participation, as well as compliance with the conventional construction of ‘childhood’, the findings were context‐specific and locally inflected.

We Make the Road by Walking: Challenging Conceptualisations of Leisure Time for Children in Poverty

“…The relationality of the ways in which children in poverty experience their time as valuable is very remarkable, because the children shape and give meaning to their regimes of time in interaction with significant others, such as adults in their lives. These findings contradict the assumptions at play in the ways in which the issue of leisure time have been theorised as ‘free‐time’ by several authors, such as Griffiths (: 191), who refers to the issue of ‘free‐time’ as the ways in which children ‘elect to spend their free‐time’, defined by Mayall (:133) as ‘a time out of adult control’. In our findings, the notion of ‘free‐time’ rather refers to processes of meaning‐making in which children challenge taken‐for‐granted divisions of time and imagine a socially just future, as interdependent human beings who are involved in ongoing processes of meaning‐making and learning with adults and other children in their everyday lives.…”

Children’s Play—The Educator’s Opinion

“…Šagud recognizes a threat to children's play in the extreme roles of educators at each end of this spectrum-namely in directive behavior and disinterest [5]. Griffiths agrees, warning of different ways in which adults control children's play, especially their outdoor play [43,45]. It is therefore justifiable to investigate how educators see their personal roles in children's play.…”

Extracurricular activities and the development of social skills in children with intellectual and specific learning disabilities

“…Also, typically developing children move away from engagement in structured activities and increase their participation in unstructured activities during pre‐adolescence. Griffiths () observed a preference for unstructured, casual and informal unstructured activities in children between the ages of 9 and 11, which was related to a decrease in the level of parental involvement or adult construction of their activities. Conversely, Abells et al .…”