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Enriching children, institutionalizing childhood? Geographies of play, extracurricular activities, and parenting in England

Version 2 2020-10-22, 09:58
Version 1 2014-04-03, 09:58
journal contribution
posted on 2020-10-22, 09:58 authored by Sarah HollowaySarah Holloway, Helena Pimlott-WilsonHelena Pimlott-Wilson
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. © 2014 Copyright © Sarah L. Holloway and Helena Pimlott-Wilson. Published by Taylor & Francis.

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) [grant number RES-000-22-4095]. It was written up during Professor Sarah Holloway's British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship.

History

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

Volume

104

Issue

3

Pages

613 - 627

Citation

HOLLOWAY, S.L. and PIMLOTT-WILSON, H., 2014. Enriching children, institutionalizing childhood? Geographies of play, extracurricular activities, and parenting in England. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104 (3), pp. 613 - 627.

Publisher

© Sarah L. Holloway and Helena Pimlott-Wilson. Published by Taylor & Francis

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Acceptance date

2013-05-01

Publication date

2014-01-16

Notes

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ISSN

0004-5608

eISSN

1467-8306

Language

  • en

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