Childhoods past and present: anxiety and idyll in reminiscences of childhood outdoor play and contemporary parenting practices

ABSTRACT

Outdoor play is considered an essential aspect of a ‘proper childhood’. However, unsupervised outside play is declining, a decline attributed to parental anxieties about children’s safety. However what drives these anxieties and how this impacts on contemporary outdoor play is less clear. Our paper seeks to explore this through an analysis of adult narratives generated through digital map-making and forum discussion about where they played as children and where they would allow a child to play unsupervised now. Our analysis explores the nature of these narratives and pivotal moments in which adults articulated the disconnect between their own recollections of idyllic spatial freedom and the spatial restrictions they place on contemporary children. This offers a rich understanding of how parents navigate conflicting cultural imperatives on risk-avoidance and children’s rights to a ‘good’ childhood.     

Playing,parenting and family leisure in parks: exploring emotional geographies of families in Guangzhou Children’s Park,China

ABSTRACT

Children’s leisure activities in parks have attracted increasing scholarly interest in recent decades. However, relatively little attention has been given to the emotional needs and responses of children to their activities within a park’s play spaces. Moreover, what parents perceive, and how they themselves engage within children’s playing spaces, is under-studied. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in the Guangzhou Children’s Park, China, this paper aims to explore the experiences of both children and parents within this particular playing space. Supplementing participant observations with interviews and analysis of reviews on the Internet, the paper finds that children obtain a sense of family and company from their parents’ presence, and parents recall memories of their own childhood and obtain emotional recovery by visiting parks with their children. The findings suggest that play spaces are not only places where children play, but also where family life and childhood are ‘built’. The paper contributes to the existing literature by highlighting and examining the ‘child–parent’ relationship within playing spaces. By conducting a case study of a non-Western society, the paper encourages researchers to examine ‘child–parent’ relationships in a family leisure context, and to explore the everyday and emotional geographies of family life in contemporary China.     

‘Nature makes people happy,that’s what it sort of means:’ children’s definitions and perceptions of nature in rural Northwestern Ontario

ABSTRACT

Nature exposure positively impacts children’s physical, socio-emotional, and cognitive health and development. We know less about how children perceive their connection with nature and what nature means to them. This study uses focus groups to understand how rural Canadian children define, experience, and perceive benefits of nature. Using thematic analysis, we identified three primary themes. First, while children associate nature with specific activities, natural elements, and locations, they also conceptualize nature as ‘a whole community.’ Second, children experienced nature through doing, highlighting how activities connected them with nature while recognizing constraints on those engagements. Finally, children demonstrated agency in accessing nature to improve their emotional states. These findings indicate that from children’s views, nature is more than just space with natural elements. Children are also knowledgeable about the health benefits of nature, and capitalize on this knowledge. These findings can inform interventions to increase children’s interactions with outdoor environments.     

The Khat ban in the UK: What about the ‘scientific’ evidence? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Since the 1920s certain psychoactive substances have been controlled by specially created international agencies. More recently, governments have committed themselves to using evidence in policy‐making. Yet, as the ban on khat in the UK and other countries shows, the assessment process is a perfunctory rather than a decisive component. The Home Secretary set aside scientific advice and bases the decision to ban on considerations outside the health risk ratio, including crime control and counter‐terrorism. However, experience shows that prohibiting substances when demand remains strong is inherently criminogenic. Indeed, the khat ban would appear to play into the hands of radical Islamist organizations. In this article, Axel Klein discusses how political calculations overrule evidence and how this is facilitated by international drug control agencies. Using the term ‘social system’ to explain the relentless extension of bureaucratic remit, he argues that control would now appear inevitable for any substance defined as a drug, regardless of evidence and consequence. As this has implications for other culture‐bound peculiar substances or ‘genussmittel’ he suggests ditching the term ‘drug’ altogether.     

Women’s Movements and Challenges to Neopatrimonial Rule: Preliminary Observations from Africa

Women’s movements in Africa represent one of the key societal forces challenging state clientelistic practices, the politicization of communal differences, and personalized rule. In the 1980s and 1990s we have witnessed not only the demise of patronage‐based women’s wings that were tied to ruling parties, but also the concurrent growth of independent women’s organizations with more far‐reaching agendas. The emergence of such autonomous organizations has been a consequence of the loss of state legitimacy, the opening‐up of political space, economic crisis, and the shrinking of state resources. Drawing on examples from Africa, this article shows why independent women’s organizations and movements have often been well situated to challenge clientelistic practices tied to the state. Gendered divisions of labour, gendered organizational modes and the general exclusion of women from both formal and informal political arenas have defined women’s relationship to the state, to power, and to patronage. These characteristics have, on occasion, put women’s movements in a position to challenge various state‐linked patronage practices. The article explores some of the implications of these challenges.     

Tracing children’s politics

This article sets out to conceptualize children’s political agency and the spaces of children’s politics by addressing children’s politics in official settings and everyday contexts. The study is based on research concerning child and youth policies and the politics played out in children’s everyday life practices. To demonstrate how childhood policies typically seek to involve children in politics, we discuss recent legislative developments related to building a parliamentary apparatus for children’s participation in Finland. We propose that not all children are able to, or willing to, participate actively in this kind of political action, and that all issues important to children can not be processed through (semi)official arenas such as school councils, children’s parliaments and civic organizations. Thus, we agree with scholarship portraying children as political agents also in their everyday environments and on their own terms. To further conceptualize these mundane politics, we propose a model for identifying different modes and spaces of children’s agency in terms of political involvement and political presence. We conclude by discussing the challenges of studying everyday political geographies in childhood.     

The public playground paradox: ‘child’s joy’ or heterotopia of fear?

ABSTRACT

Literature depicts children of the Global North withdrawing from public space to ‘acceptable islands’. Driven by fears both of and for children, the public playground – one such island – provides clear-cut distinctions between childhood and adulthood. Extending this argument, this paper takes the original approach of theoretically framing the playground as a heterotopia of deviance, examining – for the first time – three Greek public playground sites in relation to adjacent public space. Drawing on an ethnographic study in Athens, findings show fear to underpin surveillance, control and playground boundary porosity. Normative classification as ‘children’s space’ discourages adult engagement. However, in a novel and significant finding, a paradoxical phenomenon sees the playground’s presence simultaneously legitimizing playful behaviour in adjacent public space for children and adults. Extended playground play creates alternate orderings and negotiates norms and hierarchies, suggesting significant wider potential to reconceptualise playground-urban design for an intergenerational public realm.     

Children’s independence: a conceptual argument for connecting the conduct of everyday life and learning in Finland

This paper discusses children’s independence as a conceptual framework for exploring how independence in children’s everyday life relates to learning in the Finnish context. The framework is articulated using the conduct of everyday life as a theoretical base and focuses on the sociocultural aspects of informal daily life such as periods when children are at home without direct adult supervision as potentially important learning environments. Independence is also linked to discourses on educational success, self-regulated learning and children’s independent mobility. Discussion is supported by results from a survey conducted in Finland exploring parental perceptions of their children’s level of independence and children’s spatial movement and routines. The conceptual arguments made and preliminary findings summarized point to children’s independence in the conduct of everyday life as an additional factor to consider when exploring the impact of sociocultural factors on the development of self-regulated learners.     

‘Anti–Mini Militants Meet Modern Misses’: Urban Style,Gender and the Politics of ‘National Culture’ in 1960s Dar es Salaam,Tanzania

This essay examines a 1968–9 campaign by Tanzania’s ruling party Youth League to outlaw mini–skirts and other ‘indecent’ fashions as ‘decadent’ affronts to Tanzanian ‘national culture’. It situates the intense, public debate on the campaign both in terms of the state’s contested national cultural project, and in relation to intersecting anxieties about shifts in women’s work and mobility in urban space, and the politics of sex in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. Arguing that ‘the city’ ndash; both as an imagined space and as the site of particular, gendered social struggles – is central to understanding the campaign, the essay charts attempts by the ban’s opponents to fashion viable personas and notes the limits of these attempts.     

It's safe: food as a way of expression for children in Warsaw

ABSTRACT

The role of food in family relations is often discussed with a focus on discipline and control. This paper shows how food can also be used to create children’s safe spaces, defined as the social conditions that allow relatively independent expression of opinions, emotions and practices. Based on ethnographic research conducted with families in Warsaw in 2012–2013, I discuss different ways in which food is used to create and express such safe spaces. Firstly, I look at how children use food to create their own, personal and hidden safe space, in opposition to parental rule. Secondly, I analyse how food is used to build a safe space between adults and children. I argue that within often antagonistic family food relations there is in fact a space for children’s expression. Thirdly, I discuss the role of food in creating safe spaces for children during the research process. This paper takes a relational approach to the concept of safe space, and considers what kind of social relations and processes enable children’s autonomous expression with the means of food.     

Grasslands as transitional spaces of play: Mongol children’s reimagination of the world in cinematic representation

ABSTRACT

This article examines children’s geographies in cinematic representation. It argues that cinematic landscape that intimates what D. W. Winnicott conceives as ‘transitional space’ contributes to a cinematic rendering of the otherness of childhood. Taking the Chinese movie Mongolian Ping-Pong (2005, dir. Ning Hao) as a case study, this article illustrates how the cinematic space of the grasslands is transformed into multiple transitional spaces of play for the Mongol child protagonists owing to the filmmaker’s employment of cinematic landscape, while a ping-pong ball discovered by one of the children becomes their ‘transitional object’. In transitional spaces, the children safely and creatively manipulate cultural resources of diverse scales to understand the social-cultural identity of the ball. Consequently, their unique vision of the world unfolds. The filmmaker’s cinematic treatment reveals his celebration of the children’s creativity. He sympathises that they cannot escape from acculturation once they start formal schooling in a Han-dominated society.     

Unequal Knowledges in Jharkhand,India: De‐Romanticizing Women’s Agroecological Expertise

Taking the Jharkhand region of India as a case study, this article uses empirical data to intervene in ‘women, environment and development’ and ecofeminist debates regarding women’s environmental knowledge. The article first outlines the adoption of gender/environmental issues into development planning and considers the dangers of overestimating women’s agroecological knowledges and assuming that they can easily participate in development projects. It then highlights the local complexities of environmental knowledge possession and control with reference to gender and other variations in agricultural participation, decision‐making and knowledge transfers between villagers’ natal and marital places. Particular emphasis is placed on the economic, socio‐cultural and ‘actor’ related factors that supplement gender as an influence on task allocation, decision‐making, knowledge distribution and knowledge articulation. The article concludes that given the socio‐cultural constraints women face in accumulating and vocalizing environmental knowledge, simplistic participatory approaches are unlikely to empower them. Instead, more flexible, site‐specific development initiatives (coupled with wider structural change) are required if opportunities are to be created for women to develop and use their agroecological knowledges.     

Understanding children’s neighbourhood destinations: presenting the Kids-PoND framework

ABSTRACT

Children interact with and are greatly affected by their neighbourhoods. This research aims to understand the places children go in their neighbourhood and their perceptions of them. A child-centred approach was used to map destinations and ask open-ended survey questions, using Maptionnaire (a public participation geographic information system (PPGIS) mapping software). Overall, 1102 children aged 7–13 years, from 19 schools in Auckland, New Zealand participated. PPGIS destinations were mapped with parks, unhealthy food outlets and advertising to contextualise children’s neighbourhood destinations. We developed and present here the Kids-PoND (Kids- Perceptions of Neighbourhood Destinations) framework for understanding children’s perceptions and use of neighbourhood destinations. We found parks with a variety of options for active play and socialisation are important to children as are shops where children consumed unhealthy food and drink. Our findings have implications for public health, town planning, children and their parents and schools.     

A new map of Qâni’ (Yemen)

Qâni’, the main seaport for the export of goods from South Arabia, was founded by the Hadramawt kingdom in the first century BC. A geomorphological survey and a general surface reconnaissance of Qâni’ have revealed a new image of the site. Originally a royal entrepôt in a fortress on an ancient island, separated from the mainland by a silted channel lined with a mangrove forest, Qâni’ gradually grew and spread around the beach fronting the mooring place of the trade ships that arrived by sea. Sacred spaces, cemeteries, dwellings and trade quarters appear to be well‐defined areas forming a real town within the limits imposed by the surrounding sea.     

Nonsense and possibility: ambiguity,rupture and reproduction in children’s play/ful narratives

ABSTRACT

Play has been widely acknowledged as a site of important processes in children’s lives, ranging from socialisation to subjectification. Little empirical work, however, has focused on the particular features of play that mobilise criticality and contestation, or that alternately enable the micro-politics of exclusion. This article draws on school-based research in the west of Ireland with young children from migrant and non-migrant backgrounds. Centring on understandings of generational, gendered and raced belongings, it examines children’s narratives of play and playful narratives that de/reconstruct positionings in peer contexts and in broader societal spaces. More specifically, it explores how the in-between and ambiguous character of children’s play practices and playful speech contribute to such multiple sites of becoming. It concludes with a suggestion for further adult engagement with these play/ful political practices, and for consideration of potential links to ‘large p’ politics in children’s lives.     

Young children’s use of an augmented reality sandbox to enhance spatial thinking

ABSTRACT

Augmented reality (AR) technology is being introduced in educational settings for its ability to overlay virtual information onto physical environments. The AR Sandbox is a conventional sandbox with depth coloured representations projected onto the sand’s surface. This research investigates how 4- and 5-year-old Australian children use an AR Sandbox to enhance their spatial thinking through play. Participants were four children, their two educators and the first author as a participant-observer researcher. Data were collected over an 8-week period during 2015 and included observation, child conferencing, photography, educators’ perspectives, and the researcher’s perspectives. Vignettes are presented to demonstrate how children’s spatial thinking was enhanced through exploration and representation in the AR Sandbox. Children’s active and dynamic manipulation of the space of the AR Sandbox, along with a range of socio-cultural contexts and tools, assisted in enhancing their spatial abilities.     

Changing recess geographies: children’s perceptions of a schoolyard renovation project promoting physical activity

ABSTRACT

Insights into children’s perceptions of their changing recess geographies are absent. The current paper provides qualitative evidence from 5 renewed schoolyards by investigating children’s perceptions of their new schoolyards. Ten focus groups (2 at each school) including go-along interviews were conducted, in total 57 4 to 8 graders (28 girls). The functional aspects of the altered child–environment relationship were assessed using Gibson’s concept of affordance, and changes in the meanings ascribed to the schoolyards by the children were studied by engaging a concept of place. Our findings reveal that schoolyards offering multiple potential affordances for physical activity seem more likely to engage a broader group of children in recess physical activity. The analysis, however, could point to a difference between places designed for children’s play and places where children actually play. To optimise actualisation of the potential affordances for recess physical activity, involving children throughout intervention planning and decision-making is crucial.     

An intergenerational qualitative study of the good parenting ideal and active free play during middle childhood

ABSTRACT

This study addressed the question: How and why has the good parenting ideal changed in relation to active free play (AFP) during middle childhood? Twenty-eight middle class and predominantly white adults (14 grandparent-parent dyads) completed individual semi-structured interviews. Data were subjected to a thematic analysis. Two themes (changing expectations for parental involvement in children's lives and increasing expectations to involve children in structured activities) depicted how the good parenting ideal has changed. A further two themes (news media influence on perceptions of safety and concerns about being judged on social media) explained some of the reasons why the good parenting ideal has changed. Perceived needs for parental involvement, supervision, and organized activities appear to contradict the notion of active free play. It may be useful to develop initiatives that are consistent with the good parenting ideal, and to examine parents’ use of traditional and social media in future AFP research.