Titles on our Children, Young People and Families list range from bestselling textbooks, including the Open University Childhood series, critical monographs such as those in the international Sociology of Children and Families series and the Families, Relationships and Societies journal.
Long-established, this interdisciplinary list brings together work across Childhood Studies, Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology. It supports students in their successful study, challenges current policy and practice and offers practical guidance to those working with children and young people in often difficult circumstances.
Children, Young People and Families
You are looking at 31 - 40 of 2,988 items
This chapter reflects upon the movement towards young people as drivers of social change in relation to research, policy, and practice. Young people are critical in influencing the reformation of youth provision and are recognised as experts in their own lived realities. Recent efforts have been made to ensure that young people have an active participatory voice in shaping service development. While the move towards such co-production and participation is commendable, it is equally important to be critical and reflexive of this process. This chapter challenges the current discourse around the notion of participation, focusing on the embedding of consultation and co-production with young people. Based on focus group interviews and creative methods, with over 90 young people this chapter highlights the relational processes and the unpredictable nature of research with young people.
This chapter builds on Lareau’s (2000, 2011) notion of ‘concerted cultivation’ to illuminate the ways in which the parents in the study marshalled structured leisure activities as sites for the holistic development of their children and to equip them with prized skills, connections and dispositions that will put them in good stead in higher education and the professional job market. However, unlike Lareau, the findings here reveal that in racialised middle-class contexts concerted cultivated through leisure carries both classed and racial connotations. The parents interviewed saw these organised activities as opportunities for their children to amass coveted soft skills, behavioural competencies and dominant species of cultural capital that are valued in the white majority settings in which they live and work. At the same time, they invested significant portions of their money, time and energy in enrolling their children in leisure lessons that can transmit ‘ethnic cultural capital’ linked to their Indian heritage. This chapter, therefore, expands our understanding of concerted cultivation ideologies – which have received much scholarly attention in recent years – by revealing how it contributes to class reproduction as well as ethnic and racial socialisation in ethnic minority middle-class families.
The concluding chapter draws together the insights presented in preceding chapters to reflect on the core question broached by the study in the first place, that is how race and class intersect, inflect and shape the everyday leisurescapes of middle-class British Indian children and their underpinning leisure-based parenting ideologies. In doing so, it outlines the key findings of the study, and delineate their contribution to contemporary debates within cultural sociology, sociology of education, childhood studies and parenting culture studies.
This chapter lays down the core theoretical premise of a ‘critical sociology of children’s leisure’ that draws on current debates within leisure studies as well as childhood studies and forges a conceptual ground for a critical analysis of middle-class British Indian children’s leisure geographies. It begins with a critique of the adult-centrism that lies at the heart of leisure theory, introducing key issues in childhood and leisure research, before moving on to the tripartite model for studying children’s leisure that forms the basis of the study with British Indian children. The arguments and conceptual schemes presented in this chapter have wider relevance for researchers working in this area especially in the global north.
This chapter foreground children’s lived experiences and understandings of their own leisure schedules to unpack how leisure mediates their engagement with the world around them. Relying on children’s and parents’ accounts, it directs attention to the way children negotiate leisure choices with parents and the idioms they deploy in classifying and evaluating various activities. Ideas of ‘fun’ and ‘boring’ resonate across child participants’ narratives, where these notions perform a range of political work in terms of shaping leisure schedules and attitudes of children. Moreover, from the vantage point of children’s perspective, the chapter reflects on how children draw on their class resources to play the leisure market in concert with their parents and establish their own status as consumers in the neoliberal marketplace of leisure options. Notwithstanding the class privileges that enable these children’s leisure behaviour, especially in the context of organised activities, their location in the racial hierarchy as ethnic minority subjects fractures these leisure spaces as they often find themselves at the receiving end of racial stereotypes and aggression from white peers. The way children deal with these racist incidents offers a window into the relational nature of their agency.
This chapter provides the context for this book – outlining its key conceptual issues and making a case for taking children’s leisure seriously. It shows how the study of leisure can offer a new point of entry into crucial sociological debates around identities, subjectivities and inequalities. The methodological approach underpinning the study is also discussed here alongside the ethical questions of researching the interior lives of racialised minority families.
This chapter adopts a temporal lens to explore time issues in participating families vis-à-vis leisure. Although time is widely invoked in definitions of leisure, our understanding of the way time is subjectively perceived and utilised in and for leisure in racialised middle-class settings is thin on the ground. This chapter addresses this gap by exploring key manifestations of time and leisure in participation families which pivot around notion of busyness and family time, navigation of ‘screen-time’ in relation to children’s digital leisure, and ‘alone time’ as an instantiation of solitary leisure. Each of these axes illuminate the way race and class inflect experiences of time within families, and how opportunities for various genres of leisure are carved out in relation to each other. By theorising leisure within families as ‘negotiated temporalities’, this chapter pushes current debates on time, family life and children’s everyday geographies into new directions
Children’s leisure lives are changing, with increasing dominance of organised activities and screen-based leisure. These shifts have reconfigured parenting practices too. However, our current understandings of these processes are race-blind and based mostly on the experiences of white middle-class families.
Drawing on an innovative study of middle-class British Indian families, this book brings children’s and parents’ voices to the forefront and bridges childhood studies, family studies and leisure studies to theorise children’s leisure from a fresh perspective.
Demonstrating the salience of both race and class in shaping leisure cultures within middle-class racialised families, this is an invaluable contribution to key sociological debates around leisure, childhoods and parenting ideologies.
This chapter focuses on how leisure practices mediate children’s social relationships as well as the mechanisms through which community-based British Indian leisure arrangements direct place-making within the urban multiculture of Greater London and reinforce the role of diasporic groups as agents of city-making and transformation of urban socialities. Given London’s history as a preeminent migrant city, collective acts of leisuring mounted through the voluntary effort of middle-class British Indians reinscribe the social and cultural geographies of the city and help educate ethnic others and next generation of British Indians about their distinct cultural practices and intangible heritage. These insights further underscore the fact that leisure in the lives of middle-class Indian diasporic families cannot be reduced to individual psychological dimensions alone.
In this article, I discuss the development of a child protection system that too often seems to harm rather than help those who are most marginalised, despite countless attempts at reform and reimagining over the decades on the part of so many progressives including feminists. While the focus is mainly on England, many of the developments there are by no means unique, as I will highlight. I focus, especially, on the issues that have emerged in the arena of domestic abuse where those who are often the most harmed are not able to tell not just of the harm, but of what they consider they can do to mitigate it. It can often appear, therefore, that a system has been constructed where abused women are collateral damage in a project that ‘saves’ their children! In this article, I discuss the need for perspectives informed by intersectionality, transformative justice and restorative processes so that we might widen circles of support, voice and accountability.
