Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Table
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Critical Sociology of Children’s Leisure: A Framework
- 3 Concerted Cultivation the Indian Way? Organised Leisure and Racial Parenting Strategy
- 4 The Fun, the Boring and the Racist Name Calling: How Children Make Sense of Their Leisure Geographies
- 5 Negotiated Temporalities: Leisure, Time-Use and Everyday Life
- 6 Relating, Place-Making and the Cultural Politics of Leisuring
- 7 Concluding Thoughts
- References
- Index
3 - Concerted Cultivation the Indian Way? Organised Leisure and Racial Parenting Strategy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Table
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Critical Sociology of Children’s Leisure: A Framework
- 3 Concerted Cultivation the Indian Way? Organised Leisure and Racial Parenting Strategy
- 4 The Fun, the Boring and the Racist Name Calling: How Children Make Sense of Their Leisure Geographies
- 5 Negotiated Temporalities: Leisure, Time-Use and Everyday Life
- 6 Relating, Place-Making and the Cultural Politics of Leisuring
- 7 Concluding Thoughts
- References
- Index
Summary
The burgeoning trend of middle-class children's participation in a panoply of organised leisure activities in the global north has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. This is largely due to the fact that this genre of children's everyday leisure has been identified to completement school education in reproducing class advantages across generation by equipping children with coveted competencies and extra-curricular achievements that can put them in good stead in higher education and professional job market in the future. Just as middle-class parents in Britain play the choice-based school education market (Ball, 2003; Reay 2017, 2010), they also exploit the children's leisure market to garner further positional advantage for their children in an unequal, class-stratified society. These efforts are said to be situated within a broader middle-class cultural logic of child-rearing that Lareau (2000) terms ‘concerted cultivation’ wherein parents come to view their children as projects to be developed in a concerted fashion. In effect, parental efforts at supporting their children's education and leisure lives are increasingly framed as an ‘investment’ into the child's future where the latter are seen as ‘an educational and developmental project’ (Irwin and Elley, 2011: 481) for the parents to work on. A growing body of literature is now replete with instances of how middle-class parents enrol their children into multiple extracurricular activities as part of this wider strategy of social class reproduction as children are exposed to opportunities to learn skills, build networks and expand their cultural repertoires beyond their formal school curriculum (Devine, 2004; Vincent and Ball, 2007; Pugh, 2009; Kremer-Sadlik et al, 2010; Nelson, 2010; Lareau, 2011; Friedman, 2013; Reay, 2017; Wheeler, 2018; Wheeler and Green, 2019). Parental spending in this regard shows sizable quantitative differences across social classes as those with higher disposable income are more likely to enrol their children in these paid-for activities (The Sutton Trust, 2014; Schneider et al, 2018). However, this growing body of work on concerted cultivation has largely downplayed the importance of race and ethnicity and consequently fallen short of developing a nuanced understanding of how race and class intersect when it comes to middle-class child-rearing approaches (Manning, 2019; Delale-O’Connor et al, 2020). This is where this chapter intervenes, by exploring concerted cultivation strategies vis-a-vis children's organised activities within middle-class British Indian families through the joint lens of race and class.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Race, Class, Parenting and Children's LeisureChildren's Leisurescapes and Parenting Cultures in Middle-Class British Indian Families, pp. 43 - 65Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023