Introduction: Special issue on children, families and leisure – part three

As editors, we initially anticipated only one special issue to showcase the changing definitions and conceptualisations of families, children and leisure. Little did we know that we would end up accepting 18 papers and creating a three-part special issue on this topic. On reflection, and without repeating our earlier editorials from parts one and two of the issue and the subsequent book publication (Schänzel and Carr 2016), much can be gained from the diversity of the families studied, and the innovative research approaches taken. No doubt there is much room for further advancement, but the seeds have been sown for family, children and leisure studies to spread into more diverse research areas. The papers in this special issue have been global in their reach, encompassing Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. However, they have mainly been based on research undertaken in relatively wealthy and ‘Western’ countries. This may reflect both the history of leisure studies and the location of the authors. However, it also clearly highlights the need for new work that examines the leisure experiences of families and children outside of the West and in less wealthy countries where the social and cultural conditions may be different.

While the papers in all the parts of this special issue have predominantly focused on ‘middle class’ and ‘traditional’ nuclear families, a trend towards recognizing a wider diversity of families is apparent. For example, in this part of the special issue, the leisure of youth with disabilities has been examined by Duquette et al., while the leisure of LGB young people (Trussell, Xing, and Oswald 2015) was examined in part two and the travel motivations and destination choices of gay and lesbian parented families was examined in part one by Lucena, Jarvis, and Weeden (2015). Papers in this special issue by Mikkelsen and Blichfeldt (2015), and Karsten and Felder (2015) also break away from the middle class focus to examine the leisure of working class families. Future research in the field of families, children and leisure needs to explore the social, cultural and economic diversity of families and the lives of the people who inhabit them in the twenty-first century. It needs to recognize that leisure is not restricted to the middle classes or traditional nuclear families.

The voices presented within families are becoming more inclusive, reflecting the more active participation of children and adolescents within research and family life. Three of the five contributions in this part of the special issue are either solely focused on children as active social agents or are inclusive of their active voices, something that would not have been probable only a decade ago when, almost exclusively, across the social sciences adults (mainly mothers) were asked to speak on behalf, supposedly, of their children (Blichfeldt et al. 2010; Corsaro 2005; Gram 2007). Changes in the way family and children-oriented research is conducted in leisure studies and the foci of this work are signs that the study area has reached a level of maturity in terms of its paradigmatic approach, scale, depth and reach.

While signs of maturity in the research field are apparent something is still puzzling and is reflected in this part of the special issue: who is doing the research on children and families in leisure in general but especially in tourism? In particular, what is the gender of the researchers? The authors who have contributed to this special issue seem to be symptomatic of a wider trend, with women dominating the field, with some notable exceptions (e.g. Carr 2011; Jenkins 2009; Wearing et al. 2015). This leads us to raise the matter of whether children and families in leisure are identifiable as mainly a women’s research topic. If this is true, questions need to be asked about why this is the case and if it is a healthy situation. On the surface, a research field dominated by women may appear to be a good thing; something that exists in the face of historical (and regrettably still current in too many areas) discrimination. However, scratch beneath this surface and questions of the gendered and discriminatory construction of ‘appropriate’ or ‘acceptable’ research fields for men and women raise their ugly heads that potentially undermines the positive surface image. Instead, the underlying image may be one of continued gender-based discrimination where women should research children and families in leisure due to the continuing pervasiveness of the notion of woman as ‘carer’ and men who examine children in leisure are constructed as deviant, reflecting wider social constructions of the relation between men and children. This is not the place to answer these questions. Rather, this is a call-to-arms for research to be conducted to determine the extent of the gendered nature of research not just on children and families in leisure but across the entire leisure studies field. Such research must also examine the causes of any apparent gender imbalances in the research field. As such, this call builds on work by Aitchison (2001) in which she identified the gender imbalance in the authorship of papers published in tourism and leisure journals. It is also linked to ongoing concerns in education regarding the existence and persistence of gender divisions and stereotypes that, for example, construct science as masculine (Brotman and Moore 2008; Kelly 1985).

Why do we need to worry about potential gender imbalances in the researchers working within leisure studies or specific areas within the field? We do not subscribe to a reductionist paradigm that suggests only women can understand women or that men can only understand men. Such a perspective is essentialist, discriminatory and plain wrong. Yet when studying human life, which is the central theme of leisure studies, we do a disservice to the field if we do not explore it with as many eyes as possible from as many different perspectives as possible. From a post-structuralist perspective we may recognize that men and women are both able to interpret and understand the ‘other’ but by having a wide range of perspectives, by having men and women looking at families’ and children’s leisure in this case, we gain a richer, more nuanced understanding than is otherwise possible.

Zabriskie and McCormick (2001) used a family systems framework to develop the Core and Balance Model of Family Leisure Functioning. They argued that core leisure patterns arise from low cost activities on a regular, almost daily, basis around the home. They also identified the need for families to adapt to change and maintain balance and suggested that adaptation skills are often needed and developed in leisure activities pursued away from home. However, increasingly any divisions between core leisure and balance leisure travel are arbitrary and conceptually irrelevant. For example, what about non-resident parents who are only able to engage in any meaningful leisure activities with their children on holiday? Is it not time to view leisure, tourism and other related areas of study more holistically and abandon any form of duality? This is an important question that arguably lies at the heart of the schism that appears to exist between tourism and leisure studies. They appear in so many ways to be intimately related, with leisure offering the potential to be the umbrella concept, one that possesses a rich philosophical foundation. Yet there appears to be little interplay between leisure and tourism researchers, with the philosophies and paradigms of the former often left on the shelf by the latter.

We deliberately chose to employ the term ‘children’ when forming the idea for this special issue. It provides a wider chronological umbrella than terms such as adolescents, pre-schoolers or babies, for example. This is useful in the sense that, it is inclusive and opens us up to the idea that all children, irrespective of age, can be engaged as active participants in the research process. In this way it offers the potential for the experiences and views of all children at any age in leisure to be examined. However, it is perhaps time to reflect on this approach and to suggest the need for a more nuanced look at ‘children’ that recognizes the diversity that exists within this term while not ignoring the interrelations that exist across this diversity. Without this move we run the risk of oversimplifying a complex reality and alienating our research population by failing to fully appreciate the differences that exist across childhood.

There are, of course, other points that have arisen through the construction of this special issue but most have already been covered in the editorials published with the other parts. Rather than regurgitate these, the reader is encouraged to examine them in their original context.

We have five contributions making up this third and final part of the special issue which capture the diversity of family life. They encompass active leisure during pregnancy, the leisure of young people with disabilities, children’s tourism experiences, conference family travel without children and modern family vacations. The papers, thus, encapsulate what our special issue has tried to achieve: to provide insights into children, families and leisure from different perspectives, at different stages of family life and within different leisure environments, through employing innovative methods. Kate Evans, Kellie Walters, Toni Liechty and Kelsey LeFevour, from the USA, open this part of the special issue with a paper about the physical experience of pregnancy as it relates to women’s leisure. This study explored how women’s experience of pregnancy and the changing body may play a role in shaping and defining their physically active leisure which has important implications for women’s health and well-being. There is increasing public and scholarly debate about the benefits of exercise during pregnancy but evidently there is a lack of uncontentious information regarding how to best maintain women’s health and that of their unborn babies.

For the second paper, Marie-Michèle Duquette, Hélène Carbonneau and Colette Jourdan-Ionescu, who are based in Canada, provide insights through parent–child interviews into the leisure experiences of young people with disabilities and their influence on family dynamics. What emerges out of this analysis is a model of interaction on family dynamics and a classification of families, further supporting the importance of sport participation for any adolescent, irrespective of whether they are with a disability. This research significantly adds to our understanding of processes of family dynamics and family resilience. In the past, the effects on the parents were studied in a context where the activity was practised by the whole family. This research provides a new perspective as the beneficial effects on the parents were not directly connected with the leisure activity practised by their children. The paper highlights that leisure practised by individuals within the family has implications for the entire family, justifying more research into individual leisure and family dyads.

The next contribution on tourism experiences through the eyes of a child is authored by Steven Rhoden, Philippa Hunter-Jones and Amanda Miller, from the UK. This is novel and inclusive research that explores eight and nine years old children’s views and opinions as articulated by themselves and not adult proxies, as has been done in the past. Children have traditionally been viewed as unsophisticated or incompetent respondents because their answers might lack the depth of thinking we associate with adulthood. But what this paper proves is that young children can make valuable and major contributions to existing research if they are listened to in an appropriate manner. It is only when we include children and adolescents in our understanding of leisure that we can fully understand the physical, emotional and social proximity of leisure experiences within families.

The fourth contribution is a phenomenological study by Hyekyung Yoo, Alison McIntosh and Cheryl Cockburn-Wootton, from New Zealand. This paper focuses on conference travel without children as alternative family leisure. Much of our understanding of family tourism comes from children and families travelling together but little is known about couple travel without children. The type of travel examined by Yoo et al. is part of an increasing trend towards more individualized and diverse travel by the family; be it children away from their parents travelling with their grandparents (grandtravel) or with child-less aunts (Camargo and Tamez 2015), or, as in this case, couples getting ‘us’ and ‘me time’ while one partner attends a conference. The findings of this study illustrate that conference travel can facilitate the pursuit of personal interests, allowing opportunities for serendipity and increased intimacy in the couple’s relationship compared to traditional family holiday travel. This paper provides refreshing insights into the gendered nature of accompanying partners’ experiences and leisure travel experiences within the family that are not dominated by responsibilities towards children.

The final paper is by Heather Kennedy-Eden and Ulrike Gretzel, based in Australia, and examines modern families and their distinctively modern vacations.¹ This study reflects on the continuation of the trend mentioned in the previous paper, in that with busy lives and differing work schedules, vacations might only include some members of the family or expand to include extended family members. Modern vacations also increasingly include the taking of technologies and other aspects of peoples’ everyday lives with them on vacation which might lead to fundamentally different vacation experiences than in the past. This paper is based on a study of 10 family groups and explores the structure of the modern family vacation, the role it plays in the lives of families, how families enact vacations, how modern families experience time together, what role technology plays and what meanings and traditions have emerged from modern family vacations. In a nutshell, this paper tries to capture what it means to travel as a modern family with extended family or part of the family while being technologically connected to other family members and friends. It provides a new meaning to family time together, physically and virtually, and is a fitting finale to the special issue.

We would like to thank all our contributors and reviewers for their hard work in engaging in such a variety of research and showcasing the rich meanings that leisure can bring to all members of the contemporary ‘family’. It takes a certain tenacity and introspection to be involved in family research for we are all members of one kind of family or other. Foremost we see this special issue as a celebration of what leisure means to children and their families in today’s society.

Notes

1. The use of the term ‘vacation’ rather than ‘holiday’ in this paper arguably reflects the North American links of both of the authors.