Swim club membership and the reproduction of happy, healthy children

Abstract

Through ethnographic methods, I examine the ways in which upper middle-class families facilitate the reproduction of their healthy lifestyles through their affiliation with the Valley View Swim and Tennis Club, a semi-private facility located near a major mid-Atlantic city in the USA. Drawing on Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of social class, I argue that club membership operates as future investment in children’s health with the cultivation of their healthy swimming bodies serving as visible markers of class-based, embodied capital. Specifically, the pool offers parents a distinctive cultural context in which to augment children’s medical health and physical safety, build a foundation for lifelong physical activity practices, help them achieve an ideal body weight and control their consumption habits. Ultimately, the club serves as a powerful and influential physical space in which families engage in important health-related practices and processes contributing to the reproduction of their healthy, upper middle-class children.

Keywords:

• ethnography
• physical activity
• families
• healthy lifestyle
• social class

Notes

1. Swimming participation has received relatively little academic attention, however there has been work considering parental support of age group swimming (e.g. Power and Woolger 1994; Dukes and Coakley 2002), examining attrition in youth swimming (e.g. Gould et al. 1985), understanding the myths effecting minority swimming participation (e.g. Irwin et al. 2009), drowning inequalities based on race and class (e.g. Hastings et al. 2006) and the history of swimming and pools in the USA (e.g. Wiltse 2007).

2. Physical, embodied and corporeal capital are all used interchangeably to describe this concept within the context of this article.

3. Club name and participant names are pseudonyms in order to protect participants’ anonymity.

4. The metropolitan area where Valley View is located features the number one- and two-ranked US swimming age group club teams in the country. Additionally, it also has one of the largest, most developed summer swim leagues in the USA with approximately 90 swim clubs in the county. Within two miles of Valley View alone, there are four other swim clubs which are almost identical in terms of fees, club layout and membership demographic.

5. The summer of 2009 was the final summer of field work as well as the time frame for all interviews.

6. There are competitive opportunities for children at Valley View; however, members who participated in this research largely reported their club membership to function primarily as a form of family leisure time and socialisation, with the sport component a distant second though many of their children participated on the teams.

7. The 2006–2008 data was the most up-to-date information available at the time when the interviews were conducted.

8. The 2007 data was the most up-to-date information available at the time when the interviews were conducted.

9. As is often the case with middle and upper middle-class youth, the Valley View children participate in multiple organised sports and activities in addition to swimming, particularly during the school year. However, within the scope of this article, I believe that it is pertinent to discuss only their involvement in swimming as that was the main sport/activity that all children participated in during the summertime. Other summer activities included day camps and family vacations, but very few organised activities.

10. From my perspective as the researcher/ethnographer, I do not believe that any of the children in the families I interviewed were overweight or had any weight issues at the time this research was conducted.

11. Clayboys are shaved ice covered in flavoured syrup served in a cup with a Swedish Fish on the bottom. They are a Valley View tradition and are served out of the back of a pick-up truck that plays Harry Belafonte’s calypso song, ‘Day-O’, as it drives into the pool parking lot.