The feel of mobility: how children use sedentary lifestyles as a site of resistance

Abstract

The consequences of the neo-liberal societal ‘speed-up’ are lived at the apparently contradictory intersection of mobile lifestyles and obesogenic environments. The focus for public health interventions is the bodies of children. Recent interpretive research into how pre-teenaged children talk about watching television suggests that these children may be using the ‘feel’ of being sedentary to resist the ‘feel’ of being busy, while engaging with electronic media and communication, precisely because e-media do the work of collapsing time and distance to create the experience of instant connection and consumption from inside the home. The generalised view that television ‘stops you from doing anything’ is expressed but with some ambivalence by both children and parents in our study. While the children discuss needs for space and rest, they may also be conveying the ways they address particular mental health needs in longer, busier and more stressful days, often with two parents working. They may be arguing for the feel of being stopped as society speeds up around them. Indeed, societies, sectors and publics are becoming more mobile, but children are charged with being more immobile and forgetting how to play actively and spontaneously. It could be feasible that children may enact a strategic, embodied resistance to living faster lives. This article argues that children's uses of inside spaces and e-media to ‘still’ time and ‘stop’ themselves are as important to sociological studies of how children experience mobilities as they are to sociotechnical studies of the digital generation. Using localized, empirical data to illustrate this argument, new possibilities for phenomenological analyses of embodiment, social action and social change are suggested.

Keywords:

• Children
• Mobilities
• Phenomenology
• Sedentarism
• Television

Acknowledgements

This paper draws on pre-pilot research undertaken at the Edgar National Centre for Diabetes Research, funded by a Lottery Health Research Grant 2007. The author acknowledges Rachael Taylor (PI), Oliver Davidson, Grant Schofield, Jim Lewis and Victoria Farmer in that research team. The writing up was made possible by a Building Research Capacity in the Social Sciences (BRCSS) seeding initiatives grant in 2010. Finally, thanks to the enthusiastic children and parents who told us about their lives.

Notes

1. Such a conclusion is based on both the presence of adults as drivers and the influence of automobility for both are barriers to physical and sociable mobility, rather than a straight depiction of children's independence as the freedom from parental presence (Mikkelson & Christensen, 2009).

2. There were 54 participants in the 10–13-year-old sample age group. Seven focus groups and three individual interviews were held on school grounds and in homes for the child participants, in two major urban centres in New Zealand in 2007–2008. Pseudonyms are used in all references to the study participants and their family members. Illustrative quotations in the text are indexed to data chunks via line numbers from the verbatim transcripts, each numbered and coded as a family interview [FA] or focus group discussion [FG]. Data collection and interpretive data analysis were conducted by the author.

3. There were 22 parents in the sample with eight parent-child pairs (parents and children were in different focus groups and interviews). Each parent participated because they had a child in the 10–13-year-old sample age group and each was recruited to discuss issues around television for this age group in particular.