The After School Routines of Literature-Devoted Urban Children

Abstract

This paper discusses the out of school routines of a group of ‘literature-devoted’ children of the city of Madrid (Spain). The children and families were recruited for the study at a library, a children's bookstore and a puppet show in a park. Participants provided information on their weekly routines through several procedures: surveys, photographs of their daily lives, interviews based on the photographs and interviews with parents. We develop a spatially based model that allows us to identify four styles of activity in children's out of school lives: homebound children, non-scheduled children, outdoor and scheduled children, and fully scheduled children. Our results suggest that there is significant diversity in the ways in which children's after-school time is organized, even within a middle-class and socially homogeneous sample as the one in this study. Also, the range of activities our participants engage in seems to contradict current portraits of Western urban children's lives as constrained.

Keywords:

• Daily routines
• after-school activities
• urban childhood
• literacy
• qualitative methods

Notes

1. All parents gave their written consent to use the photographs for research purposes and the majority also extended this consent to use in scientific and academic publications and presentations. Individual cases for discussion are drawn from this later group and all names have been changed to help protect children's identities.

2. To simplify the discussion we will leave aside methodological differences as a factor in the production of different results.

3. The exceptions to this pattern are the Deaf children who participated in our study. These children's schools are very far away from their homes and they also incorporate to their routines the settings provided by Deaf associations, which are located neither close to their schools nor homes.