Playing, parenting and family leisure in parks: exploring emotional geographies of families in Guangzhou Children’s Park, China

ABSTRACT

Children’s leisure activities in parks have attracted increasing scholarly interest in recent decades. However, relatively little attention has been given to the emotional needs and responses of children to their activities within a park’s play spaces. Moreover, what parents perceive, and how they themselves engage within children’s playing spaces, is under-studied. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in the Guangzhou Children’s Park, China, this paper aims to explore the experiences of both children and parents within this particular playing space. Supplementing participant observations with interviews and analysis of reviews on the Internet, the paper finds that children obtain a sense of family and company from their parents’ presence, and parents recall memories of their own childhood and obtain emotional recovery by visiting parks with their children. The findings suggest that play spaces are not only places where children play, but also where family life and childhood are ‘built’. The paper contributes to the existing literature by highlighting and examining the ‘child–parent’ relationship within playing spaces. By conducting a case study of a non-Western society, the paper encourages researchers to examine ‘child–parent’ relationships in a family leisure context, and to explore the everyday and emotional geographies of family life in contemporary China.

KEYWORDS:

• Play
• parenting
• family leisure
• park use
• China

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers and editor of this journal for their constructive and professional comments and suggestions, most of which have been taken up in the final revision.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 It is worth noting that the meaning and landscape of “park” vary in different social contexts. “Park”, in this paper, chiefly refers to the publicly-accessible, state-run urban park: an area of open space provided for recreational use. The surveyed Children’s Park shares common characteristics with everyday urban parks. This observation is strengthened by a TripAdvisor review of the park by a visitor from England: “Of all the parks in Guangzhou I think it’s the one (The Children’s Park) that reminds me of a typical English park with its trees, bushes and winding paths but above all its grass.” (accessed at https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g298555-d9865062-Reviews-Guangzhou_Children_Park-Guangzhou_Guangdong.html.) As with typical urban parks in the West, the Children’s Park in Guangzhou has features including gardens, running and fitness trails/paths, sports fields and courts, water areas, public restrooms, etc. Specifically, in order to meet the children’s demands for outdoor activities, facilities for children’s play are open exclusively to children (See Figure 1 for more information about the functional zones of the park). Moreover, unlike commercially-operated amusement parks, which provide attractions catering to a variety of age groups, the Children’s Park in Guangzhou has no mechanical facilities (carousels, rollercoasters etc.) and is more like an everyday park designed to provide a safe environment for play.

2 China’s one-child policy was introduced in 1979 as a mandatory policy of a birth planning programme designed to control the birth rate, and consequently the size of its population. The policy stated that all couples, except those with ethnic minority backgrounds or with rural hukou, were allowed only one child. The one-child restrictions had significant effects on population growth and population size, but also resulted in a series of social problems, including disparity in sex ratio at birth and an increase in the ageing population, to name but two. In response to growing concerns over an ageing population and a dropping birth rate and demographic dividend, China ended the one-child policy and replaced it with a universal “two-child policy” in 2016. The new policy encourages Chinese couples to have two children. However, as will be discussed in the Concluding comments section of this article, the policy has seemed to play a very limited role in preventing the ongoing decline in the birth rate and the number of births in contemporary China.

3 Data and calculations are based on the Sixth National Population Census of the People’s Republic of China, accessed at http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/pcsj/rkpc/6rp/indexch.htm.

4 Information accessed at http://childfriendlycities.org/overview/the-cfc-initiative/.

5 Information accessed at https://www.livestrong.com/article/1005977-importance-family-structure-hispanic-families/.

6 Information accessed at https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.

7 According to a report published by Guangzhou’s Women Federation, the public leisure space per child was only 0.14 square metres in 2010. The area was even smaller for children living in downtown areas. Traditional free leisure facilities, like swings and slides, vanished quickly with rapid urbanization.

8 Most child respondents argued that a park visit is a “special moment” in their everyday life.

9 Due to high summer temperatures in Guangzhou, the number of children who experience sunburn and sunstroke usually increase significantly. Sunstroke can be life-threatening. Young children exposed to high temperatures are at particularly high risk of sunstroke.

10 China launched a two-child policy in 2016. Although the two-child policy is expected to increase the birth rate, a report published by the National Bureau of Statistics of China in January 2019 showed that China has seen a declining birth rate since 2016. In fact, although there was an immediate boost in the fertility rate for 2016, the number of births subsequently declined. It is worth noting that the year 2018 saw the lowest number of births in historical record. Moreover, given changes to cultural norms, the increasing costs of raising another child, and other concerns, the birth rate and family size in China are expected shrink in the future.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 41701146, 41630635, 41601133]; Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province [grant number 2016A030313427, 2018B030312004].