The Sociology of Leisure by Stanley Parker

Author:Stanley Parker [Parker, Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781000464047
Google: 2f0-EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-10-17T04:26:11+00:00

Class differences in family leisure

Various enquiries on both sides of the Atlantic have concluded that social class membership has a considerable effect on the frequency with which different types of leisure activity are engaged in. Many of these ‘class’ influences on leisure may be seen as arising from the different types, circumstances and demands of work, and these were considered in Chapter 5. Here we are concerned more especially with the ways in which class (mediated by work, which in turn may be mediated by education) affects the family nature of leisure.

The picture is not a clear one, since various influences may pull in different directions. Take adequacy of living accommodation, for example. The typical middle-class home, more often than the typical working-class home, is likely to provide space for each individual to be alone, and space for the whole family to be together in reasonable comfort.21 To some extent this will encourage the family members to spend their leisure in the home, though not necessarily in the home together. By contrast, the lower-income working-class family home is likely to be excessively crowded and therefore to be a less physically congenial place in which to spend leisure. With such homes, each individual may have to get out to be alone, or to do the things he or she wishes to do with friends. To the extent that such individuals do stay in the home, however, they are more likely to take part in ‘family’ leisure because shortage of space leaves them little option.

Leisure activities outside the home usually cost more (in travel, admission fees, etc.) than leisure spent inside the home. Cost is no doubt an important factor in explaining the greater participation rates of the middle class than the working class in nearly all forms of leisure activity. Many of the popular out-of-home forms of recreation, whether commercialised (the cinema, theatre, sports events) or social (golf, bridge, tennis, dinner parties) are designed primarily not for family-wide participation, but for individual or couple participation. Hence it may be said that the presence of children constitutes an interference with most of the recreation available to the middle-class father.22 But this may be too harsh a judgement, since it fails to take into account the fact that playing with the children and helping to educate them can be part of the recreation or ‘semi-leisure’ available to a father. Also, middle-class fathers and mothers are more likely than those in lower socio-economic positions to be able to afford the services of a babysitter and hence to avoid too great a reduction in their own out-of-home leisure activities.

Summing up the recreation situation of what she calls ‘lower middle-class’ families in the United States, Betty Yorburg writes that they ‘are not usually as lonely or isolated as the modern working class. Visiting as couples in the evening or coffee klatsching during the day, and the cooperative babysitting and other services, provide the functional equivalent of extended family activities and mutual aid for many residents of these burgeoning suburban communities.

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