Habitus,affordances,and family leisure: Cultural reproduction through children’s leisure activities

There is a heavy emphasis on academic achievement and excellence in Hong Kong (Chan, 2000). Parents’ concern about children’s academic outcomes (Fung and Cheng, 2012) are counterbalanced by the fact that they do not see local education as satisfactory in fulfilling children’s educational needs because of its examination-oriented nature, highly competitive education system, and their distrust of curriculum innovations (Waters, 2006; Ngan and Chung, 2004; Ng, 2012). Local parents increasingly invest in enrichment activities with the goal of fostering children’s social and cultural development as well as educational attainment (Choi et al., 2005), but time spent on parent-child activities decreases. A recent survey (HKIFE, 2016) involving 528 parents of primary schoolchildren in 2016 found only 55% of parents spend more than seven hours a week with their children during the summer holiday, which is 10% less than the results of a similar survey in 2013, and 20% of parents spend less than three hours a week with children, compared with 9% in 2013. Parents spend less time with children partly because of their long working hours (Lau, 2010), and partly because parents worry that leisure may divert children’s attention from academic study under Hong Kong’s high-pressure education system (Leung, 2011: 537).

As parents expect children to take learning seriously and tend to focus on children’s academic outcomes instead of the learning process, Fung and Cheng (2012: 27) argue that ‘parents are caught in a struggle between their desire for a playful learning experience for their children and their demand for academic readiness’. Research finds that parents ranked pre-academic skills as the most important category for early children education (Opper, 1994). Although the Education Bureau emphasizes that play facilitates children’s holistic development and is important in the early childhood education curriculum in its ‘Guide to the Pre-primary Curriculum’, early childhood education institutions rarely incorporate play into the curriculum because of parents’ pressure on children’s academic readiness (Fung and Cheng, 2011) and teachers’ polarized perception between play and academic learning (Berk et al., 2006).

Besides local parents’ struggle with ideas about education and leisure, local literature also finds that parental choice of school (Cheung et al., 2005) and children’s participation in enrichment activities (Zhao, 2015) are closely associated with socioeconomic status, and intensify inequality in children’s educational attainment and social stratification. Local children’s domestic leisure activities, however, are under-researched (Choi, 2016), although the domestic setup conveys ‘the present and changing-future state of habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 171) for children to acquire habits through education and leisure, and parent-child interaction and parental involvement at home are beneficial for children’s academic achievement (Phillipson and Phillipson, 2010).

The United Nations refers to leisure as ‘time in which play or recreation can take place’ and is defined as ‘free or unobligated time that does not involve formal education, work, home responsibilities, performance of other life-sustaining functions or engaging in activity directed from outside the individual’ (United Nations, 2013). In other words, leisure is the activity children choose to do during their discretionary time. Leisure is also a series of actions, which are often ‘materially situated yet constantly imbued with meaning and interpretation’ (Fayard and Weeks, 2014: 241). Informed by Gibson’s affordances and Bourdieu’s habitus, this visual ethnographic study explores parents’ ideas about learning and leisure and the actual domestic leisure children consume in association with socioeconomic status – whether Hong Kong parents from a similar socioeconomic background display similar views on education, learning, and children’s leisure, and how parental perception and involvement affect the behavior of children (between three and seven years old) toward learning and leisure through their use of (1) domestic setup, (2) television and computing devices, and (3) toys.

Habitus and affordances: Parenting practices and children’s circumstances

Both Bourdieu and Gibson discuss practices. Bourdieu emphasizes practices as the result of interactions of the individual’s perceptual and behavioral disposition and capital in the given field; Gibson sees action as the result of the congruence of the features of the environment and the intention and capability of the individuals. The former emphasizes the importance of individuals’ habitus, capital and the given social field, whereas the latter emphasizes human-object dynamics of how individuals act in reference to the material environment. Since Bourdieu’s theory of practice does not emphasize the importance of the property of materials in affecting individuals’ actual acts, the integration of two ideas of practices help researchers examine practices in both material and social ways.

In discussing individuals in their everyday life, Bourdieu (1984) developed his famous ‘theory of practice’. For Bourdieu, people’s practices are the result of the interaction of their habitus and cultural capital in the context of a given field. Bourdieu defined habitus as ‘a subjective but not individual system of internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class’ (1977: 86). Habitus represents a system of dispositions of seeing, being, and doing rooted in family socialization and conditioned by the positioning of social structure. Individuals of different social backgrounds tend to see and do what are ‘right’, ‘natural’ and even ‘necessary’ practices differently because of their different schemes of perception and conception conditioned by their different habitus. In education, Lareau (2011) focuses on different cultural logics of parenting among parents of different socioeconomic backgrounds in contributing to class reproduction. Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson’s (2014) research in England, however, finds that parents of different socioeconomic backgrounds value enrichment activities similarly but middle-class children have higher participation rates due to their economic capital. They argue that research should not merely highlight class-differentiated cultural logics of parenting but also the importance of structural factors (such as different financial resources) in contributing to the differentiated parenting practices.

In ‘sport and social class’, Bourdieu (1978) argues that people’s acquisition of ‘taste’ for sport and their choice for one sport rather than another depends on economic capital, cultural capital, spare time (a transformed form of economic capital), the ‘immediate and deferred profits’ (1978: 835) accruing from different practices, and ‘the ethical and aesthetic dispositions characteristic of each class’ (1978: 836). Applying Bourdieu’s discussion on sport to children’s leisure, this study shows parents’ socioeconomic status affects their spare time and thus children’s leisure; parents’ different involvement in children’s leisure also demonstrates their different views (i.e. the economic and cultural profits and costs and their ethical dispositions) on learning and leisure and affect their children’s actual leisure.

As many leisure activities involve objects and this paper focuses on children’s leisure activities situated in domestic space, I employ Gibson’s concept of affordances to further elaborate on Bourdieu’s suggestion of the organic relationship between practices and environment. For Gibson, what individuals perceive when they look at an object or environment is its affordances – the possibilities the objects afford them for action. Therefore, affordance ‘cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective’ (1986: 129) because the ‘substances’ of things and environment and the observer’s perception of the substances relative to the observer shape affordance. In this study, parents’ different perceptions of learning and play, as well as the different home size conditioned by their economic status, contribute to different affordances of these homes in placing children’s toys and bookshelves and affects children’s everyday leisure.

Heft (1989) further expands ‘affordances’ to include both perceptual affordance (the visual perception of the substances, properties and structures of the material in relation to action) and social-cultural affordance (the interpretation of the social meaning of affording the action), which help analyze human-environment dynamics in context. Parents from different socio-cultural backgrounds in this study may view the same object (e.g. a tablet) with different intentions and functional significance, and thus contribute to their different acts. Besides, working-class parent informants, constrained by their cultural capital, do not pay attention to newly-developed technology-enhanced toys which may offer new educational affordances for their children.

I use Gibson’s affordance and Bourdieu’s class habitus to discuss how my parent informants, conditioned by their socioeconomic status, use domestic setup, children’s books, toys, tablets and smart phones relative to their intentions of child development, and how parental choice of play activities and toys fit into their habitus economically, culturally, and ethnically in the section about domestic setup and media devices usage. The contextual study of human-environment affordance helps us understand not only family members’ action in a situation but also intergenerational transfer of capital through children’s leisure activities with home objects.

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Table 1.

Informants’ profile.

Children (age)	Father (occupation, education)	Mother (occupation, education)	Household salary/month (HKD)	Home size (square feet)
Kay (6)	George (waiter, primary school)	Winnie (restaurant cashier, primary school)	30,000	< 250
Enya (5)	Simon (technician, senior high)	Fion (clerical worker, senior high)	43,000	450
Sammie (7)	Lawrence (head chef, junior high)	Diane (head-waiter, junior high)	55,000	<300
York (5)	Isaac (University lecturer, PhD)	Ellen (art administrator, MA)	120,000	1,200
Andrew (5)	Xavier (senior engineer, MSc)	Joyce (finance analyst, MSc)	140,000	1,200
Charles (3)	Ricky (investment banker, MSSc)	Mandy (marketing manager, BA)	200,000	1,600

Methods

This study uses a visual-ethnographic approach to examine parental involvement in children’s leisure activities and intergenerational transfer of capital and habitus through family leisure with children between three and seven years old. Young children are chosen because studies find that parents are one of the most important factors in influencing and reinforcing children’s social attitudes, aspirations, and future success (Phillipson and Phillipson, 2010), and socioeconomic status has the strongest relationship with parental involvement (Ho, 2006). As I wanted to explore if there were different perception and behavior patterns of learning and leisure between parents and between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds, I invited dual-income families from different socioeconomic backgrounds to participate in this ethnographic research. As the research involves active participation of parents and children, I did not set extra criteria for informant selection.

The paper discusses six dual-income nuclear families with different monthly household incomes in various vocations and education attainment. In my study, all middle-class parents have master degrees or higher from overseas; all working-class parents are high school or primary school graduates. The sample is not a representative sample, but I made efforts to include the broad range of social classes in the Hong Kong population. The working-class families in my study earned more than the median monthly domestic household income in Hong Kong (HK$20,700 in 2012; Information Services Department, 2013: 2). This situation is typical because they were dual-income families and had been holding down jobs since their teenage years. With the resulting accumulation of work experience, some of these individuals rose to the level of middle-grade technicians and received corresponding increases in wages. Nevertheless, the working-class families in this study cannot represent the complicated and differential parenting practices among working-class families in Hong Kong (Choi et al., 2005), and they are also different from the economically disadvantaged families which struggle to meet the educational needs of their children (Lam, 2010) and children’s problems in facing academic and socioemotional difficulties (Pugh, 2009).

I also attempted to use different ways to collect visual data, and both parents and children were emphasized. I invited families (1) to add me on Facebook so I could browse their uploaded photos, and (2) to send me video diaries they had made before and during the research regarding family activities. I also asked parents (3) to video-record their own presence during parental home involvement in learning and play. Children were given disposable cameras and invited (4) to document their worlds photographically. Visual data from category (1) and category (2) were ‘naturally’ produced by family members, and data from categories (3) and (4) were produced on my request. I also conducted semi-structured interviews and paid multiple visits to six families. Each home visit lasted between approximately three and six hours. I observed routinized family life, and my research assistant and I played with the children. Many of these visits were video-recorded and audio-recorded. Toys of the six families were also photographed for categorization purposes.

Although I tried to collect data in addition to the actual fieldwork, much of it can only be used as supplementary sources. It is because parents use (1) Facebook and (2) video diaries to document their children’s lives in different frequencies; three parents (Isaac, Mandy, and Fion) often share their children’s lives (York, Charles, and Enya) on Facebook, but the other three (Joyce, Diane, Winnie) seldom use Facebook. Besides, most parent informants did not take photos or video diaries at home and therefore the data collected before research may not be the most useful in this study. All parent informants recorded videos about their involvement in children’s study and leisure (category 3) during the research period, but some parents (Isaac, Mandy, Joyce, and Diane) produced more videos than others (Fion and Winnie). Nevertheless, these data help me understand that parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds have different leisure activities with children at home. Category (4) is most problematic because two children (Charles and Kay) accidentally opened the camera case and their photos were overexposed, and another (Andrew) took photos in the dark, which rendered them un-recognizable. Consequently, parents’ video-recording of family leisure, fieldwork video, and interviews are the main sources of data of this study. The video-recordings made by parents help me examine parent-child interaction during leisure and different types of parental involvement (such as direct instruction used by Winnie and scaffolding used by Xavier); the fieldwork videos help me study children’s verbal and problem-solving skills and the ways they use tablets; the interview includes both parents’ and children’s voices but I largely use parents’ interviews in this study because of the emphasis on parental views.

As the study involves video-recording, photography and interview, the visual data may expose children’s and parents’ identity. I asked parents to sign informed consent prior to their participation in the research, and all photos used in this paper received consent from both parent and child informants. The photos I chose try to keep children’s identity hidden to protect informants’ confidentiality. Pseudonyms are used in this text.

All collected data (videos, interviews, field visits, photographs of toys) were transcribed. I started with initial coding for themes and developed coding hierarchies for selective empirical and theoretical categories, looking for similarities and differences across cases. In this paper, social class emerges as the contributing factor of differences in parental involvement in children’s leisure activities. As Bourdieu’s generative scheme on taste and social reproduction in the insular culture of France in the 1960s (Bourdieu, 1984) may not apply to the contemporary global context of Hong Kong, and class categories ‘exist nowhere in the world in any “pure” form’ (Schutz, 2010: 12), the discussion of class categories in this paper certainly cannot capture the complexity of social class as people have social mobility and different sources of identity and culture. Nevertheless, the binary formulation of class seems to be productive for the discussion, though these cases cannot be seen as empirical generalizations of Hong Kong parenting practices and social stratification in general.

Affordances of learning and domestic arrangement: Engineering environment and taste

The overwhelming academic atmosphere of Hong Kong society (Cheng and Stimpson, 2004) and the preschool program’s primary focus on pre-academic skills (Fung and Cheng, 2012) contribute to parents’ reservations about Hong Kong education (Ngan and Chung, 2004). Parent informants in my study have similar reservations about local education’s excessive homework and examination-oriented rote-learning and drills regardless of socioeconomic status, and current local education gives their children few ‘affordances’ in solving real-world problems. Although most parent informants (except one pair, Lawrence and Diane) would like their children to enter university in the future (i.e. all middle-class parents expect their children will get into overseas universities), they perceive ‘learning’ differently because of their different learning experiences. Parents with higher education see learning as fun and important, both practically and ethically, whereas the working-class parents prefer practical knowledge and some, such as Lawrence and Diane, devalue the myth of qualification. Because of their different attitudes toward learning, these parents generate different actions, including their domestic setup, media usage, and choice of toys, in response to the perceived deficiencies in Hong Kong education.

Working-class parent informants tend to polarize leisure and study, using ‘toilsome’ and ‘stressful’ to describe studying. In our conversations, parents emphasized that they would not ‘force’ their children to excel academically. They care for their children practically and emotionally, and are afraid of their children ‘being stressed out’ in the highly competitive educational setting in Hong Kong.

Simon: It’s no use forcing children to study if it’s not in their nature; you can’t force a worm to become a dragon no matter how hard you try, and they resist more if you keep pressuring them. Instead of forcing Enya and making everyone miserable, why not let her go to a mediocre school? It’s fine as long as she is happy.

Partly due to parents’ negative perception on the affordances of formal learning and lack of aspired teaching and learning approach, and partly due to the objective property of working-class homes (the size of the working-class homes range from 250 to 450 square feet in comparison to middle-class homes from 1200 to 1600 square feet), these working-class children informants do not have their own rooms or bookshelves. Excluding textbooks, Enya has around 60 books, Sammie has around 20 books, and Kay has four books at home.

Middle-class parents, like working-class parents in this study, are reserved about local education, and view excessive homework as ‘totally useless’ in ‘problem-solving and analysis’. Nevertheless, they have an aspired for learning approach which they had experienced previously:

Joyce: Your mind can be broadened by good education … Those so-called ‘top pre-schools’ in Hong Kong do nothing but make you get tutors for every subject, day in and day out … While I understood more physics than the average girl in Hong Kong, in America you can actually look at how it’s applied to the real world and interact with it; it’s on a completely different level. Hong Kong high schools train you to achieve high scores on paper – but what’s the use of that? It’s totally useless.

Television and mobile computing devices: Engendering attitudes and acquiring skills

Results from UNICEF’s survey (UNICEF, 2013) indicate parents spend less than six hours playing with their children per week, but children spend more than 11 hours watching television, playing computer games and surfing the internet. However, the survey does not indicate if children display different consumption patterns of media devices. Media devices such as tablets provide multidimensional affordances in terms of education, including personalized learning, exploration-collection of data, multi-modality with engagement of multiple senses, resources sharing, connectivity and collaborative work, etc. North, Snyder and Bulfin’s study (2008) find that parents’ level of education and occupation influence young people’s digital tastes, partly because parents’ background informs these young people’s habitus, and partly because the cultural capital allows them ‘to operate with a degree of competence and acceptance’ (2008: 903). Horton (2014) further suggests that in studying children and young people’s popular culture, researchers should note that children actively appropriate objects, and that social relations and sociotechnical connections problematize children’s use of popular cultural texts. In this study, child informants of different socioeconomic backgrounds consumed media devices differently, including frequency, duration, and their consumption. Children sometimes appropriate objects beyond their original usage (all middle-class children informants use Lego or Duplo to build objects beyond original purpose as discussed in next section), but parental intervention, including their own digital literacy and their approval or disapproval of particular usage of media devices, is an important contributing factor in young children’s media usage, as they seek parental acceptance.

Although all parent informants perceive local education’s examination-oriented drills as ‘useless’ and ‘stressful’, middle-class parent informants’ articulation of an aspired learning approach helps them insert learning into leisure, whereas working-class parent informants treat leisure as compensation of stressful learning. Parental intervention consequently affects children’s leisure and their consumption pattern of media devices.

The television is a basic and important part of the working-class family; watching TV and YouTube, as well as playing games on smartphones, provide actual entertainment affordances for children’s leisure, and they are the most frequent leisure activities enjoyed by the working-class children informants in the collected videos. All three working-class children informants spend at least three hours a day consuming televised media and smartphone/tablet usage, individually and with family members. During my home visits, I discovered that the television in working-class families is always on, even when the children are doing homework.

Interviewer: You don’t turn off the TV set when Enya does schoolwork?

Fion: No. I watched TV while doing homework when I was small, so she could also watch TV while doing homework. We all like watching TV.

Kay is the only child who owns a tablet computer in my study. Her working-class mother Winnie bought Kay a tablet because Kay kept pestering Winnie, who thought that the tablet could serve ‘practical needs’ for formal learning, in that ‘Kay needs to use it later in school’. In other words, Winnie, who grew up in a village in mainland China and moved to Hong Kong five years ago because of her daughter, somehow knows the learning affordances brought by tablet. However, her long working hours (12 hours per day and six days per week) and her relative lack of knowledge of tablet-related learning affordances result in her lax attitude toward Kay’s media usage. Consequently, Kay used less time to do ‘practical’ things with the tablet, such as reviewing school teachings, since Winnie ‘didn’t have time to help her’. She instead chose to play games and watch YouTube videos independently until the tablet run out of charge. Winnie did not stop Kay, although she commented on her tablet usage as a ‘serious’ problem.

Winnie: We don’t have established rules – sometimes she finishes her homework first, sometimes she plays first … I won’t force her to complete all her homework and have leisure times afterwards … Her father gets off work around midnight, and he plays with her.

Interviewer: What do they play?

Winnie: He plays video games with her.

Middle-class parent informants do not treat all leisure activities as good. They have complicated views on media and mobile computing usage; they act as gatekeepers and set limits on children’s usage (Choi, 2006; Gentile and Walsh, 2002). Andrew can only watch TV during dinner and he cannot turn on the TV set easily because his parents installed a special on/off switch to limit the time their children spend on watching TV; York cannot watch TV without his parents’ approval; Charles has no chance to watch TV because Mandy did not install a TV set at home. When these families dine out, parents always set limits on the duration (5 to 15 minutes) of children’s smartphone usage. In these parents’ minds, there is no such thing as children’s ‘natural inclination’ or predisposition towards televised or online media.

Mandy: It isn’t necessary to play with him with an iPad, since he’s happy when I put a puzzle together with him last night, or when we roleplay. Sometimes I think we adults are responsible for children’s dependence on tablets – I mean, we don’t have a TV set, so he doesn’t watch TV.

Middle-class parents’ keen approach to knowledge acquisition is shown through mobile computing usage, transmitting their digital tastes (North et al., 2008) and training up children’s cognitive skills (reading and spelling) and learning skills (searching information). While middle-class children informants sometimes act out in an attempt to get permission to watch YouTube videos or play tablet games, these children also know what types of technology-related leisure activities are valued by their middle-class parents, and they would also comply in meeting parents’ wishes to get parental acceptance and approval (Tezel, 2011; Horton, 2014). Consequently, middle-class parents’ transmission of particular digital and non-digital skills (such as language, research and problem-solving) and attitudes (such as persistence) coincide with institutional approaches to learning, and help children earn cultural capital in relation to school education attainment.

Toy play: A look at self-worth and academic pursuits

Vygotsky argues that play is important for child development because it ‘contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form’ (Bodrova and Leong, 2015), contributing to children’s greater degree of exploration, concentration, self-regulation, problem-solving, and language abilities. Lots of play, however, is materially situated, and Bergen and others (2010) further argue that toy-play can help children expand on exploratory acts to play toys beyond original usage. Recently, scholars (O’Brien and Nagel, 1987; Bergen et al., 2010) have argued that certain toys offer more development affordances than others, and Carr (2000) suggests three affordance factors of tools and materials in relation to learning: transparency (the ability in signaling the toy’s concept such as pressing button for making noise), challenge (the ability in increasing children’s play options), and accessibility (the amount and the type of social participation that a toy affords).

Among working-class parent informants, one sees toys as ‘useless’ and others see toys affording children's independent play so that they can take a rest. None mentions that toys help children’s development. The middle-class informants, however, are somewhat conscious that different toys offer different degrees of affordances toward child development and their selection and endorsement of particular toys (such as Lego) become important in helping their children develop language skills, enjoy challenging play and cognitively stimulating tasks, strengthen their sense of achievement through trial and error, and even start acquiring digital literacy.

The number of toys varies among working-class children informants: Kay has around 20 toys (including four plush toys, five toys from McDonald’s, one kitchen play kit, one Hello Kitty dentist doll house, one stacking toy, one jigsaw puzzle, one set of flash cards, one scooter, one small ball, and four vehicles), the least in the study. Kay has few toys partly because of small home size, and partly because Winnie perceives toys as ‘useless’. In contrast to Kay, Enya has many toys (more than 20 plush dolls, more than 10 socio-dramatic toy sets, creative toy sets, learning sets, around four bikes and scooters, and more than 110 model cars, and many stickers, DVDs, CDs, and so on), not because of parents’ ‘symbolic abundance’ (Pugh, 2009), but her parents want her to be happy:

Interviewer: Actually it’s not Enya asking you two to buy toys …

Simon: No, it’s us … Sometimes I want to buy them things.

Fion: Sometimes I find that I don’t have time to be with them, and then I’d like to use materials to satisfy them.

Interviewer: Really?

Fion: Yes. We’re both busy, working from 9 AM to 7 PM, and sometimes we need rest on Saturday … With the toys we buy, they can occupy themselves for an hour or two. It’s really good.

Simon: And when they see the new toy, they have a happy face, and you also feel happy.

Similar to Fion and Simon, Diane and Lawrence buy a lot of toys (including bikes, toy cars, stickers and stamping, toy camera, etc.) for their seven-year-old daughter Sammie to ensure her happiness. As Diane and Lawrence have long working hours (12 hours on workdays), they would rather spend time with Sammie for fun (such as dining and shopping) instead of doing schoolwork with her. On average, Sammie buys one toy every week. Parents tell Sammie the budget and they let Sammie choose whatever she likes. Consequently, Sammie has more than 50 little pet shop figures. The figures potentially afford Sammie to engage in pretend play and expand her imagination and language skills in storytelling scenarios, but Sammie’s play during fieldwork and video-recording remained ‘putting figures in the right place’ inside the doll house.

Because of Sammie’s repeated failure in assignments and her parents’ long working hours, Sammie has been taking a commercial tutoring class (six days per week, three hours per day) since her second year of kindergarten, and Diane relies on the tutoring class to check Sammie’s school assignments. Sammie’s reliance on tutoring classes, the low parental involvement in her learning, and her less successful academic outcome contribute to her ‘negative positioning’ as a learner with under-developed self-directed and self-regulatory learning skills, which extends to Sammie’s low motivation and low engagement in challenging leisure activities. Seemingly distraught by a fear of failure, Sammie chooses to play with relatively unchallenging toys (miniature plastic animal figures such as those associated with Little Pet Shop and Zoobles). Without a curiosity extending to leisure that might require an investment of effort and time, Sammie just says ‘no’ to many games and toys. Once I accompanied Sammie and Diane on a trip to toy stores. We passed by a store selling jigsaw puzzles and I asked Sammie whether she liked them. She immediately replied, ‘No. Difficult.’ Sammie kept declaring out loud that she was failing when she played a paper-folding game.

Sammie: I can’t follow [the steps].

Interviewer: Keep trying. You know how to fold stars now.

Sammie: But I fail all the time.

Interviewer: Folding stars? Or roses?

Sammie: Stars, roses, everything … I can’t fold a plane, not even a spider.

In contrast to working-class parent informants seeing leisure as pure entertainment and having low intention in selecting toys to enhance child development, middle-class parent informants select toys that may engineer leisure as a learning opportunity for developing children’s skills (observation, attention to details, review, and creativity), concepts (such as speed), and learning attitudes (curiosity and patience). The video-recording of leisure activities include role-play, drawing, doing sports, doing art and craft, and story-telling. Interestingly, the middle-class parents like buying children Duplo or Lego.

Joyce: Yeah, Andrew builds his own stuff out of Lego, like ‘wireless transmitters’ and ‘radars’ and fighter planes ‘faster than the speed of light.’ Since he talks about super-speed a lot, I’ll say stuff like ‘no, airplanes are faster, they can go faster than the speed of sound,’ and he asked me what’s the fastest. When I told him the speed of light is the fastest he wants to know why, which means he understands the concept of speed.

One year after the fieldwork, I find that York and Charles have joined classes about Lego programming, and York has started writing Lego programs at home. The technology-enhanced toy not only helps them acquire ‘traditional’ skills such as exploration, modification, and storytelling but also create more opportunities for them in practicing logical thinking and acquiring digital literacy, which are offered by these new toys. In contrast, no working-class children informant studies coding languages, and their parents do not know about these extracurricular courses. In other words, the technology-enhanced toys may bring new learning affordances toward child development, but only the middle-class children informants enjoy these newly created affordances because of the differential parental selection of toys.

All three middle-class families emphasize learning-related leisure activities, but Andrew’s parents engage in epistemic play (which involves problem solving and exploration) more than others. For Xavier, leisure may not have educational outcomes (e.g. improvement of grades) but leisure should be an educational practice. In choosing toys, Xavier emphasizes edutainment affordance – the toy needs to offer both educational and enjoyable experiences. Once Xavier played Monopoly with Andrew and his sister, Vivien, and Xavier – acting as the bank – asked Andrew to solve some mathematical problems:

Xavier: Suppose you don’t have a $4 note: what combinations of bank notes should you pay out?

Vivien: Two $2 notes.

Xavier: Let Andrew come up with the answer himself.

(Andrew then picks up a $1 note.)

Xavier: You [Andrew] are running out of $3 notes. How about another combination?

Andrew: $2 and $2.

…

Vivien: Six dollars please.

Xavier: This time it’s six dollars. How should you pay?

Andrew: I know.

(Andrew then gives Vivien one $2 note and one $4 note.)

…

Vivien: Eight dollars please. The easiest way is for you to give me two $4 notes.

Xavier: Wait for Andrew to do it himself.

(Andrew then picks up the $4 note and adds one $2 note and two $1 notes.)

Andrew: (Addressing Vivien) Am I right?

Vivien: Yes.

(Andrew smiles)

The types of toys procured by parents of different backgrounds, and how different actual affordances produced through children-toy interaction both reflect and shape children’s attitude towards the relationship between learning and leisure. Working-class parent informants and their children tend to conceptually classify learning and leisure as mutually exclusive activities, while middle-class parent informants strive to integrate the two. As such, working-class families favor unchallenging toy play, while middle-class parent informants favor challenging toy play that trains their children’s creative thinking and cognitive skills, which have the bonus of bolstering their self-worth in relation to academic pursuits. OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 2.

Sammie putting figures into toy house.

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Figure 3.

York writing Lego program and successfully driving two gears at home.

Conclusion

This ethnographic study integrates Bourdieu’s habitus and Gibson’s affordances and finds that parent informants from similar social background display consistency in their perception and involvement in children’s leisure. Parental involvement transfers taste to their children and the children reproduce habitus through their specific engagement with domestic setup, ICT usage and toy play at home. This study finds that parent informants, regardless of socioeconomic status, are reserved about local education’s excessive homework and little ‘affordances’ in solving real-world problems. Nevertheless, working-class parent informants, constrained by their economic and cultural capital, do not have an aspired learning approach and do not intend to set up a domestic environment with particular objects conducive to children’s learning. Because of their lack of spare time (a transformed form of lack of economic capital), they seldom act as gatekeepers of children’s leisure. Middle-class parent informants, supported by their economic and cultural capital, have articulated an aspired learning approach and applied it in their domestic setup, ICT application, toys selection and children’s leisure. Through leisure, middle-class parent informants transmit emotion (curiosity in learning, enjoy challenging play), values (persistence and creativity), skills (reading, spelling, calculation), behavior disposition (patience), and taste (reading for leisure and ICT use for research) to their children. Middle-class parental involvement may also shift children’s leisure from exploratory to extended elaborative play.

The recent introduction and proliferation of technology-enhanced toys may intensify inequality in children’s leisure. Besides acquiring ‘traditional’ skills such as exploration, modification, and language acquisition, the coding toys, because of its objective properties, afford middle-class children with more opportunities to train logical thinking and acquire digital literacy, which have not been practiced by working-class children informants. The study finds that children’s domestic leisure is largely patterned by materials (domestic setup and leisure-induced appliances), practices (TV and mobile computing usage and toy selection and play) and social structure, and thus links considerably to children’s disparity in academic competence.