What to Do with Children’s Time? Colombian Parents’ and Children’s Perspectives on the Use of Time and Extracurricular Activities

Abstract

Occupying children’s time has become as a challenge for the contemporary upbringing of urban middle-class families. A cultural manifestation of this phenomenon is the accelerated growth of extracurricular activities designed for this population group. In this article, we analyze the meaning of these activities through the experiences of a group of middle-class children and parents in Bogota, Colombia. These activities are considered to be part of a strategy for the management of what is called children’s time. A dialogue on this notion is established, involving the voices of children and parents. The analysis also combines ideas from fields such as the anthropology of childhood and social studies on time. The ethnographic data are part of the fieldwork undertaken in 2018. Specifically, they are derived from some interviews and observations in commercial contexts and in a private educational institution. It is concluded that the childhood experience of these middle-class children is marked by family expectations about the materialization of their time. This conception of organized and productive children’s time appears to leave less room for children to have their own spaces for child socialization and forces parents to create family dynamics that are exhausting for their children and for themselves. This article contributes to recent discussions on the need to incorporate the analysis of time as a key variable to understand the modes of construction of ideas and experiences about childhood in different sociocultural contexts.