Simply child’s play? Reconfiguring child-adult relations in a leisure place for children

Abstract

This article describes an ethnographic study exploring children’s everyday life in a leisure place for children led by a small group of play-assistants. In particular it focuses on child-adult relations within this place and aims to discover, through the observation of play activities, the grounds of this relation. Findings suggest that the relation between adults and children is always performed within an educational framework, where the adult knows better than the child what is best for him/her. Based on the main assumptions of the sociology of childhood and of the cultural studies pertaining to this field, the proposal aims to interpret child-adult relations as an intercultural relation rather than an educative one.