Outdoors have long been an unstructured playground for children in Turkey. However due to urbanization, safety concerns and media over-reporting, parents today seek to avoid their children from public spaces. This study aims to explore children’s new socialization environments with peers and parental intervention to children’s outdoor play experience. It argues parental authority on children’s everyday life spaces along with municipal initiatives for children’s structured participation to “outdoors”. In this qualitative research, semi-structured interviews with 30 parents of children aged 10 to 14, attending the two state middle schools located in different neighbourhoods of Üsküdar town in Istanbul/Turkey as well as with 7 teachers and school administrators were conducted within academic year 2016-2017 and were analysed through critical content analysis. Additionally, questionnaires were applied to 365 parents and analysed on SPSS 22.0. Findings suggest that most participating parents consider extracurricular institutionalised and structured courses as outdoor play activities. Some parents indicated having limited their children’s socialization spaces to homes or gardens of the residence they live in, strictly preventing their presence from outer areas. The parental supervision threatened children’s encounters with different layers of society and reproduced their interdependency to family.
The new “outside” understanding: Children’s transforming outdoor play experience in Turkey
Hamide Elif Uzumcu
2018
Abstract
Outdoors have long been an unstructured playground for children in Turkey. However due to urbanization, safety concerns and media over-reporting, parents today seek to avoid their children from public spaces. This study aims to explore children’s new socialization environments with peers and parental intervention to children’s outdoor play experience. It argues parental authority on children’s everyday life spaces along with municipal initiatives for children’s structured participation to “outdoors”. In this qualitative research, semi-structured interviews with 30 parents of children aged 10 to 14, attending the two state middle schools located in different neighbourhoods of Üsküdar town in Istanbul/Turkey as well as with 7 teachers and school administrators were conducted within academic year 2016-2017 and were analysed through critical content analysis. Additionally, questionnaires were applied to 365 parents and analysed on SPSS 22.0. Findings suggest that most participating parents consider extracurricular institutionalised and structured courses as outdoor play activities. Some parents indicated having limited their children’s socialization spaces to homes or gardens of the residence they live in, strictly preventing their presence from outer areas. The parental supervision threatened children’s encounters with different layers of society and reproduced their interdependency to family.
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