Favoured Free-time: Comparing Children’s Activity Preferences in the UK and the USA: ‘Favoured Free-time’

This study presents a comparative study of the free-time activity preferences of 9- to 11-year-old children in the UK and USA, as drawn by them in art workshops. Six themes emerged relating to sport, outdoor play, family/peers, media, special occasions and other (indefinable) activities. The children’s talk about their drawings revealed additional preferences for ‘obsessive hobbies’, ‘doing nothing’, relationships with others, and the local environment. Whilst the emergent patterns displayed strong cross-cultural similarities in free-time activity choices and participation, as well as compliance with the conventional construction of ‘childhood’, the findings were context-specific and locally inflected.