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266 12 Producing Family Time Practices of Leisure Activity Beyond the Home Marjorie L.DeVault This article presents my analysis of an occasional, local, and apparently rather trivial activity—the “family outing” to the zoo—but I want to suggest that it can be read as part of a larger story, about the changing character of middle- and working-class family life. Part of this large story revolves around time—how much time parents can and do spend with families (Hochschild, 1997), for example, who is overworked and why (Schor, 1992), and how to provide for the “quality time” that most Americans believe is so crucial for children’s development (Daly, 1998). Policy makers take up these questions in the context of an emergent discourse of “work/family” (or sometimes “work/life”) issues. Such developments are signals of a large social transformation in the organization of work and family life—arising in large part from the establishment of middle-class wives and mothers as relatively permanent members of the labor force. As in the early industrial period, this large change is accompanied by uncertainties and anxieties about the reproduction of future generations, and it motivates attempts to develop a model (or models) for family life that will fit with a restructuring economy. Research on the “time bind” in contemporary family life (Hochschild, 1997)—and widespread discussion of it—points toward larger areas of concern: How will ordinary people sustain those experiences that make up “family life” as so many have known it in the industrial period? What do the middle classes want to preserve, and why? Not, apparently, starched and pressed collars, homebaked cookies, or even (but much more controversially) child care at home. What, then, will come to be defined as essential to family life—and for whom? The research I report on here is concerned with some of the things that parents do with the “family time” they have with children, and—in a very preliminary way— with how their practices are shaped by larger social structures—not only by work hours, schedules, and pressures but also by the organization of the public spaces that family members might inhabit together and a discourse of family life that swirls around those spaces. Though I can only sketch in these larger contexts and their consequences at this point, my intention is to identify some openings for connecting this ethnography of a local setting to broader political-economic relations (as outlined in Smith, 1987; and DeVault, 1999, ch. 3). The notion of “the family outing” is a concept with a class and cultural bias built into it. I do not mean that only middle-class families go to the zoo; in fact, the zoo© 2000 by Human Sciences Press, Inc. Reprinted from Qualitative Sociology Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 485-503. Practices of Leisure Activity Beyond the Home 267 appears to be one of the more “democratic” spaces in which families gather. What I mean is that the idea of the outing calls up a particular image of family life, an image that minimizes collective economic support and emphasizes a terrain of consciously constructed emotional expression (and discipline)—the “modern” view of marriage and family life. Many North Americans seek this mode of family experience, work extremely hard to achieve it, and derive intense pleasure from their sense of family connectedness. This model of family life is also encouraged and enforced by public discourses of family life, through advice directed to mothers, references to “quality time,” public images of family, and the activities of social workers and other family educators. For example, a social worker tells me that when she taught “parenting skills” she regularly “prescribed” an outing to the zoo. She went on to say, however, that few of her low-income clients were able to comply with the advice; such an outing requires substantial resources (transportation, entrance fees, money for snacks and souvenirs) and, perhaps more important, a good deal of time and energy for planning and execution. This kind of explicit instruction is less common than a more general imperative for parents to attend to children’s development, conveyed through focused advice literature and disseminated even more widely through various media. For example, nearly every city newspaper publishes a calendar of events, many identified as especially appropriate for children or families, and in most cities of any size, one finds monthly publications directed specifically toward parents and offering a smorgasbord of sites, services, and products for producing family...

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