Becoming a parent1 is, by and large, a wonderful experience. It is also a hugely challenging experience. My wife and I have two fabulous sons, aged 3 and 6 respectively and we love them to pieces. But there are times when we crave to be apart from them. This is certainly not the same as wishing they were not in our lives; this could not be any further from the truth. Sometimes we just need some alone time; time to recharge, time to reconnect with ourselves and one another and, dare I say it, time to catch up on the things we did before we had children. These ‘things’ I refer to are more often than not highly mundane, like taking the dogs for a long walk (without having to stop off at the playground en route, or without having to carry scooters up ‘that’ hill), washing the cars (without the ‘assistance’ of little helpers), or even having a soak in the bath (without the inevitable banging on the door). And a lie in at the weekend, well forget about it. Personally, what I crave the most is time to devote to playing and, to a lesser extent, watching sport. My wife and I have been together since the age of 15 and for the next 17 years I played sport pretty much guilt free. Like many of the participants in this book, sport is an incredibly important part of my life. I have been a student of the sociology of sport since I was 18 years old. My PhD took sport as its starting point and I have chosen a career educating young people about sport and its social significance. But two young children later and I struggle to carve out even a modest amount of time to follow the world of sport, never mind actively participate in it.
That is probably a slightly misleading comment because it suggests that time is the only barrier, which it is not. In truth, the biggest barrier I face to playing and watching sport is actually myself; specifically, the expectations I place on myself in terms of my involvement with my children and the time we all share doing ‘family things’. My love affair with sport is both personal and pragmatic. The primary reason I became involved in sport is very simply because I enjoy it. But as I got older and more involved, my friendship networks also became more established. And scaffold around these is the acknowledgement that sport participation (and physical activity in general) has a series of long-term health benefits. My wife appreciates these reasons (gosh, we’ve discussed them often enough) and beyond the cursory reminder ‘cricket again, eh?’ she was fully supportive until our second child was born. At this point we decided that playing sport to the level I had become accustomed was untenable with our lifestyle and image of the father I wanted to be.
These experiences acted as the catalyst for this book, which focuses on the tripartite relationship between sport, families and fathers. At a very foundational level, I wanted to know whether my experiences were typical. I was particularly interested in why it is that some men, upon becoming fathers, either reduce or stop their participation in sport altogether, while others seems to carry on regardless. More broadly, I wanted to know how family practices are shared and negotiated. The concept of negotiation is central to my analysis and to my argument that family practices are not the straightforward products of rules and obligations. They are, I shall argue, the products of negotiation .2 The choices made, and who makes them, reflect the ways in which families draw upon, reinforce and rewrite their value systems and identities. Indeed, the ways families use space and time (and what activities they fill these with) reflect the values of family members, as well as the social contexts they inhabit in terms of work, education, leisure, and the requirements of wider culture.
This chapter introduces the context of the study, the research underpinning subsequent chapters and the key themes developed throughout the book. It begins by situating the importance of sport (and leisure) to our understanding of family practices and, in particular, the practices of fathers. Next, I articulate the family practices theoretical framework. The chapter finishes by providing an overview of the themes running throughout the book.
Locating Sport and Leisure
Sport and leisure are important to society for a plethora of reasons. They have individual, social, economic and political value and contribute to quality of life, mental and physical health and the well-being of communities (Such, 2013). In an era when the United Kingdom (UK) government is committed to developing measurements of happiness and well-being (Spiers and Walker, 2009) and in which the consumption of leisure services and goods forms a significant economic sector, it would be difficult to understate the significance of leisure to contemporary society (Roberts, 2016; Fletcher et al., 2017).
Despite this, the identity and profile of both the sociology of sport and leisure studies in UK Higher Education curricula have become less apparent over the past decade. This decline has been widely noted (Aitchison, 2006, 2015; Bramham, 2006; Elkington, 2013; Fletcher et al., 2017; Harris, 2017) and has created a desire to re-affirm their social and educational importance. This trend is not peculiar to these fields; the social sciences as a whole are threatened by a neoliberal economic discourse which increasingly informs Higher Education strategic management. Cost-efficiencies, utilitarian learning and a turn to the wisdom of ‘big data’, are among a number of forces positioning the social sciences as ‘less germane, inappropriate, and/or undeserving of scholarly attention’ (Pike et al., 2015: 358). Indeed, as Carrington (2015) warns:
In our neo-liberal age of public sector austerity and instrumental learning, wherein grant-driven scientization and the biomedicalization of research dominates the corporate university, trying to convince undergrads (let alone Deans) to appreciate the relevance of Antonio Gramsci’s writings to the sports they love seems nostalgically utopian. (p. 393)
The sociology of sport, or socio-cultural study of sport necessarily engages a host of disciplines and is thereby a multidisciplinary affair (Wenner, 2017). Of course, most in the sociology of sport community recognise this. It is also recognised that most sociology of sport, at least in certain quarters of the world, is often done by scholars who are not centrally trained in or seated in academic departments of sociology. Ironically, a remarkable paucity of sport sociologists may be found in departments of sociology and, to my knowledge, even fewer teach modules on families or fatherhood. Rather, many, if not most sport sociologists are both trained and foundationally aligned with departments that grow from physical education and the sport sciences. Indeed, according to Malcolm (2014, 2018), while sociologists of sport may consider themselves part of the (university) teaching/research profession, or as members of ‘other’ disciplines and fields (sociology, sports science), it is also the case that they constitute a (relatively) clearly defined occupational group that exhibits many of the ‘traits’ frequently associated with professions. Nevertheless, for Malcolm those scholars focused on the socio-cultural study of sport, especially those with a critical disposition, may find themselves in a precarious situation, on the periphery of their core academic unit and sometimes in conflict with its priorities. Andrews et al. (2013: 342) extend this argument, suggesting that hierarchies of respectability exist within the fields of sport and leisure themselves:
[sport] departments tend to be either exclusively bio-science focused or unapologetically bio-science centric (the social sciences and humanities being begrudgingly tolerated, but habitually under-funded and under-supported, and needing to “prove” their worth and often “conform” to prescribed, neo-“legitimate,” standards).
This devaluing of the social sciences is paradoxical given their importance in resolving contemporary social injustices pertaining to ‘race’/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, class and disability. Advocates of the social sciences of sport are arguably disproportionately affected by the devaluing of the social sciences more broadly because, within the social sciences themselves, sport continues to gain limited recognition. I am reminded of this passage from C.L.R. James in Beyond a boundary where he laments the devaluing of sport as an academic field:
A professor of political science publically bewailed that a man of my known political interests should believe cricket had ethical and social values. I had no wish to answer. I was just sorry for the guy. (James, 2005 [1963]: 241)
As this book goes to press it will be three decades since the English translation of Pierre Bourdieu’s essay ‘Program for a Sociology of Sport’ (Bourdieu, 1988) where he warned of the dilemma facing sociologists in taking sport seriously. Bourdieu expresses a clear ambiguity over the value of sport; not so much as a pastime, but rather as a field worthy of study in its own right and/or as a lens through which to understand other social phenomena. On the one hand, Bourdieu points out there are enthusiasts with vast specialist sports knowledge, who tend to be disinclined to think about the wider sociological importance and politics of sports, concerning themselves instead with endogenous discussions about scores, statistics, and tactics. Conversely, many academics, Bourdieu suggests, refrain from thinking deeply about sport because they do not consider it to be fundamental to the inner workings of society (Bourdieu, 1988: 153). Thirty years on, and while progress has been made, some of these fundamental challenges remain insidious (Fletcher, 2015; Coakley, 2017; Dart, 2017).
Crucially though, for many of us, sport does matter; personally, professionally and academically and thus, its relative exclusion within the ‘mainstream’ social sciences continues to be irritating. A number of scholars have already made a strong case for the value and analytical potential of sport in this respect (Coakley, 2017). Carrington (2010) suggests that the assumed innocence of sport as a space (in the imagination) and a place (as it physically manifests itself) that is removed from everyday concerns of power, inequality, struggle and ideology, has paradoxically allowed it to be filled with a range of contradic...