Leisure Lives and Children’s Play: A Tale of Two Ideals

Abstract

Work and leisure occupy two ends of a continuum. How work and leisure are organized pertains to ideologies and a sense of who we are. For example, in our current times, upper-/middle-class children’s leisure is frequently regulated and supervised, known as “concerted cultivation.” In contrast, “the achievement of natural growth” refers to working children spending their free time with minimum adult supervision. Likewise, two ideals regarding leisure and children’s play co-existed in Chinese history spanning over two thousand years. The exemplary child prevailing in historiographies is a juvenile prodigy who distains play, echoing the sentiment of concerted cultivation. Classical poems, however, depict an idyllic picture of the child at play uncontrived, resonating with the notion of “natural growth.” By examining these two childhood ideals, this paper discusses how Confucian and Daoist tenets shaped the concepts of leisure and work. It is argued that the two childhoods are intricately connected to ideologies traversing work, leisure, and social identities.