Children’s Free Time In Turbulent Times a Global Comparison of Holidays, Leisure and Inequality

Holidays and free time are among the experiences through which children encounter the social world — and among the most unequally distributed. Yet the question is too often reduced to aggregate “departure rates” and confined to single national frames. This session proposes an international, comparative sociology of children’s holidays and leisure that places children’s own viewpoints at its centre, treating them as competent social actors (James & Prout, 1990) rather than as objects of measurement.

In turbulent times, children’s free time is a sensitive register of wider upheavals. Pandemics, war and displacement, climate disruption, the rising cost of living, and the spread of artificial intelligence and digital platforms are reshaping what holidays and leisure are, who can reach them, and what they mean — unevenly within and between societies. These shocks are not absorbed directly: they are mediated by public policies and welfare configurations (Esping-Andersen, 1990) that, from universalist to residual or developmentalist, distribute protection and risk very differently, and by class, gender, race and territory inside each country (Lareau, 2003).

We invite papers from any region — Global North and South — that compare how state provision and its absence shape children’s holidays, leisure and non-departure, and how children themselves experience, narrate and make sense of these arrangements. We especially welcome contributions that confront the methodological challenges of comparing childhoods across contrasting political economies, and that connect children’s free time to the turbulences of the present.