The course will focus on the leisure activities of children, inquiring into the term “children’s leisure”: Who defines the term? Who shapes it and organizes it? Who consumes it? Who profits from it? In addition, we will examine the time and space of child leisure. All these issues will be scrutinized from an inter-generational perspective.

The course will begin with child leisure dictated and produced by adults: the complementary education provided by the establishment (organized trips, extracurricular activities, youth movements, organized sports, etc.) and the variety of texts written by adults for children: child literature and journalism, games, theater, cinema, television for children, commercials, and so on.

Our focus will then shift to more adult-free child leisure that has played a major role in recent decades: multi-channel television, computers, the internet and mobile phones. We will address the new options these channels open to children and discuss adult attitudes towards them.