In this article, I contend that the sociology of leisure in particular and leisure studies in general has been shaped by adult-centric assumptions which have marginalized children’s perspectives on and experiences of leisure within theory building exercises. Consequently, leisure researchers who do empirical work on children’s leisure have largely eschewed critical debates about children’s agency, social positioning and lived citizenship among others that have been developed by the ‘new’ sociology of childhood. Failure to build bridges with other areas of scholarship such as sociological childhood studies, has intensified the intellectual isolation of leisure research. Here, I propose a sustained dialogue between leisure studies and childhood studies which will not only widen the intellectual breadth of leisure theory and make it more inclusive, but also enable leisure studies to have an impact on the new social studies of childhood. In illustrating what such a collaboration might entail, I outline a conceptual schema of three interlocking genres of children’s leisure – namely organized, family and casual leisure – based on existing studies conducted by researchers in leisure, childhood and family studies that offer a roadmap for the development of a new critical sociology of children’s leisure.

In countries currently under lockdown, schools and leisure facilities have closed their gates to the vast majority of children. Having to stay indoors for most of the day, children's leisurescapes have been radically transformed. In these circumstances, instances have emerged from across the globe of children adapting to the lockdown in creative ways and constructing leisurescapes within the limits of the home, by putting up rainbows and teddy bears on windows and porches. Drawing upon media reports about children's rainbow drawings and teddy bear hunts, in this paper, I deploy a sociological lens to demonstrate how children are using these leisure narratives as tools for participating in the wider conversation around the pandemic. At the same time, however, in pinning romanticized notions of hope and 'national spirit' upon the normative image of the child at play, media narratives are obfuscating the inequalities that fracture lived childhoods in the developed world.

Studies have highlighted the growing phenomenon of 'concerted cultivation' wherein middle-class parents are enrolling their children into multiple paid-for organised leisure activities as a way of cultivating their skills and reproducing class advantage. In unpacking the class disparities in children's organised leisure participation, researchers have largely overlooked the way race and ethnicity inflect middle-class parents' concerted cultivation strategies. Drawing upon a qualitative study with Greater London-based professional middle-class British Indian parents, this paper argues that the time-spaces of concerted cultivation also serve as sites for British Indian children's ethnic and racial socialisation (ERS). Two axes are identified along which racial parenting strategies intersect with concerted cultivation practices in these families: 'cultural (re)production through organised leisure' and '(anti)racism and leisure'. By analysing these processes, we draw out the implications of this interplay between class and race for understanding middle-class parenting and educational strategies in minority ethnic contexts.

Based on in‐depth interviews with 24 middle‐class Indian child participants, this is the first exploratory qualitative study, in India, to demonstrate the ways in which children as reflexive social actors re‐negotiated everyday schedules, drew on classed resources at their disposal and made sense of the impact of the pandemic on their educational pathways and future aspirations. These narratives offer a unique lens on the politics of middle‐classness and its constitutive relation to constructions of normative childhoods in contemporary India. Study findings contribute to the sociology of Indian childhood and more generally help enrich our understanding of southern childhoods and the reproduction of inequalities in contemporary India.

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