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As research has shown, former elite athletes often struggle to adapt to aspects of their post-sport lives. This can include the management of their identities, dealing with the uncertainty of their new roles, and negotiating the changes that occur to their bodies. In this paper we discuss an under-reported challenge facing retired athletes: how to manage their ongoing relationship with exercise. To address this issue we adopted a narrative approach, based on the first author's experiences as a former football player, to provide a socio-cultural reading of the various challenges involved in the transition from exercise as a vocation to a leisure activity. We suggest that these stories demonstrate that in retirement, former athletes' docility, while seemingly advantageous, can also be a significant obstacle to developing alternative meanings for exercise, including as a potential re-creative or leisure activity that can become meaningful and important in its own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managing the risks to which children are exposed in contemporary Britain is complex, requiring parents to balance opportunities for a child’s development with an appropriate concern for the potential consequences. Managing risk is particularly an issue for mothers, who, despite societal changes, tend to retain overall responsibility for the care of children. This paper explores the meanings mothers attach to risk and how this influences their children’s outdoor play. It also extends the scope of much existing literature by including children’s own perspectives on risk in outdoor play. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 12 mothers who had children aged between 9 and 11 years old who attended a north-east school. Two focus groups were also held, each with six of the children. Findings are analysed in relation to mother and child constructions of risk; mothers and children as risk managers; and negotiating mothering choices. The paper pays particular attention to the way in which mothers’ decisions were framed within risk cultures and dominant views of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothering. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Increased academic attention on the gendering of leisure pastimes in recent years has highlighted the centrality of the gendered body in influencing how leisure is accessed, experienced and transformed. To date, however, little attention has been paid to how women experience aquatic leisure activity, the second most popular form of leisure activity in the UK, and where female participation predominates. This paper presents results from research investigating the aquatic leisure experiences of 22 women, with children aged under 3, in the North-East of England. A number of key themes emerged from the data, which highlighted the centrality of the gendered, lived body as a key social construct contouring participant perceptions in the swimming pool environment. Women reflected upon their self-perceived physical deficiencies when wearing revealing swimming costumes, particularly under the critical gaze of ‘other’ bodies, whether present or imagined. The co-presence of other bodies was also central in shaping lived experiences, and the presence of ‘dependent’ children’s bodies shifted bodily intentionality away from the self towards perceived maternal responsibilities and the management of perceived risks, including ‘dirt’ and ‘germs’ and the negotiation of the tacit rules of the swimming pool. Results also suggest that the emphasis on maternal responsibility in aquatic leisure activity and timing of parent-toddler sessions could lead to reproduction of gender inequalities and the exclusion of some fathers from participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many north-western European countries, the family practices of drinking and eating used to be largely located in the private domain of the home. This situation has recently begun to change, particularly in gentrified urban areas where middle-class families are growing in number and family outings in bars and restaurants are becoming more widespread. This paper examines the new practices of family consumption from two perspectives: the providers and the consumers. Entrepreneurs shape family-friendly spaces by reducing boundaries between eating, drinking and playing and by offering out-of-home pleasures in home-like environments for both parents and children. They balance between accommodating the families and retaining their childless clients. Families that consume in the food and drink spaces are primarily local middle-class families, and fathers and mothers equally participate. This study further reveals that leisure time spent with the family cannot always be classified as leisure time as a family. Parental involvement with the children differs. We distinguish leisured caring time with high parental involvement, own leisure time mainly directed at parents’ personal activities and social leisure time mainly directed at maintaining social relationships beyond the family. We discuss earlier research on the complicated character of family leisure related to the caring duties of parents. Empirical evidence comes from an exploratory study of ten consumption spaces in the inner city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]