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Geographical research on children, youth, and families has done much to highlight the ways in which children's lives have changed over the last twenty-five years. A key strand of research concerns children's play and traces, in the Global North, a decline in children's independent access to, and mobility through, public space. This article shifts the terrain of that debate from an analysis of what has been lost to an exploration of what has replaced it. Specifically, it focuses on children's participation in enrichment activities, including both individual and collective extracurricular sporting, cultural, and leisure opportunities in England. The research reveals that middle-class children have much higher participation rates in enrichment activities than their working-class counterparts. Parents value enrichment activities in very similar ways across the class spectrum-seeing them as fun, healthy, and social opportunities. The ability to pay for enrichment, however, means that it is incorporated into, and transforms, middle-class family life in ways not open to working-class families. Nevertheless, support across the class spectrum for these instrumental forms of play that institutionalize childhood in school, community, and commercial spaces leads to calls for subsidized provision for low-income children through schools. The article thus traces the \"enrichment\" and \"institutionalization\" of childhood and draws out the implications of this for how we think about play, education, parenting, and class in geography.

In this article we draw on data collected from a recent qualitative project to highlight the enthusiasm of middle-class parents for enrolling their under fives in 'enrichment' activities (extra-curricular creative and sporting classes). We seek to identify the part activities play in parental strategies for class reproduction. We first consider the broader issue of children and consumption, drawing out the way in which consumption and leisure activities are highly classed, and focusing on notions of taste and distinction. Then, using examples from the data, we emphasize the sense of urgency and responsibility parents felt concerning their child's development and the classed and gendered involvement of parents. We conclude that enrichment activities are one response to the anxiety and sense of responsibility experienced by middle-class parents as they attempt to 'make up' a middle-class child in a social context where reproduction appears uncertain.

In 2012, things weren’t looking good for Grant Beacon Middle School in Denver, Colo. Enrollment numbers were declining, students weren’t reaching required academic levels, and the Denver Public Schools district designated the school as on watch. By implementing a plan that emphasized expanded learning opportunities — adding five hours to the school week during which students engage in enrichment activities — the school turned around. Attendance and test scores are up, suspensions are down. Key elements of success were starting with a vision, choosing the right partners, including student voice, hiring a full-time coordinator, and offering high-quality programming.

This 2‐year study assessed program‐level differences in after‐school program (ASP) engagement in relation to child competencies (effectance motivation, social competence, school grades) and program quality and content. Participants were 141 children (Mage = 8.4 years) who attended 9 ASPs in an urban, disadvantaged city in the United States. Measures of competence were determined from classroom teachers’ ratings, and program engagement, quality, and content were assessed primarily through observation. Results from a hierarchical linear model showed that program‐level differences in engagement predicted children’s social competence and effectance motivation (but not school grades) in a linear, positive direction (p< .05). This relation held after modeling several selection factors and prior competence. Engaging ASPs were also significantly higher in program quality and tended to devote more time to enrichment activities and less time to homework and non‐skill‐building activities.

Elementary school students are intensely curious about astronomy: the Moon, planets, stars, and galaxies. Summer, with its warm evenings and star-filled skies, is the perfect time for students to explore the cosmos with a pair of binoculars. Because binoculars are used for many purposes (sporting events or birding, for example), many families already have a pair. If not, the author lends them a high-quality, durable pair of general purpose binoculars that he purchased for about $50. He provides the student and parent(s) with a series of enrichment activities that they can work through at their own pace over the summer. The activities include observations of the Moon, several planets, stars, and the Milky Way, integrated with supplemental material from the internet. Because these activities involve planning and carrying out investigations of the solar system and stars, they connect well to the new \"Framework for Science Education\" (NCR 2011). (Contains 4 figures and 11 online resources.)

We used a preferences-and-constraints model to develop four hypotheses to explain why parents may choose self-care (an unsupervised arrangement) as the primary child care arrangement for their children over supervised alternatives and tested them in a multivariate framework using 1995 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We found that the choice of self-care over supervised care alternatives is linked to the availability of parents' time to care for children, the child's level of responsibility and maturity, and the neighborhood context. However, we found no evidence that parents' ability to pay for child care is related to the choice of self-care. The results also suggest that parents use different decision-making processes, depending on their children's ages.

On a sunny day in July 2015, I drive with a college friend to the Ball Lake Dam in Vermont. “It’s not the size of the Hoover Dam,” she cautions me, “but it’s a real dam.” I am prepared for a small pile of rocks and arrive instead at an engineering feat that provides close to one thousand homes with electricity. I read about the TVA in college and not too long ago saw a public television documentary on the Hoover Dam, but never before have I had knowledge by acquaintance of a real live government-built dam. To my astonishment,