Family and Leisure: A Set of Contradictions

If a person dreams of leisure, he discovers connotations that are shared by so many people that we can begin to postulate a cultural definition of leisure in our western civilization. For many, it means stretching out for sun in a combination of well-being and laziness. Leisure is supposed to feel good, whether outside on a beach or inside in a comfortable home. For more active persons, it may mean using muscles for pleasure or skills for creativity. In other words, if we did a semantic analysis of the context in which the word leisure is used, we would find at least two general dimensions. First, the activity is pleasurable for the individual. Second, it is done at a time when the person is free to do it. The latent meaning of leisure for most people is that you do a thing that you want to do, at your own pace. Leisure is thus defined connotatively in individual terms. However, we know that leisure activities are more often than not pursued in a group setting. If we add the qualification to the word leisure we get the added connotation of doing things together. This togetherness is highly valued in family ideology and a postulate that is seldom explicated is that a high rate of family interaction in a leisure context will bring more cohesion to the group as an entity. That a high rate of family cohesion is desirable is also part of our western ideology. I It will be our contention in this article that cohesion is but one of many desirable states of the family system. The fact that leisure activity has the connotation of individuality in our culture is reflected in the type of research that has generated existing data. It considers the individual as the unit of analysis, and it focuses mostly on attitudes instead of actual behavior. Furthermore, and this is a corrolary of the above, leisure activities are seldom considered in their total impact on a specific society and in the social class as of that society. Research seldom looks into the social determinants of leisure, either as a product of social class or as specific to a particular type of society according to level of affluence. Our reasoning in this article will be guided by a systemic approach. Among other things, this means that the family system, as a system, has developed rules of behavior that will generally apply to leisure activity as well as to any other family activity. These rules are family norms (a culture specific to each family) and they will be applied to transform inputs from the environment. Following Ackoffs (1972) definition of a purposeful system, we say that an activity is co-producted by the rules of the systemn and the input from the environment. What is being done, (as family behavior in this article), depends on the perceived alternatives for choice within the family system, in order to match adequately the variety of