Spatialized time-marking – children’s travel and outings during the school summer holidays by parents’ class and citizenship status in Shanghai, China

We explore children’s experiences of travel and outings during the school summer holidays in Shanghai, China. Drawing on our interviews with children and adults from 32 families, and the children’s audio-recorded reflections, we consider variation in the children’s experiences of three kinds of summer mobility: vacations, day outings, and visits to parents’ workplaces. We examine the implications of parents’ class and migration citizenship status for the children’s experiences of each. Concurrently, we emphasize the impact of children’s own time availability on their experiences of travel and outings. We find that travel and outings constitute rare slivers of time when children can escape the confines of home, packed study and enrichment schedules, and mundane domestic routines, to enjoy leisure or family togetherness. Theoretically, we contribute the concept of ‘family spatialized time-marking practices’ as a lens for analyzing the meaning that parents and children bring to travel and outings in a context of involuted childrearing and precarity.