Barn, föräldrar och idrott En intervjustudie om fostran inom fotboll och golf

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this work is to describe and understand the significance of sports for children active in sports, their parents, and family. I am interested in how daily sports practice is understood by children active in sports and their parents and what sports mean for upbringing of children and young people. In the study eighteen children were interviewed, twelve boys and six girls in the ages of 10-12 years and their parents. Nine of the children play golf and nine play soccer. The perspective applied is pedagogic, which means that the connections between the social and individual are focused on. The results show that the patterns of childrearing for soccer and golf are distinguished from each other and thus what the children learn. In a comparison with research on concepts among parents from different social strata on the rearing of children, the pattern of childrearing with soccer agrees with patterns in the worker class, and those of golf with patterns in the upper middle class. In the results there are gender-related differences that do agree well with theories and research on the masculine hegemony in the sport. But the results also show that the sport can contribute to the rearing of males with both masculine and a part of traditionally feminine characteristics and of females with both feminine and a part of traditionally masculine characteristics. Another result is that sports at the same time correspond to needs of today's people and can be a counter against a development that is described by research as a split between body and soul, cultural isolation, dissolution of norms, and a fragmentation of existence. Soccer and golf become a kind of common project for families, not only for meetings between parents and children but also for meetings between adults and children of different ages. In a time when parents feel insecurity when facing the task of childrearing, sports stand for a distinct network of rules. In this way sports become a kind of complement to the childrearing that parents provide. Finally, the results show that there is both that which is common and that which is distinctive in both sports. Of the children who play golf, almost all of them devote themselves to some team sport, while the children who play soccer do not practice any other sport. In this way the children who play golf receive a double qualification that equips them for confrontation with the demands of modern society in a different way than with the case of the children who play soccer. And it is this that is the most distinctive factor.