Children's Geographies

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After-school Hours and the Meanings of Home: Re-

defining Finnish Childhood Space

Hannele Forsberg And & Harriet Strandell

To cite this article: Hannele Forsberg And & Harriet Strandell (2007) After-school Hours and
the Meanings of Home: Re-defining Finnish Childhood Space, Children's Geographies, 5:4,
393-408, DOI: 10.1080/14733280701631841

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Published online: 11 Dec 2007.

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 Children’s Geographies, Vol. 5, No. 4, 393 – 408, November 2007

After-school Hours and the

Meanings of Home: Re-defining
Finnish Childhood Space

HANNELE FORSBERG AND HARRIET STRANDELL

Hannele Forsberg, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Tampere,
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Tampere, Finland. E-mail: hannele.forsberg@uta.fi

Harriet Strandell, Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki,
Finland. E-mail: harriet.strandell@helsinki.fi

ABSTRACT School children’s use of their home during the after-school hours has
become a controversial question in Finnish society. The article discusses cultural
conceptions and uses of home as a specific space for children by comparing two
different sets of empirical data: children’s accounts of their after-school spaces and
media debate on the same topic. Activated public concern in media accounts is
analysed as a process of re-defining the properties of ‘proper places’ for children,
whereas children’s accounts are interpreted as expressions of local cultures. For the
children, home is an ideal place for spending after-school time, while the public debate
portrays the home as empty and children as lonely and unsafe. Definitions of home in
after-school time are considered as part of a broader cultural process of re-defining
contemporary Finnish childhood in which control turns out to be a crucial dimension
of children’s ‘proper places’.

KEYWORDS : Home, childhood, after-school hours, spatial discourses and experiences

Introduction
In our ‘western minds’, effected by modern domestic and family ideologies, children
and home are easily linked (see, for example, Hareven, 1991).1 The union is often
symbolised by security, trust and affection—on the condition that there is at least
one adult in the home, this generally being the mother. Childhood has historically
become increasingly domesticated, shaping the notion that the place for young children
is in a supervised space at home (James et al., 1998, pp. 53– 55; Holloway and
Valentine, 2000a, pp. 776 –777). In the construction of the dependent child in
modern childhood, the conceptual link between ‘family’ and ‘home’ is reinforced to
an extent where they become almost interchangeable terms (see Hareven, 1991). The
child is ideologically understood as being at home in the family; in fact the family
is the child’s home. Children acting ‘too independently’ raise increasing public
concern (James, 1998; see also Calcraft, 2004).

ISSN 1473-3285 print; ISSN 1473-3277 online/07/040393-16 # 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14733280701631841
 394 Hannele Forsberg and Harriet Strandell

A child spending time at home without adult supervision accordingly violates the
modern cultural convention of equating home with family or parents and easily
becomes a cause for concern. Such a situation of activated concern has recently arisen
in Finland, as increasing attention has been paid to children who spend all or most of
their after-school time at home when their parents are working outside the home.
Home, which has more than any other place been regarded as the ‘proper place’ for child-
hood, is rendered increasingly improper when it comes to children’s after-school time.
Finland, together with other Nordic countries, frequently stands as a model country for
public child care services.2 When it comes to arrangements for young school children’s
after-school care, however, Finland has partly followed a different path than for
example Sweden and Denmark. In these latter countries, public after-school care for
young school children was systematically expanded and institutionalised concurrent
with mothers’ increased employment in the 1970s and 1980s. In Finland, however,
women’s gainful employment has a longer tradition. The mostly full-time, gainful
employment held by Finnish mothers has been regarded as self-evident for many
decades.3 Mothers’ work has, then, been tied to the institutionalisation of after-school
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care to a considerably lower degree than in other Nordic countries. While a comprehensive
system of public day-care institutions for preschool children (0 –6 years) was developed in
the 1970s and 1980s, young school children’s (7 –9 years) after-school hours have typi-
cally been filled by a ‘patchwork’ of different kinds of private arrangements and non-
profit offerings provided by voluntary organisations or local authorities (Koululaisten
aamu ja iltapäivätoiminnan . . ., 2002, pp. 2 – 11; Salmi and Lammi-Taskula, 2004).
Part of after-school arrangements consists of children spending time on their own, or
with siblings or friends in and near their homes. The hot meal provided at school, the rela-
tively child-friendly environment, children’s capability of independent mobility and a cul-
tural agreement allowing children to spend time on their own (see Kyttä, 2003) have made
this social practice possible. Thus, home forms an important space for young school chil-
dren, an anchoring point for many kinds of activities, organised either by the children
themselves or by parents and children together (Alanen, 1992; Kiili, 1998; Salmi and
Lammi-Taskula, 2004).
Until recently, the patchwork-like arrangements of children’s after-school time have
been more or less culturally accepted and normalised, expressing a trust in both
parents’ and children’s own capacities and resources to organise children’s after-school
hours while parents are working. Lately, however, attitudes towards the organising of
this stage of children’s lives have begun to change, and the after-school time spent at
home by young children has been highlighted as a social problem; the lack of institutional
care services is perceived increasingly as a developmental risk adding to children’s inse-
curity. In the mid 1990s, ‘lone children’ became the topic of heated public debate and
concern which continued until 2004, resulting in the Act on schoolchildren’s morning
and after-school care. The Act guarantees supervised municipal after-school care for all
first- and second-graders who opt for it.4
Because the cultural practices of children spending time at home after the school day did
not until recently presuppose a mother (or father) who stays at home, the question of young
school children’s after-school hours is not one more case in the ideological struggle
between ‘women’s right to work’ and the notion that young children’s place is in the
home with their mother. The fact that parents work full-time is largely accepted and not
drawn into the issue. Instead, the rise in concern is directed towards the negative conse-
quences seen as following from children’s direct relationship to and use of their home.
In this article our interest is in the cultural conceptions and uses of a specific place
occupied by children, home during the after-school hours, reporting at the same time
 After-school Hours and the Meanings of Home 395

on the changing attitudes towards childhood in contemporary Finnish society. In order to

do this, we will compare two different sets of empirical data: one consisting of children’s
accounts of their everyday after-school spaces and the other consisting of media debate on
the same topic. The tensions and contradictions between children’s accounts and the
public debate—essentially crystallised in terms of home—form the starting point of the
article. We analyse the activated public concern as a process of re-defining the properties
of ‘proper places’ for children, whereas children’s accounts will be interpreted as signs of
the local culture of after-school hours—both processes in which home and the child’s
relation to home play a crucial role. We consider the after-school issue as part of a
broader cultural process of re-defining contemporary Finnish childhood.

Approach, Data and Methods

When introducing children’s geographies and the new social studies of childhood Sarah
Holloway and Gill Valentine (2000a, 2000b) identify three different approaches
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towards thinking about spatiality: the importance of place, everyday spaces and spatial
discourses. In this article, we combine two of these approaches: everyday spaces and
spatial discourses. We consider in particular the links between childhood as a cultural
construction and a variety of spatial constructions focusing on home.
In this paper, children’s accounts of their after-school homes are approached as every-
day spaces. The analysis will focus on the ways children use, experience and value space,
in other words on those everyday after-school spaces ‘in and through which children’s
identities and lives are made and remade’ (Holloway and Valentine, 2000b, pp.
11 –12). We explore the ways in which space fashions experiences for children and struc-
tures the social space of childhood (James et al., 1998, p. 39). We will build on the notion
that home is more than a physical location; it is also a location which is imbued with
meaning and is part of the process of identity-making and a matrix of social relations; a
relationship between people and their environment (Dovey, 1985, p. 34; Christensen
et al., 2000, p. 139; Valentine, 2001, p. 71; also Blunt, 2005, p. 506).
That children can have a meaningful relationship to home on their own, without that
relationship being mediated by their parents, has largely been obscured by the equation
between home and family, which has long dominated research perspectives on children
and families (James, 1998; Christensen et al., 2000). ‘Family’ in this theoretical construction
actually stands for parent, excluding the possibility of treating the child as an active partici-
pant in both family and home relations (Brannen, 1999; Smart et al., 2001). Research that
disconnects this equation is scarce but emerging. It goes into what Owain Jones (2001, p. 36)
has termed ‘otherable space’ when studying children in rural villages. By looking at the
opportunities for children to exploit spaces on their own terms, he studies how children’s
geographies take form by ‘suffusing through the fabric of adults’ geographies’ (ibid, 29).
Disconnecting home and family means making a necessary analytical distinction
between relations to home and relations to family, which in daily life are intertwined in
many ways (see Christensen et al., 2000). Anne Solberg (1990) has investigated
10 –12-year-old school children’s use of the home in after-school time when parents are
still at work. The way in which the after-school hours of these ‘new home-stayers’ is
organised has created an early arena for children’s individualisation and an arena for
developing a particular ‘ownership’ of the home (see Solberg, 1990). Rasmussen (2004)
and Rasmussen and Smidt (2003) include courtyards and gardens as key parts in the
home arena. They make a useful analytical distinction between on one hand ‘children’s
places’ as places children attribute special meaning and identity to and on the other
hand ‘places for children’ designed by adults. The two are not identical. Children and
 396 Hannele Forsberg and Harriet Strandell

young people’s ‘bedroom culture’—spending more time in an often media-equipped own

room at home—is likewise pointing towards a more individualised use of the home and to
the increase of private or adult-free space inside the home (Livingstone and Bovill, 2001;
see also Holloway and Valentine, 2003, pp. 102– 119).
The article draws on two different sorts of empirical data produced separately in differ-
ent contexts but addressing the same issue of the hours after school. The first set of data
consists of the accounts of 8-year-old second graders of their everyday after-school activi-
ties and spaces. The data were gathered from urban children who were recruited randomly
through two city centre schools in one of the largest Finnish cities during the term
2004– 2005. Although it was not the starting point of the study, most of the children par-
ticipating in the study spend their after-school time at home or would like to do so. The
reason for studying 8-year-old second graders is connected to a presumption that for
Finnish children, the age of eight represents a strong transition phase towards increasing
independence in dealing with everyday life. The 31 children from two different school
groups are ordinary Finnish (urban) children from different socio-economic groups, as
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the comprehensive schools are for all children (Finland does not have a division of
private and public schools). The children were studied through various means of qualitat-
ive research: fill-in diaries about their after-school hours, photography, maps of social
networks, and interviews, the idea of which was to shed light on the chronological,
spatial, social and experiential structure of the children’s after-school hours.5
The second set of data consists of public discussion on school children’s after-school
hours over the last 15 years. The public debate is here represented by writings on the
topic in the leading and most widely circulated daily newspaper in Finland, Helsingin
Sanomat,6 during the period 1990– 2004. Helsingin Sanomat was chosen because it as
the only nationwide daily newspaper has a strong institutional position in Finnish
society. The newspaper is independent and non-aligned. The after-school ‘issue’ has
been vividly discussed in the paper in this period of time. The data consists of 294
items, of which 39% are domestic news, 32% letters to the press and 9% editorials. In
the article we focus on items discussing children’s home in after-school time, the proper-
ties of that home and its meanings for the children. The media discussions of home as a
place are often related to opinions about activities regarded either as appropriate or in-
appropriate for children, thus defining the boundaries of childhood. In the article we
concentrate on the mainstream of the debate. There are also a few voices questioning
either the existence of a problem or the solutions offered.7
In the analysis of the public debate, we will apply a discursive approach on space,
paying attention to how understandings of childhood shape the meanings of particular
spaces (Holloway and Valentine, 2000a, pp. 776 –778). We display how changing concep-
tualisations of Finnish childhood alter the meanings of home in the after-school time of
young school children. Definitions of home determine children’s spatial and temporal
boundaries: where it is seen as appropriate for children to be and what to do in those
places.
We argue that ‘home’ is a political conception of social space, defined by different
parties in society. Definitions which determine children’s spatial and temporal boundaries
are formed in relation to public discourses and local cultures of parenting. Although
having less power in society, children do not passively adhere to adults’ definitions;
rather they play an active part in the negotiations (see Valentine, 2001, pp. 91– 92).
The politics of space alerts us never to regard social space as a mere issue of neutral
location. The central issue to be explored in relation to childhood space is that of
control (James et al., 1998, pp. 38– 40). Control, or the lack of it, is a crucial dimension
in both the public debate and in the children’s accounts.
 After-school Hours and the Meanings of Home 397

The article compares meanings of home in the two sets of data. We start by discussing
home as a physical space, turning then to home as an arena for children’s social relations.
The third analytical theme is home as children’s mental experience, with a particular focus
on time spent alone during after-school hours. In conceptually highlighting home from
three analytical perspectives, we utilise a division into three dimensions of meanings of
home which are developed and used in other studies: home as a concrete physical and
material space, a theatre of social interaction and ‘a home of the mind’ (for example
Kenyon, 1999; Vilkko, 2000; Lahelma and Gordon, 2003). After discussing the meanings
of home in the data, we will discuss the functions of the contrasting categories of home
found in the data.

Home as a Physical Space for After-school Hours

The majority of the children in the study did not, at the time of the study, attend public
after-school care. Only one of the 31 children regularly spent her after-school hours at a
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club, and four children reported that they visited it a few times a week. Instead, home
formed the most important after-school space for most of the children. After the short
school days,8 children walked home, even though in principle, all of them had the right
to organised after-school care within the current service provision. This everyday arrange-
ment had become naturalised for children, but equally, it was constructed socially, histori-
cally and culturally by the school system, parents’ work and child care policy. The
majority of the children in the study suggested, however, that they participated in super-
vised after-school activity in first grade, so they had experienced this form of provision.
According to the children’s accounts, home formed a particular environment for their
after-school hours. Flats in larger or smaller blocks of different types, or detached or
semi-detached houses, where many of the children have rooms of their own (although
many also shared a room with a sibling), formed the after-school space. Some of the
children spent their after-school hours in two homes, alternating between the houses of
their mothers and fathers, either spending alternate weeks at each, or dividing the time
according to some other agreement. In particular, when there were no adults at home,
children seemed to be able to use the whole space available and all the objects and appli-
ances, as resources for their activities. In this way, the children appeared to have a personal
and direct ownership of the home during their after-school time.
The home-space accessible to the children was not limited only to the flat or the house,
but also essentially included outdoor space, such as the garden or grounds and occasional
outbuildings. A slide, a tree branch to hang from, spaces under balconies, attics, bicycle
sheds and other outbuildings functioned as children’s places (Rasmussen, 2004). They
were used for play, hide-and-seek, theatre plays and climbing. The child in the following
extract provides a rich description of the opportunities for play available around the home:
I: What else have you got in your yard?
C: Yes and then there’s a sort of platform and lots of sheds. Wood sheds . . . with
space for firewood and such.
I: I see. Are there places there where you can play?
C: Yes or mostly we use them for hide-and-seek, you know why?
I: Well, why? Are they good for hiding?
C: See the shed is a place from which you can get almost anywhere else inside the
shed, so . . .
I: Has it got many doors?
C: . . . because it’s got seve-several doors, no one knows that you can get to many
 398 Hannele Forsberg and Harriet Strandell

different places through them, but I can always get anywhere. Because there are all
sorts of corners and sort of rotten boards, so sometimes you can be-bend them to get
out.
I: I see. Sort of making doors of your own.
C: Then, there was this, there was like a big hole, so I’ve lugged over a big board now,
so I can always close it when I go through it.
I: OK, I see. So you made a secret door.
C: Mm.

The grounds around the home offered an exciting environment for adventure and physical
action, which feeds the imagination. To some extent, the children also reported using
designated places for children (Rasmussen, 2004), with swings and climbing frames,
but they were not regarded with the same kind of passion or enthusiasm as the sheltered
corners of gardens or yards which the children themselves had appropriated. In some
cases, the children mentioned that they use these sheltered places without adults’ knowl-
edge. The boundaries of how far outside the home the children were allowed to go during
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after-school hours varied from one child to another. All the children had agreed upon
boundaries with the appropriate adults. Some of the boys had the largest territories,
being allowed to use their bikes to move between home, school, neighbourhood shops,
the library and the nearby wood. It would appear that the girls moved across narrower ter-
ritories. Some of the children would have liked permission to move further away; others
revealed that they have already done so in secret. However, most of the children were
happy with the territories agreed upon with their parents and felt no need to transgress
the boundaries.
On the whole, public debate about home as a physical environment for children is
scarce. When commented upon, home is seen as a risky space, filled with TVs, computers
and Internet connections. These were mostly regarded as the ‘bad’ amusements of lonely
children, although there were also voices claiming that the Internet in particular can have
important educational functions:

In order to kill time children play computer games alone or chat on the net all day
long, during holidays for weeks. They are frustrated and depressed . . . (Letter to
the press 13.9.00)

Positive dimensions of home were found when participants in the debate remembered their
own childhood in the past, which was sometimes viewed in a slightly romantic light:

How wonderful to find your toys and books, friends in the yard or your sister at home.
You had time to practise music, do your homework, visit your own club or eat a sand-
wich while dreaming about summer or whatever. (Letter to the press 25.7.02)

Spaces surrounding the home were regarded as potentially dangerous for children because
they constituted uncontrolled space. The public debate identified the uncontrolled after-
school spaces symbolically with the concept of ‘street’.

Children seem to become just more and more vigorous and self-organised when we
expect them to be so. However, time spent watching TV at home or roaming the
streets, in the company of friends only, poses a big risk. (Editorial 21.1.98)

The ‘street’ is a strong metaphor for all situations in which children are not under adult
supervision and which cannot thus be part of a ‘good childhood’ (Matthews et al.,
2000). The ‘street’ and the risks, such as loafing about and engaging in questionable
 After-school Hours and the Meanings of Home 399

activities connected to it are strong symbols for the vulnerability and dependence that are
projected as the natural state of childhood (Prout, 2005, p. 13).

Home as a Theatre of Social Interaction

Although a majority of the children returned home after-school, few of them seem to be
completely alone at home. Some of the children spent their after-school hours at home
with an elder sibling. In other cases, one of the parents spent several afternoons a week at
home. A mother or father may have been at home during the children’s after-school
hours because of night work, shift work, telework, studies, or the care of a baby or
toddler at home. The grandmothers of some of the children lived nearby, and those
children often visit them. A couple of the families occasionally employed a paid childmin-
der. Only eight out of the 31 children’s parents were always at work outside the home during
the hours after school. This patchwork-like way of arranging children’s after-school hours
has been reported in other studies as well (see Koululaisten aamu-ja iltapäivätoiminnan
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. . ., 2002, pp. 2–11; Salmi and Lammi-Taskula, 2004).

The majority of the children described the adults and siblings present at home as back-
ground figures who are indeed at hand but are mostly focused on their own activities: the
father would be asleep after a night shift, the teleworking mother reading, the studying
parent working at the computer, the mother caring for smaller siblings doing household
work. Family afternoons indeed appear to be strongly individualised; in some cases,
each family member even takes care of his or her own meals acording to individual con-
venience. However, the child is surrounded by a network of adults in or near the home,
who can keep company if needed and make the child feel more safe (see Kiili, 1998,
pp. 33 –36).
With the exception of a few items, children’s after-school hours at home were described
in the public debate as a social vacuum in which children have to manage without safe
adults. Children’s after-school hours were categorised as empty homes. That a consider-
able number of mothers of second graders were at home for different reasons9 and that
parents made all kinds of arrangements to surround the child with ‘a safety network’
during the afternoon hours, was ignored in the debate. Little trust was placed in the capa-
bility of parents to arrange their children’s after-school hours:
Usually the mother of a young school child is working long days in low-paid jobs. In
practice she is a single mother, because the father is absent from everyday life due to
his well-paid and challenging job. Parents call their children on the phone; they do not
know what their kids actually do in the afternoons. (Letter to the press 5.2.02)
Children do not have grandparents in their daily environments: these live too far
away. Nor do they have older siblings close to adulthood. There’s no lady next
door they can trust and with whom they can spend some time in the afternoons, no
housekeeper to be present as a stable adult. No janitor to keep an eye open that chil-
dren don’t tease each other or are not hit by cars. There are only strange adults that
children have to learn to fear. Children wake up in the morning, go to school and
come home alone . . . There are no stable adult people in their local neighbourhood.
(Letter to the press 13.9.00)
The public debate portrayed children’s after-school hours as a socially empty space and
the child as ‘lonely’. These constructions started to adopt their own logic as self-
evident truths, which were routinely repeated: ‘Young school children’s school days are
often short, and there is nothing except an empty home for them in the afternoons’
 400 Hannele Forsberg and Harriet Strandell

(Letter to the press 19.8.97). An interesting feature of the debate was that only the presence
of an adult can make the home less empty. The company of other people—siblings or
friends—could not reduce the emptiness. Only through adults, then, could the child
gain access to a home that is not empty. Children are ‘denied’ access to a meaningful
home unless there is at least one ‘safe’ adult there with the child.
It is evident that the ‘empty home’ as it was constructed in the debate could not be a
proper place for children. Therefore, as far as after-school hours were concerned, the
child’s home was excluded as a place for a ‘good childhood’. Defining the home as
‘empty’ and the child as ‘lonely’ constituted a favourable starting-point for offering
more tempting alternatives for children’s after-school hours. This was often done by
contrasting the ‘empty home’ to good and adult-supervised after-school activities:
. . . it’s worth seeing how many children under 12 would choose an empty home or
hanging around at the shopping centre if there were different kinds of hobbies to
choose from. (Editorial 30.11.96)
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. . . active, safe and meaningful activities in the company of friends, supervised by

adults, or an empty home, loneliness and feeling unsafe. (Letter to the press 19.8.97)
The social relationships which the children themselves defined as most important during
their after-school hours in the home sphere were relationships with friends; nevertheless,
living in blocks of flats in the city centre, in the midst of traffic, shops and crowds of people
seemed to imprison children at home and did not seem to support the forming of social
relations. The elbow room that these children were accorded was much narrower than
that experienced by children who were able to move more easily in their home
environments. Whenever possible, peer relations afforded space for children’s activity,
as demonstrated by the following extract:
I: What are you going to do today? Or do you know yet, at all?
C: I don’t know, because me and Anna and Ida have agreed that we’ll first go fetch
each other . . .
I: Mmm.
C: . . . and then we’ll spend time the three of us . . .
I: Mmm.
C: . . . and think about whose house we’ll be at.
I: Mmm.
C: Then sometimes, maybe if we’re out of doors at, at our house, then sometimes we
go . . .
I: Mmm.
C: And sometimes we play detectives.
I: Mmh.
C: Then, then when we’re indoors, sometimes we make a play, and sometimes, this is
something that me and Ida thought of . . .
I: Mm, mm.
C: . . . sometimes we get stuff from the attic and the wardrobe, big piles of costumes
for it . . .
I: Uh-huh
C: . . . pile them on the floor and decide which are the best costumes and then make a
play for them.
Play and games organised spontaneously by the children themselves occupied a crucial
position in the children’s use of the home. The presence or absence of friends associated
 After-school Hours and the Meanings of Home 401

with these activities would affect their contentment with the home in after-school time.
Friends were, in fact, the children’s most important social network, and after-school
hours may be described as a space with friends in the overall chronological structure of
children’s weekdays: mornings were spent at school, and evenings were a time for both
leisure pursuits and time with family. Also those children who, due to their living environ-
ment, could not easily be together with friends, would appreciate having this possibility.
In the public debate, on the other hand, the company of peers was depicted as a bad
substitute for the company of and supervision by adults. When the company of adults
was lacking, children ‘have to put up with’ their peers. Peers could not, according to
the debate, reduce children’s loneliness and feelings of being unsafe; on the contrary,
they made it even worse. The child was no less alone and lonely when they spent time
together with friends or siblings.
The representation of peers in the debate associated them with loafing about and enga-
ging in obscure activities and risks. Peers were interpreted as leading the child into bad
habits:
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Without care and supervision children stick to one another for support and might be
driven to really harmful deeds. (Editorial 30.11.96)
The company of peers was associated primarily in the public debate with bad pastimes or
the uncontrolled use of space. The debate did not pay attention to those arguments stem-
ming from childhood research which have pointed to the importance of peer relations in
children’s social worlds (see for example Corsaro, 1985; Frønes, 1995; Strandell, 1997).

Home as a Mental Experience—Particularly in the Light of Being on One’s Own

Although most of the children in the study reported having ‘background figures’ at home
(a parent or an elder sibling) and some of them occasionally attended an after-school club,
from time to time most of them nevertheless spent after-school hours on their own at
home. Of those children who were never on their own at home, one child attended the
afternoon club every day, while the others always returned to a home in which the
mother, a childminder or elder siblings were always present.
For the children themselves, being on their own was both a positive and a negative
experience; however, the positive aspects outweighed the negative. Children wanted to
be on their own and longed for it, hoping for some personal space where they could
find respite, calm down and spend time by themselves. This was sometimes felt to be
necessary in order to counterbalance daily school situations in which children have to
function in a group on the terms, rules and schedules of the group. For most children,
the only opportunity to be on their own was in after-school time at home, and many,
like the boy in the next extract, enjoedy being by themselves:
I: What can you do when you’re on your own?
C: You can watch videos or DVDs or listen to music or. Or I sew or go see a friend.
I: What is it you sew?
C: I usually sew by hand.
I: What do you sew, then?
C: Sometimes when I’ve got nothing to do, I may sew like shirts or some fabrics.
I: Oh. Clothes for yourself, you mean?
C: Myself and others as well.
I: Where did you learn that?
C: At school.
 402 Hannele Forsberg and Harriet Strandell

I: I see. Do you like doing that?

C: Yes.

In addition to calming down and finding space for one’s own activities and pastimes, crises
in the family, such as serious illnesses or separations and the moving away of family
members, may create situations in which the children want to withdraw to process their
own feelings. In the following extract, Nora described her longing for a place of her
own to the interviewer:

C: Yes, but in fa-fact I’d like to have a room of my own.

I: I see. Why would you like to have a room of your own?
C: I sometimes want to have somewhere that I can be just by myself and not bothered
by others.
I: Mm. Well, where do you go if you want to be just by yourself?
C: Well yes but I can’t, can I.
I: No, not at home at least, but do you mean you have to go somewhere else if you
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want to be by yourself?
C: Hmm.
I: So do you have a place somewhere, out in the garden or somewhere, where you can
be on your own?
C: Well, that’s where I usually go, see I’ve built a sort of house under the stairs.
I: Is that outdoors or indoors?
C: Outdoors.
I: I see.
C: Under the steps out of doors.
I: All right, and that’s where you can be by yourself.
C: Because, you can’t even see it really, because there’s a sort of rug hanging in front,
in front of the mouth.
I: I see. All right.

Nora’s house built underneath the steps outside the house served as a substitute for per-
sonal space. Nora’s narrative formed a context justifying the need for personal space.
She has a chronic illness which causes some strain on her daily life. She needs a respite
after the hectic day at school. Being on one’s own often constituted a double meaning
for children: it was not always nice, but sometimes it was experienced as a very necessary
thing which they strove to provide for themselves.
A few of the children hinted occasionally that they suffered from being alone. It is worth
noting that being alone, regardless of whether it was experienced positively or more nega-
tively as loneliness, was emphasised as a passing moment in the children’s daily lives. As a
rule, the children lead their lives as part of various social networks: their circle of friends,
the school, the parents, the siblings and other adults.
The children distinguished being on one’s own from being lonely, which was
described as a negative feeling. Feeling lonely during the hours after school was rare
and limited to specific occasions usually connected to relationships with friends,
‘when no one wants to be with me’, or to feeling socially excluded, ‘they’re always
together, the two of them’. Although the children rarely admitted having felt lonely
during the after-school hours, they were able to define loneliness. Expressions like
‘boring’, ‘time goes slowly’, ‘not that much fun’, ‘stupid’ and ‘sort of an unhappy
feeling’ are eloquent. For the children, feeling lonely was not necessary connected to
after-school experiences at home; they thought that a child may feel lonely also at an
after-school club when suitable company was not at hand. The children also had ways
 After-school Hours and the Meanings of Home 403

and means of dealing with an eventual feeling of loneliness. Either they could find mean-
ingful activities to enable them to forget this sentiment, or they could seek contact with
other people, whether this meant phoning or going to see a friend, talking to the lady next
door or calling dad at work.
According to the children’s accounts, there were thus both good and bad aspects of
being on one’s own. It did not necessarily mean that the children had nothing to do. Some-
times idleness was a deliberate choice, sometimes it was not. The public debate, neverthe-
less, did not distinguish between being on one’s own and loneliness when discussing
children’s after-school time at home; the two dimensions were discussed as synonyms.
One of the central arguments in the public debate on after-school hours of young
school children has been that being alone at home has dramatic and strongly negative out-
comes for children’s well-being. The argumentation rests on strong assumptions about
causes and effects:

A study concerning 4000 ninth graders in the US tells about the risks of children’s
unsupervised use of time. It shows that if a child spends more than four hours a
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week after school without adult supervision, the risk of using drugs increases. The
risk doubles if the unsupervised time is more than 10 hours a week. Besides drug
use, the child will become more depressed and have less success in school. (Editorial
9.2.97)

Maybe the most important aim of the whole-day-school would be to protect children
from the risks of being alone after school, such as unsafeness, depression, develop-
mental problems and marginalisation. (Editorial 3.9.02)

The argument stating that being alone necessarily leads to dramatic consequences has
obtained the status of a more or less undisputable ‘fact’ in the mainstream of the
debate. Many of the claim-makers of the debate have contributed to producing and repeat-
ing the ‘fact’: educational authorities, voluntary organisations, politicians, professionals,
researchers, and partly also parents. Being on one’s own has been automatically seen in
a negative light: being alone has been argued to lead to underage drinking and
smoking, alcohol and mental problems, restlessness, inactivity, bad school achievement,
marginalisation, undesirable activities, light-fingeredness and even to the beginning of a
criminal career.
‘Wrong’ expectations of children’s ability to take care of themselves at home often
seemed to be under attack in the debate. Gradually increasing trust in the children’s
ability to manage the practical tasks of everyday life, such as having a snack, doing
one’s homework or maybe walking the dog, has until recently been regarded as a way
to accustom the growing child to be more independent. The debate, however,
turned this cultural practice into a question of the ‘abandonment of the child’. The
villains were both the parents and society, who were neglecting the supervision of
children:

In Finland we are proud of our ‘independent’ children, although children’s indepen-

dence is used just as another word for abandoning children . . . No one should be
proud that a seven-year-old child can walk alone to school, make his food in the
microwave oven and spend five or six hours alone at home without the company
of an adult. (Letter to the press 22.3.01)

What could be thought of in terms of competence and trust was in the debate ‘revealed’ as
‘wrong beliefs’, ‘imagination’ or ‘falsity’, false doctrines which threaten children who
 404 Hannele Forsberg and Harriet Strandell

suffer from too little care and who for this reason desperately long for safe adults.
However, a few critical and balancing voices were also heard in the debate:
If being alone for a few hours is regarded as equal to the abandonment of the child, we
are throwing the baby out with the bathwater in the discussion about children.
(Editorial 20.1.98)

Contrasting Categories of Home

As we have seen from comparing the children’s accounts of their everyday spaces with the
public discourses on the after-school question, two very different, not to say contrary ver-
sions have emerged. Interestingly enough, the opposing interpretations are crystallised in
the meanings of home. As text genres, children’s accounts and the media texts are natu-
rally different and have different aims and functions. Children talked about home in
order to make sense of their daily experiences of after-school time. For most of the
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children in the study, home is an ideal place for spending their after-school time, regard-
less if they do it on their own, together with peers, siblings, parents, or occasionally
grandparents or other people. The home forms an important basis for many sorts of activi-
ties with or without friends. For children, ‘good’ after-school hours consisted of ordinary
everyday activities, the company of friends and some influence on what to do and how to
use the home space. At home you could be your own boss and in control of your own use of
space and time. A distinction was made between being on one’s own and being lonely:
while the former had both good and bad aspects, the latter mostly refers to problems in
peer relations, in the home context or outside it.
We find in the children’s accounts many of the meanings of home that have been
pointed out in earlier research on home. Home is a personal space of relations and identi-
fication, an emotionally based and meaningful relationship between people and their
environment and a place where one best knows oneself. It is a mode of being, a place
of certainty, routine behaviour and the experience of insideness (Dovey, 1985, pp.
34– 39; Olwig, 1998, p. 225). But also boredom, as in feminist notions on women’s
home experiences (Friedan, 1963), is from time to time present in the children’s accounts.
The after-school time at home has until recently provided the most significant free time
zone for Finnish school children. On the basis of the accounts of the children in the study,
the framework of individualisation seems to structure their after-school hours extensively,
including opportunities for personal space, action and participation. It seems that Finnish
children have until recently been accorded a degree of autonomy and freedom of mobility
that is exceptional compared to countries with longer traditions of supervised childhood
(see Kyttä, 2003). Becoming heated at such a late date, the public concern seems to be
very specific when considered in an international context, given the fact that Finnish
mothers have been working outside the home for decades.
The media talk on children and young people, on the other hand, has to be read in
another context. As has been stated, children rarely appear on the agenda unless they
are defined as social problems (Thorne, 1987, p. 89). The media is an important arena
to raise claims on issues as a social problem (Spector and Kitsuse, 1977; Best, 1990;
Calcraft, 2004). The location of children is never a neutral question, and we have read
the media debate not only as a spatial discourse but also as a political text which re-shapes
social spaces and their meanings for children and childhood. Although late modern
societies are in many respects characterised by increased flexibility and blurred boundaries
between different sectors, age groups and activities in society (Alanen et al., 2004; Zeiher
et al., 2006), the public debate on children’s after-school hours seemed to represent
 After-school Hours and the Meanings of Home 405

a counter-tendency, a resolute effort to locate children in certain clearly defined and

delineated ‘proper places’, which are strongly controlled by adults. The debate can thus
be interpreted as a reaction to a society becoming more uncertain and leaning on
individual responsibility for choices and their consequences. The emancipatory outcomes
of individualisation simply then do not apply when it comes to children (James and James,
2005). Making children increasingly dis-abled and dependent on adults can be seen as
contributing to a widening of generational divisions and differences between adults and
children.
Categorical statements and strong contrasts are the typical means used in this construc-
tion of social problems, and this has been the case also in the media debate on children’s
after-school time at home. In the debate, the home of young school children is portrayed as
‘empty’ and the child spending his after-school hours at home as ‘lonely’. Leaving the
child alone at home is discussed in terms of the abandonment of the child. Home and lone-
liness are equated. On a discursive level, then, the child is denied access and participation
to and within their home in the hours after school, because the parent(s) are working and
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are not there to create a home for the child. In this understanding, home is equated with
parent(s) and the child seen as dependent (James, 1998): the child gains access to their
home only through their parent(s) and is unable to forge a positive relationship on their
own to home. Consequently, the category of ‘being home alone’ can have only negative
connotations and can definitely not be a ‘proper place’ for children.
The discursive ‘emptying’ of the home of social relations, security and meaningful
activities in the after-school hours, is one of the central themes in the debate. Two prop-
erties of the debate have alerted us to analysing the debate as something over and above
claims for just more organised after-school care for young school children, which the
debate is of course also about. The first property was the catastrophical outcomes depicted
as following from being alone at home after school which seem to be totally out of pro-
portion to actual problems as reported by children and their parents. The second property
was that the debate seemed to pay little or no attention to the extent to which parents actu-
ally are at home or make arrangements for the child at home. The debate thus signals that it
is something else or more that is missing from home than the parent.
More is at stake, then, when home becomes discredited as a proper environment for
children to spend their after-school time in than the worry that parents are not there to a
sufficient extent. The public concern for children’s ‘lonely’ after-school hours in
‘empty’ homes is crystallised in terms of control. Control, in terms of adult supervision,
distinguishes good care from bad and security from insecurity. The traditional safety
network model of the children’s home sphere, based on relations of trust between
parents and their children and on the idea of adults as background figures becomes
largely outmoded. At the same time, children’s use of time in and outside the home
becomes regarded as too unstructured, unplanned and floating—a potential threat to a
time-scheduled society (Ennew, 1994). Supervision acts like fuel for children’s growth
and development: without supervision children simply come to a ‘standstill’ and
become inactive. Unsupervised space at home is empty space, while supervision fills
the space with activity. An empty home and nothing to do is constructed against controlled
time use in a ‘proper’ after-school care place. Time is a central device for the exercising of
modern power and control. It guarantees productivity and predictability. It produces a
clear rhythm and repetition, and the modern individual (Jenks, 2001, pp. 72– 74).
The quest for increased structure in children’s after-school activities is very much in line
with the spirit of post-industrial societies, in which competition, efficiency, lifelong learn-
ing and risk anticipation are key terms (see Cohen et al., 2004, p. 191). The new discourse
appearing in the public debate is potentially powerful, shaping both the decisions of
 406 Hannele Forsberg and Harriet Strandell

individual parents in raising their children and the wider childhood policy of the country.
According to the debate, staying outside of the new idea of adult-controlled time exposes
parents and their children to risk. We have interpreted the public debate as an activity
which has the effect of re-defining what constitutes a good childhood and in what kind
of places it should be spent or not spent. Adult supervision in institutional after-school
care emerges as the ‘right’ way to activate children for good activities and appropriate
learning.
The public concern about ‘empty homes’ can be understood as part of an increasing
institutionalisation of childhood going on in many post-industrial countries (for
example Cohen et al., 2004, pp. 5 –6). Institutionalisation refers to the organisation of
day care and schooling in a way which essentially structures children’s daily lives and
social contacts. Children’s lives are increasingly fitted into the frameworks of institutions
and professionals with regard to time, space and social control. The debate seems to intro-
duce a qualitatively new and deeper level of the institutionalisation of childhood, which
can be understood as a ‘second’ institutionalisation (Kampmann, 2004, pp. 137– 142)
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referring to a new and deeper level of societal interest and investment in the quality of
childhood. In this process, childhood is more firmly tied to the economic and social
goals of society, increasingly thought of as an investment, and assessed with methods
of control and efficiency on the same footing as other social phenomena (ibid, p. 129).
Our interpretation is that the effect—partly also the aim—of the talk of control and super-
vision is that home as a ‘proper’ place of childhood becomes outmoded and that childhood is
relocated to an adult-supervised space in the public sphere. Society shows a deepening inter-
est in guiding children’s choices of after-school spaces and the related activities and use of
time. Home as a site for children’s after-school time becomes challenged, and the children’s
place is no longer seen to be in the home (see Holloway and Valentine, 2000b, p. 16). In this
way, changing ideas about childhood—in this case that children need supervision in after-
school institutions—change the meaning of home as a proper place and children’s time use
after school. The constructions make it possible to intervene in what from society’s point of
view appears as inappropriate childhood space.

Notes
1. The concept of the home as a private retreat first emerged in the lives of some European bourgeois families
in the eighteenth century. The development of this concept was closely linked to the new ideals of
domesticity and privacy associated with the characteristics of the modern child-centred family (Hareven,
1991, pp. 258 –259).
2. Notions of Finland as a model country for public child care services are usually made with reference to the
care of children below school age, as children have a statutory right to day care in few countries. In addition,
almost all possible forms of child care—home care for children under three, care in day-care centres, family
day care and private day care—are covered by public subsidies (see Anttonen, 2003, pp. 160– 161).
3. In 1961, for example, over 50% of the mothers of children below 16 years of age were in gainful
employment outside the home; the employment of Finnish women has also been characterised by full-
time jobs (Takala, 2002, p. 12).
4. The Act on school children’s morning and after-school care (L 1136–1138/2003) came into force 1 August
2004. In addition to morning and after-school care, a new addition concerns the possibilities of extending or
reorganising the school day. The working parents of first- and second-graders are also entitled to work
shorter days (The Act of changing the 4th chapter of the Labour contract 870/2003).
5. The data have been gathered as part of Hannele Forsberg’s research project ‘Anybody home? After-school
activities, Configurations and (In)security of Small Schoolchildren’ funded by the Academy of Finland. The
data were collected by the author in cooperation with Ouiti Kauko, Master Student of Sc.Sciences at the
University of Tampere. All names and other identifying information have been changed in order to
protect the participants’ anonymity.
 After-school Hours and the Meanings of Home 407

6. Helsingin Sanomat is actually the largest subscription based newspaper in the Nordic countries. The paper’s
weekday circulation totalled in 2005 430,785 copies, in a population of about five million people
(Helsingin Sanomat).
7. The data have been collected by M.Soc.Sc Lotta Haikkola as part of Harriet Strandell’s research project
‘Childhood, Space and Age Order of Society’, funded by the Academy of Finland.
8. At the earliest, the school day ends at noon, and at the latest, at 2 p.m.
9. In 1998 about 60% of mothers of first and second graders were gainfully employed (Kartovaara and Sauli,
2000, p. 121). Some mothers are also at home taking care of younger children. In Finland the maternity
leave is about 1 year long. The Homecare allowance makes it possible for parents to stay home with
their children until the child reaches the age of three.

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