To be-tween: Wellbeing and becoming young male teenagers through informal sport.

Abstract

There has been a global movement towards the facilitation of informal sports as tools for community development focusing on the benefits and transformative aspects of these activities for ‘healthy’ young people. Wellbeing literature suggests that children and young people are engaging in healthy activities now as part of a concern for their future capabilities and opportunities for becoming. This paper provides new insights into the experiences of tweens as a life-stage of transition between childhood and adolescence during which young people negotiate child and teen identities in their navigation of leisure spaces, a practice that remains under-explored in youth research. Through innovative qualitative methods in photo elicitation and online paired interviews with young males aged 12 and 13 years this interplay between leisure, wellbeing and becoming as part of tweenhood is explored. Findings reveal new evidence of the positioning of informal sport by young male teenagers as healthy and productive, but the spaces themselves as polluted, unsafe and supporting of unhealthy behaviours, highlighting complex relations with other users and issues of neglect and maintenance of public space. Multi-generational co-participation of parents and young people supported access to resources, generating the development of spatial autonomy in finding alternative spaces; so constituting part of a process of independent mobility not yet fully realised.