ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the developments which transform boys and girls into men and women, husbands and wives, and structure their uses of leisure. It explains how adolescent leisure reproduces conventional gender roles and forms of sexuality. The chapter aims to build a realistic picture of how young people’s freedom to use leisure to develop and express personal interests is restricted by gender, then class and other trajectories, whose net effect is to confine most individuals’ scope for choice within trivial boundaries. A modal pattern can be discerned, despite the numerous departures. It leads from childhood. Before they can join the adolescent procession, children must learn that they are boys and girls, and how to play. Critics of the adolescent procession have suggested that the normal pattern of social development, which eventually leads into gender and sexual traps, should be considered a problem.
