Regulating Game Play: ‘Clingy Sooky Mummy’s Boys’ and Other Personas

Abstract

It should come as no surprise to the reader by this stage in the book that I think that gender and sexuality are central to the parental regulation of the game playing of the young children in this study. The parental regulation of boys and girls as well as the ways that girls and boys describe their game playing, differs considerably. For me one of the most interesting things is that parental discourses about regulation are concerned almost exclusively with the need to regulate boys. The regulation of girls is generally suggested by parents as unnecessary. It is what is held behind this silence and apparent non problem that began to fire my own imagination and made me wonder why it is that regulation is a problem in relation to boys but not to girls. Girls’ regulation was not considered a problem because girls, we were constantly told, were not interested in games. What began to emerge for me was a story in which girls are simply not given the same chance to play games as boys in part perhaps because they are understood as unfeminine and that, games are presented in relation to key regulative discourses for masculinity — around a masculinity which is about action, separation from mothers, but not addictive or violent.