Parental Regulation of Teenagers’ Time

Abstract

Parental regulation of teenagers’ time is pervasive. Parents attempt to constrain, well into adolescence, what their children do with their time, when they do it and how long they do it for. This article draws on interviews with 14- to 16-year-olds in the UK to explore teenagers’ experiences of parents’ temporal regulation, and whether their perceptions are affected by the processes and meanings attached to it. Where values, meanings and rationalities around temporalities are shared, regulation can be relatively unproblematic. Sometimes however, there is a clash of frames, which impacts on teenagers’ subjective experiences and can lead to strategies to escape parental regulation of time.