Constraints to Leisure in a Healthy Later Life

Abstract

Leisure studies, leisure science and critical gerontology are the three main disciplinary fields that are synthesised and evaluated. Leisure constraints theory, with its roots in the 1960s outdoors recreation movement, offers ways of understanding why people do not do ‘what is good for them’. This selection of everyday leisure research suggests that some people are successfully negotiating all kinds of leisure in later life. There is a new cohort of healthy people in an extended later life in the twenty-first century in the UK who have grown up and grown older with ‘active ageing’. The changing demographics have ramped up the active ageing rhetoric, but it is not clear how they negotiate between the promises of affluent fun and the threat of illness and vulnerability. There is a lack of agreement about what constitutes active and passive activities and their potential for enhancing or endangering later lives.