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consistently reported relationships between family leisure involvement and
positive family outcomes. Leisure allows families to bond and communicate,
through the development of collective interests and a family identity. The
leisure patterns of families can be divided into two types:
(1) Core family leisure patterns . These are everyday, low cost and often
home based. Examples are watching television together, playing board
games or having a barbecue in the garden. These activities involve little
planning and limited novelty or risk.
(2) Balance family leisure patterns . These refer to activities that require greater
investment of resources and that are usually not home based, like family
tourism. They mostly occur less frequently than core family leisure
patterns but may be of longer duration. (Zabriskie & McCormick, 2001)
Both patterns can contribute to greater family cohesion, but balance family
leisure patterns have one additional benefit: 'the nature of these types of
activities tends to facilitate the development of adaptive skills and the
ability to learn and change.… The adaptive skills that are developed and
practiced in this context of family leisure may be readily transferred to
other areas of family life' (Zabriskie & McCormick, 2001: 284). This means
that family holidays, compared with home-based leisure pursuits, allow the
family to develop new skills: the holiday presents the family with 'new and
unexpected stimuli from the outside environment, which provide the input
and challenge necessary for families to learn and progress as an evolving
system' (Zabriskie & McCormick, 2001: 284).
Families who are unable to take holidays are thus excluded from these
learning opportunities. Disadvantaged families in particular may lack the
financial means to participate in tourism, yet to be resilient in the face of
disadvantage and change their situation they can be seen as being the most in
need of the learning opportunities a holiday can provide. In several (mainly
European) countries, social tourism initiatives encourage the participation
of those who would otherwise be excluded from tourism.
Minnaert et al . (2007, 2009) define social tourism as 'tourism with an
added moral value, of which the primary objective is to benefit the host
or the visitor in the tourism exchange'. In practice, social tourism for dis-
advantaged families usually refers to budget-friendly holidays in their own
country, or in some cases day trips to theme parks, museums and attrac-
tions, that are funded or made available at highly reduced rates, by charities
or agencies in the public sector.
According to the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC),
social tourism initiatives are (co-)funded by the public sector - via either
direct grants or public-private partnerships - in several countries and
regions of mainland Europe (France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal). The main
justification for the provision of social holidays via the public sector is the
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