577530-vHouten

5 | 149 Career, family, and sport participation: a simultaneous exhibition? smartphone running training app]. […] He stimulates me very much. He is also one of the people in my network who just ensures that I keep going. He says like ‘Ah, come on!’. He is also the one who sent me the link to the bootcamp workouts [that she started to attend]. And if I say like ‘Actually, I want to run today.’, he makes sure he says like: ‘When do you want to run then?’ and vice versa. I insure that for him too. We do chase each other a bit.” (Nina) For quite some participants, however, significant others related to the life events that mark the transition to adulthood (e.g., fellow students, colleagues, employer, partner, children) impeded sport participation, as they served more as anchors to activities other than practising sport: “Well, at a given moment I was more often at parties in the Phocas [varsity rowing club] house than I was actually rowing.” (Dirk) “And then we started living together and I was mostly at work during the day, and in the time we had left to be together we didn’t have that much need and attention to practise sport.” (Karin) When it comes to activity enablers and anchors, young children play a particularly interesting role. Parents wanted to spend quality time with their kid(s) and were often bound to the activities of their child(ren), due to lack of independency. In these cases, kids acted like anchors to activities other than practising sport, generally hindering sport participation as a parent. This is also illustrated by various narrative fragments and reflects changes in social resources after becoming a parent (see the social resources section in paragraph 5.3.1): “You spent a lot of time at home actually, because of caring tasks, “daddy day” and evenings and weekends that you want to spend with your son and as a family. So there’s much less time to practise sport.” (Mark) “In the weekends I also take care of the children on my own and have to go to their football matches and swimming lessons by myself.” (Eva) However, becoming a parent seemed to increase the social value of the sport

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