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Drawing on a mixed-methods cross-cultural study undertaken in five locations in Argentina, Denmark, Hong Kong, England and the United States in 2018, this paper explores how children (aged five and seven) conceive of playfulness. Following a card-sorting task, 387 children selected familiar activities that they felt were most representative of play and not-play and explained their reasons. The children's justifications were fully transcribed, and five corpora were created (one per site). Lexicometry was applied, generating sets of the characteristic responses per age in each site. In-depth qualitative interpretation of these modal responses revealed nine dimensions across play and not-play: pleasure, social context, materials, movement, agency, risk, goal, time and focus. Commonalities revealed that children's ideas around play are not aligned with specific activities but with the sense of agency in a secure physical and social context when carrying out an activity experienced as an end in itself. Implications for playful pedagogies highlight the need to open up play with opportunities for children's choice and initiative, confident exploration and immersion in the activities in which they participate. [Spanish translation by Mercè Rius.]

This paper explores how parents in Hong Kong perceive the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of academic and non-academic private tutoring (PT) for their children, using a thematic analysis of interviews with 80 parents from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. We seek to understand the role of PT in parents' thinking about their children's learning and developmental needs in uncertain times, which foregrounds parents' temporalities in the face of disruption. We find that maintaining pre-pandemic PT levels was the most common attitude for almost half of the sample, followed by roughly similar groups of parents who increased or decreased their use of PT. Parental perceptions of the functions of PT converged on three main uses: mitigating the effects of schooling disruptions, making productive use of newfound free time and providing a sense of normality. Using a timescapes lens, we identify temporal elements in how PT factored into parents' experiences and perceptions of managing "gained" and "lost" time, adapting to remote learning, avoiding health risks and reflecting on inequalities during the COVID-19 pandemic. [Translation from Spanish by Mercè Rius.]