Adult accounts of conditions sustaining dolanan anak across school and family contexts in Yogyakarta

Abstract Declining traditional play is often framed as a competition between children’s interest in digital and non-digital activities. This qualitative case study instead examines how adults describe the conditions that support or constrain the continuity of dolanan anak across school and family contexts in Yogyakarta. The corpus comprised 48 voluntarily submitted written questionnaires from 37 parents/guardians and 11 early childhood teachers, 11 brief contextual observation records (approximately 30 min at each institution), and four instructional or guidance documents. Children were not participants, and the observations were used only to contextualise adult accounts and institutional routines. In this study, continuity refers to participants’ descriptions of dolanan as a recurring or repeatable practice within everyday routines, not to objectively measured frequency or longitudinal persistence. Iterative thematic analysis identified four themes: spatial access and adult risk reasoning, family time pressure and device convenience, curricular legitimation, and fragmented cross-setting support. A subsequent cross-theme interpretation considered accessible space, adult permission, available time, peer companionship, curricular legitimacy, and reinforcement across settings together as enabling conditions. Any reference to their alignment denotes an analytical synthesis rather than a directly observed configuration or causal mechanism. The study extends a play ecology perspective by conceptualising the continuity of culturally embedded play as the organisation of repeatable opportunities across family and school settings, including institutional legitimacy as part of that ecology. It does not provide evidence of children’s preferences, causal mechanisms, or educational and developmental outcomes.