A safe place to grow up? Parenting, perceptions of children's safety and the rural idyll

doi:10.1016/S0743-0167(97)83094-X

Journal of Rural Studies

Volume 13, Issue 2, April 1997, Pages 137-148

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0743-0167(97)83094-X Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper explores how an imagining of the countryside as an idealised place in which to grow up is constructed, mobilised and contested by rural parents in their accounts of their children's lives. It begins by considering how parents mobilise popular understandings of the rural idyll in their accounts of the opportunities for children in the village of Wheldale. It then goes on to explore how parents simultaneously challenge this imagining of the rural in their accounts of their children's safety, contradicting popular constructions of the rural as a safe, harmonious place, and contesting assumptions about the idyllic nature of rural childhood. Finally the paper considers how in order to justify their claims about the relative safety of the village as a place to grow up, in the face of their own descriptions of the dangers it may hold, parents further mobilise another ingredient of the ‘rural idyll’ — community. The paper concludes by considering the importance of recognising that places, like people, can have multiple meanings and identities.

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ArticleA safe place to grow up? Parenting, perceptions of children's safety and the rural idyll

Abstract

Journal of Rural Studies

Journal of Rural Studies

Journal of Rural Studies

Journal of Rural Studies

Journal of Rural Studies

Journal of Rural Studies

Journal of Rural Studies

Journal of Rural Studies

Journal of Rural Studies

Journal of Rural Studies

The concept of home range: new data for the study of territorial behaviour

Putting Children in Their Place

Children's characterization of place

Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

The fruit of difference: the rural-urban continuum as a system of identity

Rural Sociology

Children's outdoor environment from the perspective of environmental and developmental psychology

Space, structure and maps

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie

Environmental mapping in young children

Environment and Behaviour

Studies of geographic learning

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

Mapping at the age of three

Journal of Geography

The Canadian Alternative: Survival, Expeditions and Urban Change

Class and change in rural Britain

Poor children ‘prisoners’ of fearful parents

Alone Together: A History of New York's Early Apartments

Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1750–1850

The representation of space: its development in children and in cartography

Children's understanding of maps

The Death of Childhood

The Times

Children's Experience of Place

The discovery of rural England

Women in the countryside: gender identities and rurality

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Is there a ‘place’ for children in geography?

Area

Article
A safe place to grow up? Parenting, perceptions of children's safety and the rural idyll