Elsevier

Health & Place

Volume 24, November 2013, Pages 157-164
Health & Place

A qualitative study of ‘fear’ as a regulator of children's independent physical activity in the suburbs

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2013.09.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We found parent fears associated with children's independent travel were constructed through complex individual, social and environmental relations.

  • Parents continually negotiated between a desire to allow children independence and the need to limit risk.

  • There was a clear understanding of wider cultural influences on parent constructions of fear.

  • Cultural influences were balanced with personal experience, child attributes and personalities in forming constructions of fear.

  • The presence of others, supportive environmental conditions and a focus on positive outcomes may alleviate somewhat parental fear.

Abstract

A crisis discourse has developed within the health and physical activity literature that paints a disparaging picture about the decline of children's participation in active play and independent mobility. Fear as a moderator of children's mobility, in this case focused on independent active school travel (IAST), remains a poorly understood construct. Within the popular press and academic literature, middle class parents have been characterised as overly anxious towards culturally reinforced dangers whilst being ignorant of the benefits of IAST during childhood. Fear of strangers, dangers and risk-taking are portrayed as nebulous and irrational anxiety states that are contributing to another great fear, a fear that our children are getting fat. The study draws upon Tudor's, (2003), parameters of fear framework to explore parent negotiations of fear and risk associated with IAST. In depth individual and focus group interviews with parents (N=24) provide insight into meanings, rules and customs that govern the way in which fear is experienced and expressed within a middle class white suburb in Australia. Far from being irrational, and operating purely from drivers at a cultural level, parents were aware of the consequences of their decisions on a range of outcomes. Parents could articulate their own anxieties and in many cases the rational probabilities of anything bad happening. Fear was being constructed through complex relations, negotiated individually and collectively within a specific cultural and environmental context. In the process of their decision-making, there remained a constant negotiation between a desire to allow their child independence and the question ‘what if?’ Those seeking to mediate increased opportunities for children's IAST are encouraged to remove the rational/irrational focus that was redundant for parents in this study, and consider shifting the message toward the positive side of what is a highly contested decision making space for parents.

Introduction

‘Containerised kids’ and the ‘bubble-wrap generation’, are words used to describe the plight of children who are increasingly experiencing the effects of parental risk anxiety (Beaumont, 2008, Carver et al., 2008, Gardner, 2008, Louv, 2005, Malone, 2007, Skenazy, 2009). This paper contributes to the exploration of parental understandings of fear as they relate to acceptable risk-taking in the context of children's independent movement, specifically walking to and from school, or independent active school travel (IAST). Internationally and elsewhere in Australia, data signals a decline in independent activity and increased adult accompaniment in movement experiences (Buliung et al., 2009, Carver et al., 2012, Garrard, 2011, Love and Whitzman, 2011, McDonald, 2007). Tudor (2003) paints a picture of the risk anxiety that has become prevalent throughout higher income countries with children often the focus:

Our children are no longer allowed to walk to school, and the landscapes of fear that we paint for them are populated not with trolls, wolves or wicked witches, but with paedophiles, satanic abusers, and generically untrustworthy adults (p. 239).

Despite claims to the contrary, it remains unclear if fear has increased over time or gained in intensity (Zubrick et al., 2010). Cross-sectional data certainly indicates stranger danger and fear of injury (traffic or personal accident) are key moderators of parent decisions to allow their children to negotiate their community spaces (Zubrick et al., 2010). Despite this, Furedi (2007), p. 2 reminds us to not treat fear as a ‘taken-for-granted concept’, or a ‘self-evident emotion’. There is growing awareness that fear is not a fixed trait some people have and some do not, but rather it is shaped by situations and is transient in nature. The temporal drift through varying intensities of fear across the lifespan is influenced by our experience, our social interactions and by our spatial and historical relationship with our environment (Pain, 2000). Like Walklate and Mythen (2008) in their respective fields, our intent is to explore how fear might be comprehended as something more than a reduction of public anxieties about crime generated through numbers on a survey, particularly if we are to better understand it's impact upon health related and other behaviour. We begin by briefly outlining a theoretical understanding of fear to be used as guide to present findings as well as raise challenges and issues.

The concept of fear, and in particular fear of crime, has sat traditionally within a psychological framework in which previous experience, current events and personality driven predispositions to anxiety predominated (Tudor, 2003). More recently, a process of rapid social change has been connected with notable shifts in the nature and perception of risk (Beck, 1992). For Hollway and Jefferson (1997), in times of uncertainty or ambivalence, fear of crime and fear of strangers in particular, might provide some reassurance against risks that are ever-present but unseen through: the knowability of the criminal (strange man in white van); the decisions relating to a response (check the child in at school); the mastery or control of anxiety (I know where they are at all times); and the blaming of others for the current situation (I would love to let my children walk to school but I can't). Fear of strangers therefore serves as a site in which to unconsciously locate displaced anxieties unable to be dealt with otherwise. The blaming of the outsider builds loyalty and generates social cohesion in ways that elevate stranger danger as a key risk for children in the absence of other dangers that can't easily be identified (Hollway and Jefferson, 1997).

Against a global backdrop of economic, cultural and political change; international terrorism; various health crises (e.g. obesity epidemic); and concerns like global warming; has been a heightened public awareness of risk issues perpetuated through authority and media (Walklate and Mythen, 2008). Furedi, 2002, Furedi, 2007 claims that a growing and pervading culture of anxiety, promoted by faceless vested interest groups within a child protection industry, has led to a situation in which fear of children's safety dominates family life. According to Hubbard (2003) an ambient fear’ and anxiety “…saturates the social spaces of everyday life” (p. 51). Because we have no means of being sure where risk and safety lie, nothing can be trusted and anxiety dominates (Hollway and Jefferson, 1997). Cultural shifts, according to Malone (2007), are leading to a generation of parents who “bubble-wrap” children and do not leave parenting to chance. According to global views, fear needs to be understood with attention to the cultural networks through which it is constructed and reconstructed (Walklate and Mythen, 2008).

Pain (2006) highlights an over-emphasis of a cultural view of fear runs the risk of foregrounding the macro at the expense of actual accounts that sit at the level of personal experience. Or as Tudor (2003) points out, a dominant cultural view underestimates the real power of genuinely frightening aspects of modern life. Reinforcing the notion that childhood is a dynamic and complex process, Malone (2011) suggested children's mobility and independence are a consequence of decisions born out of a continued negotiation, enabled or constrained by structure. The temptation to use conceptual binaries to describe fear then (negligent/anxious, irrational/rational, fear/trust), is misplaced within the context of dynamic and multi-layered constructions and negotiations of fear that are more sensitive to the individual and their broader context (Malone, 2011, Walklate and Mythen, 2008). It is feasible that children moving through a community (or a stranger for that matter) may be simultaneously fearful and also feared, or, viewed as a potential victim and also perpetrator (Pain, 2006, Walklate and Mythen, 2008).

Health behaviours have been viewed through socio-ecological lenses in which multi-layered factors dynamically determine activity behaviour (see Sallis et al., 2006). Tudor's (2003) ‘parameters of fear’ framework, highlights the interaction of personal, social, cultural and environmental factors to produce what might be termed a fearfulness that drives behaviour. Tudor's (2003) frame presents a mix of macro (environments, cultures and social structures) with micro (bodies, personalities, and social subjects) factors to highlight fearfulness as experienced through a consequence of complex interactions among these variables. By exploring modes of institutional fearfulness with modes of individual fearfulness we can begin to understand fear from a more holistic vantage. Within this context, fear and the behaviours that are impacted by it, may be influenced by idiosyncratic phenomena such as a first-hand experience (Pain, 2006), through to broader cultural orientations that, for example, portray parents as irresponsible if they allow their child to play and move freely in their community (Clements, 2004, Veitch et al., 2006).

Agency is not determined by, but rather filtered through a collection of mediating factors such as parenting practices, values, social capital, family size, socio-economic status, characteristics of neighbourhoods, urban form and community dynamics (Brown et al., 2014). Place then, as an interpreted and embodied reciprocal relationship between the individual, their locations and their communities, becomes fundamental to understandings of fear. Our intent in exploring fear as influenced by environment or culture is not to measure these objectively or directly, but rather give voice to everyday life in a way that is responsive to place, whilst providing insight into interpretations of impact from culture.

The school was located within a middle class suburb on the outer bay-side fringe of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and sits at the advantaged end of social disadvantage scales (SEIFA) with lower crime and motor vehicle fatality rates than most areas within the state (http://www.police.vic.gov.au/). The area has significant natural habitat, access to bay beaches with rocky cliffs, an estuary and many reserves. A small commercial centre is surrounded by well-established residential areas, comprising mainly of re-developed or renovated holiday houses. Many of the windy tree-lined streets, shaped by the surrounding natural features, remain unsealed with few concrete footpaths existing. There is little traffic, with the exception of the school drop off and pick up, and on the main connecting roads.

An initial survey was conducted with 182 primary school students from the target school (response rate=48%). Results indicated that only 14% of students regularly walked or cycled to school, despite 75% living within an estimated three kilometres from the school grounds. The biggest parental barrier for allowing their children to walk to and from school was stranger danger closely followed by fear of being injured by vehicular traffic. In attempting to understand how a select group of middle class parents interpret this fear, we recognize that this study has a range of contextually bound qualities located within broader social and cultural parameters of a White, middle class suburban norm.

Section snippets

Method

Twenty-four parents (recruited from a large primary school—approx. 700 students) were interviewed in this study. Parents were aged between 31 and 47 years of age (mean=36), married with between 1 and 4 children. Whilst invitations were made for any parent to attend interviews, only females responded. It is worth acknowledging that Pain (2000) is critical of the focus on the ‘easy to access’ middle class, rather than more disadvantaged groups for whom fear might be more prominent in everyday

Discussion

This paper explored the construction of fear relating to IAST of children amongst a group of middle class parents form what was a ‘perceptibly safe’, leafy suburb. Data supports Tudor's (2003) attempts to develop a framework that was inclusive of a range of complex and entwined personal, social and environmental factors impacting constructions of fear relating to IAST. Analytically we were able to find examples that alluded to the various parameters within Tudor's (2003) framework. To this end,

Conclusion

Parents we spoke to could articulate a host of personal, social, emotional and physical benefits associated with IAST. These formed counter arguments that parents constantly used to negotiate their decision making around IAST. Strategies that promote the positive arguments for IAST provide parents with alternative discourses through which they can continue their internal negotiations that ultimately influence behaviour. Greater consideration for individual social ecologies without an overt

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