Paranoid parenting? Rematerializing risk and fear for children

By R. Pain. 2006

192 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Both in the social sciences and in popular debates, recent commentaries on fear for children highlight the mismatch between children's and parents' fears and the risk of stranger danger, point to cultural changes to childhood and parenting in explanation. This paper suggests that a materialist approach to fear and risk may be equally helpful to understanding, and of more strategic advantage in promoting social change which benefits children, especially those who have been victims. It is argued that if research is child-centred, grounded in particular places, and explicit about the social stratification of risk, then experience of victimization itself can explain a large part of children's fears. In support, the paper draws on quantitative and qualitative research with 1,069 children aged 10–16 in a deprived area of northeast England. The geographies of child victimization and children's fears are compared, showing that many fears about public space are spatially congruent with experiences of risk. These geographies of risk and fear are gendered and racialized and, in this geographical context, paedophiles and asylum seekers have replaced the ‘stranger’ in children's accounts of danger. Implications for current public and policy debates are discussed.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b816ab2276ccecc2edcfcbbbf2815cfb0cc831de

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In Clinical Psychology

In General Health Professions

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

The Road Less Travelled – New Directions in Children's and Young People's Mobility (2009, background): “…2000; Katz, 2004; van Blerk, 2005), the role of place at a variety of spatial scales in differentiating children’s day-to-day patterns of mobility and experiences of migration (van Blerk & Ansell, 2006), and the increasing spatial restriction of children in Western contexts (Pain, 2003, 2006).”
Connected and concerned: Variation in parents' online safety concerns (2013, background): “While these scholars—and advocates who hold similar positions (Skenazy, 2009) point to the pervasiveness of fear as a reason to reconsider how parenting operates, critics are quick to highlight that focusing on the rationality—or irrationality—of fear misses the point (Pain, 2006).”