From intensive car-parenting to enabling childhood velonomy? Explaining parents’ representations of children’s leisure mobilities

Abstract

Intensive parenting has become a key term for analysing the pressures and priorities of contemporary western parenting culture. For mobility studies it provides a discursive framework for understanding why children’s leisure has shifted from free play and mobility towards various adult-led organised activities and why parents deem it necessary to control children’s leisure journeys in an unprecedented manner. Most of the research on parenting and mobility has explained these trends with urban risks and safeguarding, but this paper highlights how parents also control, manage and enable children’s mobility to resource and enrich them with various dispositions. We use children’s mobility experiments and parents’ interviews to explain two contrasting representations of children’s mobility—intensive car-parenting and childhood velonomy—in a local community in Finland. The paper sheds new light on how community and place shape parents’ notions of parenting, childhood and mobility.