Navigating Judgement: Children's Outdoor Play amidst Social Scrutiny

Background and Purpose:

Children’s outdoor play (OP) and independent mobility (IM) have been declining in high-income countries over the past four decades, impacting children’s health and development. Several influences on this phenomenon have been identified including built environments, child safety concerns and increased demands on children’s out-of-school time. There are also other less examined features of socio-cultural environments, with a few studies indicating that social judgement may influence the licenses parents give children for OP/IM. The objective of this project was to examine parent’s experiences or perceptions of social judgement related to their children’s outdoor unsupervised time and how parents describe and draw conclusions from these experiences.

Methods:

State of Play was a five-year mixed-method research program which explored socio-ecological influences on children’s OP/IM. Criterion-based sampling was used to identify families with children aged 10–13 years old who lived in three diverse Metro Vancouver neighbourhoods. Recruitment was via social media and community adverts. Methods included walk-a-long interviews with children, photovoice, activity diaries and GPS. The data for the current study came from semi-structured interviews conducted with parents in their homes (n = 127) on their perspectives of their children’s OP/IM. Most parents were female (71.7%), Caucasian (69.5%), aged 40-50 (76.1%), and married or common-law (93.5%). Interviews were transcribed verbatim and deductively coded in Nvivo using conceptual categories which were refined as analysis progressed. This paper focuses on data coded under an Nvivo node for ‘external parenting pressure’ which was further analyzed narratively using a Labovian structural approach.

Findings:

Analysis highlighted two key features of parent’s accounts of social judgement related to different structural narrative components. Firstly, the ‘complicating event’ in parent’s stories was often another adult in the community expressing a conflicting position on children’s unsupervised time. These ‘meddling others’ held power due to their ability to make reports about unsupervised children to the child protection system, a fear that participants clearly expressed. Secondly, there was often no clear resolution to this complication within recalled episodes. If a resolution was present at the time of the event, there remained a sense that participants were not sure how to reconcile their experience with their ongoing parenting practice when they returned to the here-and-now during the story coda. The data was subsequently represented as a hypothesized dialogical interaction between a parent and a ‘meddling other’, created from verbatim data, which explored and contrasted the two positions and attempted a resolution.

Conclusion and Implications:

This study identifies community-based antagonists in parents accounts of social judgement regarding children’s unsupervised time who are perceived as having the potential to mediate the identification of families by the child protection system. This has not featured in research on the barriers to OP/IM to date. Further research is required to consider how this unintended consequence of child protection systems and social policy, which are designed to enhance child wellbeing, can be adjusted and bought into balance with children’s needs for outdoor play and autonomy development.