Beyond Car-Centred Adultism? Exploring Parental Influences on Children’s Mobility

Abstract

Motorised traffic and car-centric environments restrict children’s commuting patterns and outdoor activities. This has adverse health consequences as it induces physical inactivity and reduces children’s well-being. Understanding parents’ daily routines and reasons to facilitate or restrict their children’s active and independent mobility is essential to improving children’s well-being and encouraging environmentally sustainable mobilities. This article explores parental decision-making processes regarding how children should travel to and from school and how these constitute barriers or enablers for children’s independent and active mobility in a Portuguese context. We used a mixed-methods sequential approach: We first collected data through an online survey and then via focus groups with parents and interviews with school directors. Overall, parental concerns about traffic stem from an automobility-centred culture that has converted urban streets into an optimised system of mobility flows focused on (single and employed) adults. This culture responds to the anxieties it creates by perpetuating a cycle that exacerbates existing concerns and reinforces the need to rely even more heavily on mobility technologies, especially the private car. This adult-centred mobility culture jeopardises children’s ability to navigate the city independently while offering children a highly problematic and self-reproducing social construction. In this construction, the risks and drawbacks of physically confined virtual environments and experiences are considered acceptable, while engaging with the physicality and sociality of the urban environment is considered unacceptably dangerous and promiscuous.