Parental strategies for children and neighbourhoods: To form, strengthen and protect.

Abstract

The local community is a central arena for children and youth, and many studies document neighbourhood effects: children and youth’s life chances are influenced by the place they are brought up. The neighbourhood affects the younger generation directly and indirectly via their parents, through what is called parental mediation. However, few studies, especially in the European context, have recognized parents as being aware of neighbourhood effects and their own potential buffer role in developing parenting strategies for their offspring’s relation to the local community. On the basis of a literature review, the ambition of this paper is to build an analytical framework to improve the understanding of parents’ active buffer role concerning the interaction between children and their neighbourhood through conceptions of parenting styles, family stress and parenting self-confidence, and how these aspects relate to parents’ perceptions of the local community. The paper introduces a typology of parental neighbourhood strategies: (1) to form or harden the children through exposure to the neighbourhood; (2) to strengthen the community in order to improve the environment in which children are brought up; (3) to protect the children from adverse neighbourhood factors by (3a) staying in the community while controlling children’s exposure to the local community or by (3b) moving out. When it comes to family life, neighbourhood effects, processes of mobility and segregation and the level of socially mixed neighbourhoods, the potential societal consequences of these strategies are profound.