0000000000873817
AUTHOR
Marco Te Brömmelstroet
Unravelling the rationalities of childhood cycling promotion
Decrease of children’s independent mobility (CIM) has worried academics, policymakers, educators and other professionals for decades. Research and policy often emphasise that promoting children’s physically active and independent transport modes as cycling is important to achieve better public health, solve environmental challenges and increase related economic benefits. Yet, cycling promotion is not a neutral process and all promotion efforts are derived from latent notions of ‘cyclists’ and ‘cycling’. This paper discusses different rationalities of childhood cycling promotion and the representations of ‘children’ as independent ‘cyclists’ they entail. We argue that in order to efficiently…
From intensive car-parenting to enabling childhood velonomy? Explaining parents’ representations of children’s leisure mobilities
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 exper…