Who's Afraid of a Running Child?

• In Event: Reconceptualizing the Making and Taking of Early Childhood Public Spaces

Abstract

It is generally recognized that ways in which everyday life spaces are planned actively structure and regulate children’s lives as well as socio-cultural notions of childhoods. Regardless of this effect these practices are virtually always adult-led (Gillespie, 2012). A key response to this bias has been a further focus on developing participatory practices and the consulting of children in decision making (e.g. Wyness, 2012; Tisdall et al., 2006). While these attempts are worthy in motivation, they mostly situate within a discourse that takes children’s ‘voice’ as authentic and distinct, leaving unexamined the contexts and relations in which these voices take shape and evolve (Clarke & Percy-Smith, 2006 & Mannion, 2012).

The objective of this paper is to explore reconfigurations of adult-child relations in urban environments. A special focus is on children’s running, a mode of moving which is seen as problematic in many contexts and thus results in regulations to children rather than further focus on the adults who are afraid of children’s running.

The disciplinary backbone of this study can be located in the combination of education and children’s geographies. The overarching theoretical and methodological approach is informed by post-structuralist theories (e.g. Jackson & Mazzei 2012), post-humanism or (new) materialism (e.g. Bennett, 2010; Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010), as well as the emerging sociomaterial approach to social scientific research (Fenwick et al. 2011). In these approaches children and childhoods are conceptualised as neither social constructions nor biologically/developmentally determined but hybrids of both (Prout, 2005; Ryan, 2012; Kraftl, 2013).

This paper highlights a study in which I as a researcher was an ‘accompanying adult’ in what were to be children’s self-led ventures in urban everyday life settings of a wintery North of Finland. The participating five children were between 6 and 8 years of age. The original objective was to explore children’s relations to their material surroundings. However, it was soon the accompanying, initially meant to be as if an invisible component in the research design, that became the very focus of analysis: I found myself annoyed and puzzled with the simplest of things – running children – and proceeded to focus on the settled notions of childhood and adulthood that I realized this annoyance was produced by. The research meetings were documented multimodally with audio, photographs, video, notes, and drawings.

When children’s explorations of their everyday life environments are viewed as interdependent, rather than independent, children become seen as part of mutually dependent dyads or groups, being affected as well as affecting what takes place, how, and where. Running, a focus of this paper, becomes understood as a mutually produced public practice: not only children’s movement but a way of being that is produced by and defines both ‘children’ and ‘adults’.

It’s not only a question of children’s rights but also in the interest of adults and societies at large that children roam – and run – more freely. This will force settled notions of both childhood and adulthood to become reconfigured.

Author

• Pauliina Rautio, University of Oulu