From intensive car-parenting to enabling childhood velonomy? Explaining parents’ representations of children’s leisure mobilities

Abstract

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 experiments and parents’ interviews to explain two contrasting representations of children’s mobility—intensive car-parenting and childhood velonomy—in a local community in Finland. The paper sheds new light on how community and place shape parents’ notions of parenting, childhood and mobility.

Keywords:

• Intensive parenting
• car-parenting
• velonomy
• children’s autonomy
• cycling
• critical discourse analysis

1. Introduction

Sharon Hays (1996) was one of the first observers of intensive parenting. Focusing on mothers’ experiences, she sought to explain why parenting has become such a ‘child-centred, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labour intensive, and financially expensive’ enterprise (Hays 1996, 8) and why parents have started to manage and monitor children’s lives more than before. Childrearing practices have become subject to intense public scrutiny, and parents are expected to align their actions into a coherent parenting strategy which optimises the well-being and success of future generations (Furedi 2002; Lee et al. 2014). The contemporary western parenting discourse especially appreciates children’s organised leisure activities that are posited to cultivate and enrich children with a range of future assets and dispositions (Lareau 2003; Vincent and Ball 2007; Vincent and Maxwell 2016). Subsequently, childhood is increasingly ‘institutionalised’ as children’s leisure has shifted from free roaming and unorganized play towards adult-supervised activities organized by public, private and civic sectors (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2014).

All this evidently affects children’s mobility patterns. Children’s autonomous and human-powered travel has decreased in the westernized world in recent decades (Shaw et al. 2015). In parallel, their car chauffeuring has increased, and studies suggest that children’s journeys to organised activities are even more car-dependent than other journeys (Fyhri et al. 2011; Hjorthol and Fyhri 2009; Lareau and Weininger 2008). Changes in parenting culture and the socio-spatial organisation of childhood seem to favour car-parenting at the expense of children’s autonomous movement.

Studies have analysed parent-child mobility (by car and other modes) as a care practice and how it is entangled with risk-conscious aspirations to limit, monitor and control children’s independent mobility (Barker 2011; Dowling and Maalsen 2020; Gilow 2020; McLaren and Parusel 2015; Murray 2009; Waitt and Harada 2016), but also how parents (re)negotiate urban risks in order to facilitate and enable children’s autonomous mobility (Joelsson 2019; Kullman 2010; Ross 2007). However, risk-consciousness is hardly the all-encompassing perspective that explains the relationship between contemporary parenting culture and children’s mobilities across geographies. Yet, minimal attention has been paid to a key aspect of intensive parenting: how parents aim to resource and cultivate children in and through mobility as objects of social investment and ‘current and future projects who can be positively developed through their sequestering into informal (as well as formal) learning environments in diverse institutional spaces’ (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2014, 624).

Against this backdrop we argue that to understand parenting, mobility and childhood, we need nuanced analyses of the interplay between lived and embodied social and material practices of children’s mobility and parents’ representations of those practices (see Cresswell, 2010). Crucially, we need to analyse how these experiences and representations are produced across socio-spatial contexts: how intensive parenting discourse is locally manifested (Faircloth 2014) and how local community relations shape notions of ‘good’ parenting and mobility.

The paper describes findings from a middle-class suburban context in Finland where we introduced mobility experiments in children’s organised activities to create a shift in children’s mobility practices and parents’ mobility representations. After describing our theoretical and methodological framework, we analyse, first, how parents constructed the practices of car-parenting as a representation of intensive parenting. Second, we explain why in the course of the experiments the same parents constructed childhood velonomy as a contrasting mobility representation that emphasised children’s autonomy through using and moving by bicycle. With this change-oriented research design, the study provides new insights why local mobility representations matter to children’s mobility patterns.

2. Intensive parenting, organised activities and domestic mobility work

Research on contemporary parenting culture and childhood suggests that parents manage children’s lives more than ever and are also urged to do so by policymakers and experts who are preoccupied about parents’ performance in bringing up future generations (Lee et al. 2014; Hays 1996; Prout 2000). Terms like helicopter parenting, overparenting and tiger parenting have become widely used in public debate and research, aiming to grasp the cultural script that shapes childrearing practices. As Furedi puts it in his book Paranoid parenting (2002, 5): ‘[t]raditionally, good parenting has been associated with nurturing, stimulating and socialising children. Today it is associated with monitoring their activities.’ Even tough parents from different class and gender backgrounds face different structural constraints it seems that one way or the other, all parents need to negotiate their practices in relation to the ideals of intensive parenting (Ishizuka 2019).

Scholars attest that intensive parenting ideology has emerged through responsibilisation of parents according to neoliberal discourse. Parents are individualised and autonomised as sole accountables of children’s well-being and ability to run societies as ‘future adults’ (Geinger, Vandenbroeck, and Roets 2014; Fargion 2023; Vincent and Maxwell 2016). Thus, parenting as a social construction is based on the notion that the actions of individual parents are the ultimate reason for children’s success or failure, obscuring the notion of childrearing as a social issue and a shared responsibility between private and public domains. This parental determinism is accompanied by similar ideas about childhood: children are considered vulnerable and ‘at risk’, because early life experiences set people on locked in trajectories for the rest of their lives (Furedi 2002; Hays 1996; Lee, Macvarish, and Bristow 2010).

Positing causal relationships between everyday parenting and children’s myriad future dispositions leads to the construction of parenting as a performance and a social investment where every act should be geared towards cultivating resilient, autonomous and competent achievers of tomorrow (Geinger, Vandenbroeck, and Roets 2014; Hoffman 2010; Lareau 2003; Lee, Macvarish, and Bristow 2010). What used to be mundane practices as disciplining, feeding and playing with children have become subject to intensive public debate that assesses the causal effects of parenting on future generations and societies (Lee et al. 2014). Parents are urged to align their practices into a strategy that is clearly intentional, target-oriented and highly conscious of risks (Faircloth 2014; Hoffman 2010; Lee, Macvarish, and Bristow 2010). The realm of parenting is also expanding, and more and more aspects of children’s everyday life are considered a part of it.

As a part of this trend, we seek to explain why managing children’s leisure mobility (often by car) especially to and from their organised activities is a crucial part of many parents’ parenting strategy. Lareau (2003) coined the term concerted cultivation to explain why children’s participation in organised activities is so important to many parents. Studies across contexts during the last two decades have described how activities are posited to enrich and cultivate children with various skills and dispositions that are considered invaluable later in life (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2014; Lareau 2003; Vincent and Ball 2007; Vincent and Maxwell 2016). Subsequently, the ‘good’ parent’s moral duty is to invest time, money and effort in these activities, and car chauffeuring is a crucial part of this investment (Lareau and Weininger 2008; Wheeler and Green 2019). It is a form of domestic mobility work, which includes all informal work concerning the private sphere that is performed through mobility (e.g. groceries, escorting children and other similar tasks) (Barker 2011; Gilow 2020; McLaren and Parusel 2015). Lareau and Weininger (2008) have explained how intensive parenting is manifested through this kind of work in hectic activity schedules and spatiotemporal ‘pressure points’ that are emotionally laden with cultural ideals of ‘good’ parenting. Importantly, domestic mobility work is not limited to driving a car but also entails a complex set of routines and responsibilities beyond the actual journeys, making it ever more laborious for parents (Lareau and Weininger 2008; McLaren and Parusel 2015; Wheeler and Green 2019). Still, the car enables interweaving the spatiotemporally fractured family life and demands of contemporary parenting into a coherent whole. Car-parenting provides an ideal social space for flows of affect that shape family roles, relations and the experiences of being a ‘good’ parent (Laurier et al. 2008; Waitt and Harada 2016).

3. Parenting through enabling childhood velonomy?

Yet, seemingly in contrast with the tendency towards increasing control and management of children’s lives, some parents regard enabling children’s autonomous mobility as an act of ‘good’ parenting (Joelsson 2019; Kullman 2010). Indeed, parents’ responses to the intensive parenting logic are not uniform—it rather works as a cultural script in relation to which parents position themselves when negotiating their own practices, parenting roles and identities (Faircloth 2014). Studies should not regard parents as passive victims of the ideology, but agents who are actively reproducing or countering it in their local contexts and social networks (Geinger et al. 2014; Perrier 2013). This paper provides new insight in these respects by describing how a local community of parents renegotiates their normative representations of children’s mobility, when there is a collective shift away from extensive chauffeuring towards children’s autonomous mobility. Importantly, our data does not explain this shift respective to urban risks and safeguarding (e.g. McLaren and Parusel 2015; Murray 2009), but on how parents construct different mobilities as means to resource and enrich children’s lives.

As a counterpart for car-parenting, we use the term velonomy (translated from francophone vélonomie, a neologism mixing ‘velo’ and ‘autonomy’) to describe the emergence of a parenting logic of enabling children’s autonomous mobility by bicycle. It is used by authors studying how people’s engagement with the bicycle through various practices of using, moving and repairing can foster a comprehensive community culture of cycling (Abord De Chatillon and Eskenazi 2022; Mundler and Rérat 2018; Rigal 2022). By conceptualising cycling as a cultural and political event, these studies have shown how the ability to manage the bicycle and negotiate the urban space with it can promote a sense of autonomy, agency and empowerment especially for underprivileged groups (Mundler and Rérat 2018), but also an ideology that is critical towards the hierarchies created by the car-system (Rigal 2022). In both respects, velonomy is about broadening the imagination of what kinds of mobilities and activities are desirable and possible for given subjectivities. Thus, it has important parallels with the concept of motility—a sort of mobility capital and people’s potential to move (Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004) as well as so called capabilities approaches (Sen 1999).

Yet, Schwanen (2021) has noted that uncritical application of any such theoretical resources that emphasise the acquisition of ‘potentials’ or ‘capabilities’ through mobility might lead to individualistic interpretations and sway the meaning of community and place in shaping mobilities. As implied in earlier studies, velonomy is not about developing autonomous bicycle citizens at the individual level, but about a collective and social process. It describes how communities socialise people into urban cycling through generating skills, material assets and shared meanings through community relations (Abord De Chatillon and Eskenazi 2022; Rigal 2022). By focusing on parenting discourse, we understand the construction of velonomy as a process ‘through which desirable qualities and goals worth pursuing emerge out of—and co-evolve with—actions, experiences and (social) learning in particular social collectives, places and spaces’ (Schwanen 2021, 21). Both velonomy and car-parenting are socially constructed and ideologically rooted representations of children’s mobility in a community of parents that emerge through shared experiences.

Here it is also useful to draw parallels with relevant studies on children’s independent mobility, especially those that have developed a critical stance towards the notion of ‘independence’ and conceptualised mobility as a relational practice. A range of studies has argued how children’s mobility without the physical presence of adults remains socially ‘dependent’ as it is negotiated in the web of relations among peers, adults, objects, technologies and spaces (Mikkelsen and Christensen, 2009; Kullman 2010; Nansen et al. 2015: Milne 2009; Wales et al., 2021). McIlvenny (2015)) has described how cycling can create social spaces for children that are very much comparable to the car as a way of being ‘mobile with’. Mobile children also appreciate playfulness, exploration and other non-functional features of mobility, that further complicates the relational analysis of their mobilities (Horton et al. 2014; Kullman 2010; Ross 2007). For instance, it might be difficult to distinct what counts as a ‘journey’, if being ‘mobile with’ is a way to explore, hang out and ‘do’ friendship. Still, these mobility practices are far from being ‘unproductive’: mobile children develop emplaced knowledge, social awareness and other meaningful dispositions through embodied engagement with places and social settings they encounter (Christensen 2003; Milne 2009; Ross 2007). All these insights help us to interpret the phenomena that parents include and leave out of their representation of childhood velonomy.

4. Research design and methodology

The study was conducted in the municipality of Jyväskylä of approximately 145,000 habitants in Finland. Low urban density and snowy winter conditions might inhibit children’s autonomous cycling in the city, but relatively low levels of urban risks are likely to support it. Families subject to study were living in suburban middle-class neighbourhoods. At the project outset a group of 24 parents whose children (10–12-year-olds) were participating in organised activities in a local sports club were interviewed individually. After this, we implemented a range of mobility experiments aiming to provide children with various opportunities to engage with and ‘socialise around’ bicycle use (see Table 1). Participation in the experiments was voluntary and free of charge. Approximately 2/3 of the children whose parents were interviewed took part in all the experiments and 1/3 to all except for one. Four months after the experiments had started, the parents were invited to a workshop. They were asked to reflect on the shift in children’s mobility practices first with the whole group and immediately after in focus group sessions. Two weeks after the workshop a final round of individual interviews was conducted.

Table 1. Overview of the project and data creation in chronological order.

	Data (Results section 5.1)	Mobility experiments					Data (Results section 5.2)
Activity	Parents’ individual interviews	Bike repair workshops: sessions where children could fix and maintain their bikes with adult support	Bike buses: organised journeys from children’s homes to the activities	Cycling challenges: mobile app competitions measuring travel distances	Cycling equipment giveaways: essential cycling gear was provided for those in need	Pop up equipment storage: space to store sports gears at the venues	Parents’ workshop	Parents’ focus groups	Parents’ individual interviews
N/average number of participants per event	24 parents	22 children	28 children	35 children	16 children	35 children	24 parents	6 parents	24 parents
Number of events	1	5	4	4	2	n/a	1	4	1

Twelve of the interviewees were women and 12 men. Twenty-one were from conjugal families and three were single parents. The number of children in the families ranged from 1–5 ages 5–17 (although only one child per family was taking part in the experiments). Almost all these children were actively taking part in some sort of organised activities, which means that all interviewees had experience from them as a parenting setting. All interviewees represented backgrounds that can be considered middle-class: educated, native Finns with professional rather than manual work positions.

4.1 Epistemological framework

Discourse analytical approaches have provided key insight on how intensive parenting is produced in different levels of society and how parents reproduce or counter it (Geinger, Vandenbroeck, and Roets 2014; Perrier 2013). Here, intensive parenting discourse and related mobility representations are analysed with an application of Fairclough’s (2003, 2013) critical discourse analysis (CDA), which offers an epistemological framework for critical social analysis of texts and their interconnectedness with social practices and structures. Fairclough attests that social practices are networked, and their semiotic dimension is called orders of discourse. Texts work and rework these relationships, which may lead to changes in practices and their underlying structures: discourses and representations can be operationalised as new ways of interacting (enactment), being (inculcation) and physical materialisation. Hence, this relational-dialectical analysis of discourse is not solely explaining the making of meaning (semiosis) but also the relations between semiotic and other social elements as (parenting) roles and ways of interacting (Fairclough 2013).

In other words, Fairclough’s notion of discourse appreciates the meaning of social contexts where they emerge. Following this kind of epistemology, Freudendal-Pedersen (2009, Freudendal-Pedersen, Hartmann-Petersen, and Nielsen 2010) has analysed how communities produce mobility narratives and how they may be disrupted through experimental research designs. Narratives are guided by shared experiences and representations as individuals negotiate mobilities respective to others in similar life situations: ‘[u]nderstanding the importance of communities in relation to individual’s ontological security whilst maintaining a community perspective is essential in exploring mobilities’ (Freudendal-Pedersen, Hartmann-Petersen, and Nielsen 2010, 28). Similarly, regarding parenting, local adult-child communities create notions of ‘people like us’ based on similar parenting ideals and driven by a shared sense of ‘how we do things’ (Vincent, Neal, and Iqbal 2017; Vincent and Maxwell 2016; Wheeler and Green 2019). While it is known that notions of ‘good’ parenting, mobility and childhood are filtered through localised community discourses and local moral geographies (Barker 2011; Murray 2009), previous research has not analysed the interplay of shared, lived and embodied experiences of mobility and mobility representations in the way we do here.

4.2 Analysis

Interviews, focus groups and the parents’ workshop were audio recorded and transcribed. We started with a theory driven analysis focusing on language use: how car-parenting and velonomy were constructed respective to intensive parenting discourse. The representations were produced by categorising texts into themes and analysing their relations. Second, we analysed how the social relations of the local community and the mobility experiments dialectically shaped/were shaped by the mobility representations. I.e., to understand the entanglement of mobility representations and practices in the social dynamics among children and adults, the second part of the analysis examined how the social roles, interactions and new experiences shaped the production of the texts and vice versa (Fairclough 2013). In the results section, these two phases are confounded to provide a comprehensive view on the study. We start by explaining car-parenting as a representation of intensive parenting and how this representation was validated in the community. Then we describe how after the experiments, the parents constructed childhood velonomy as a representation of so called ‘enabling but engaged’ parenting (Joelsson 2019). In the end we critically examine this discursive shift and describe how the mobility representations were operationalised in the social and material dynamics among adults and children.

5. Results

5.1. Car-parenting as a representation of intensive parenting

As suggested in earlier studies, children’s journeys to organised activities were highly car-dependent, and subsequently parents’ afterwork time was highly scheduled (Hjorthol and Fyhri 2009; Lareau and Weininger 2008; Wheeler and Green 2019). Especially in families with two or more children, descriptions of ‘speedy’, ‘hectic’, and even ‘stressful’ everyday life were frequent, and the parents’ subjective experience of time was intermittent and oppressive. They needed to constantly plan ahead in a systematic manner and ‘could not afford slackening’ or ‘get disturbed’ as any ‘hiccups’ could make the organization fall apart. Time pressures required compromising on various activities and principles such as parents’ own leisure activities and the benefits of ‘slower’ transport modes such as higher physical activity and lower traffic emissions. Especially the coordination of work life and chauffeuring was deemed challenging: almost all parents regularly made flexible arrangements at work to be able to leave early for chauffeuring, and some continued working from the car or from the facilities where children’s activities took place. Most parents saw that the car was the ‘only option’ to manage these demands across time and space:

It’s a terrible amount of organising honestly. Every Sunday we check the upcoming week, if there are those tight spots when we need to ask for help from someone [for chauffeuring]. How we ensure that my husband gets his work done etc. Everyday life is all about being organized. (Interview round 1, mother of three.)

The ‘tight spots’ highlighted in the quote are discussed by Lareau and Weininger (2008) as spatial and temporal ‘pressure points’ that demand foresight and organisation. Some parents even had to make trade-offs between paid work and mobility work to overcome them. A single mother explained that she liked her job but could work only part-time to make her children’s participation in the activities possible through chauffeuring:

Well I just can’t [work more]. And I can’t really want it because I can’t do it… I just want to give my children what I can. I want to raise them to become good boys and that is more important than my career. (Interview round 1, single mother of three.)

In all these respects, chauffeuring children was a form of unpaid, informal labour that Gilow (2020) has termed domestic mobility work. Below we show why parents were so motivated to perform such work and how it was entangled with notions of ‘good’ parenting and childhood. While parenting and mobility has most often been discussed in relation to urban and traffic related risks (e.g. McLaren and Parusel 2015; Murray 2009), our findings complement these insights by explaining how managing, controlling and enabling children’s mobility can also be a way to resource and enrich them.

According to parents, performing mobility work was only a downside of the fact they were actively producing a range of assets for their children through managing their leisure mobilities. The motivation to spend ‘ridiculous amounts of time behind the wheel’ was derived from the recognition of the resourcing and enriching effects of children’s leisure life in organised activities. Enduring mobility work was part of a ‘demanding phase of life’, which ‘would not last forever’ and that would ‘pay off’ for the children. In line with literatures on concerted cultivation, parents provided detailed descriptions on what kinds of skills and assets are important for ‘success’ in different walks of life and how the organised activities cultivated them (Lareau 2003; Vincent and Ball 2007; Vincent and Maxwell 2016). Skills were accrued by being involved in something ‘proper’, ‘goal-oriented’ and ‘reasonable’ that teaches children ‘how things work’ and that renders them more ‘competent’ and ‘agentic’ through myriad ways. Parents described how ‘perseverance’, ‘resilience’, ‘determination’ as well as ‘creativity’, ‘collaboration skills’ and ‘empathy’ were accrued through competing, staying committed in self-imposed activity, working together towards common goals and surviving demanding situations. Many parents explicitly considered children’s activities complementary to formal school education.

To achieve this enrichment, the parents’ role was to ensure the ‘right’ socio-spatial organisation of children’s leisure through mobility work. Changes in the cultivating socio-spatial organisation would mean bad alternatives: ‘just staying home’, ‘loitering around’ or ‘letting the Playstation to raise my child’ and all parents deemed that quitting the activities was only acceptable if there were new ones to replace the current one(s). Because organised activities represented the appropriate socio-spatial organisation of ‘good’ childhood, it made chauffeuring children there a concrete act of ‘good’ parenting, and this notion would make every bit of ‘stress’ and compromising worthwhile. The way the parents tackled the compromises and ambivalences of chauffeuring was apparent when they described positive emotions during the car rides and the feeling that ‘we are doing the right things’:

… chauffeuring is the necessary evil. But on the other hand, if you look at it more philosophically, it’s time you spent together, on the way you can discuss with the kids and I feel I am doing something useful with my time. Even though it feels sometimes that we could be smarter about it by car-pooling etc., the girls and boys are going there [activities] to do something reasonable when you take them there, and that is how I justify it [chauffeuring by private car]. (Interview round 1, father of two.)

As the quote implies, the car offered an ideal space to affectively demonstrate to children that their participation to the activities is valued. Some of the parents explicitly stated that showing affection and involvement by chauffeuring prevented children ‘slipping away’ from the activities. Letting children manage the journeys to the activities themselves would be at best ‘unsupportive’ and at worst straightforwardly ‘hampering’. As such, the car was an integral part of the appropriate socio-spatial organisation of childhood. It provided undistracted moments with children for emotional resourcing and confounded organised activities and practices of ‘doing family’ inside the car (Laurier et al. 2008; Waitt and Harada 2016). Chauffeuring was a way to ‘stay on track’ with what is going on in children’s lives, ‘cheer on’ their participation in the activities and just ‘be involved’:

…[in the car] we talk what is going on and if they have a competition coming, we discuss about that and cheer them on. Then we just discuss the everyday life, it’s that kind of a moment. Sometimes when it’s really hectic, we’re just quiet, then you don’t need anything. (Interview round 1, mother of two.)

Thus, we see that car-parenting represented intensive parenting ideology in many respects. Children were constructed as current and future projects and objects of social investment (Faircloth 2014) that demanded a specific form of (mobility) work from parents (Gilow 2020). Chauffeuring was not an isolated practice but part of a broader parenting ‘strategy’ (Furedi 2002; Lee et al. 2014) that parents were performing to achieve the ‘right’ socio-spatial organisation of childhood. Parents’ accounts also reflected a degree of parental determinism and similar ideals about childhood—if they did not perform their chauffeuring role accordingly, children might end up on sub-optimal life trajectories (Furedi 2002; Lee et al. 2014) (Table 2).

Table 2. Car-parenting as a representation of intensive parenting in the first-round interview data.

5.1.1. Meaning of the local community

During the project, it occurred that parents and children crossed paths on a regular basis in a range of organised activities, lived in the same middle-class neighbourhoods and attended the same schools. This loose local community of families was a highly meaningful childrearing resource for the parents. They appreciated that their children made friends in the activities with other ‘like-minded’ children and built relationships with various ‘competent’, ‘skilled’ and ‘safe’ adults, who were parents to other children in the community or were otherwise involved in the activities:

…they [children] get different role models in addition to us parents and teachers. I mean in the community there is all kinds of instructors and coaches and staff and others, and I think it’s good that they are there. It’s like the whole ‘village’ is bringing up the kids. There are people around who are interested in the child, her development and general well-being. (Interview round 1, mother of three.)

Furthermore, the community was an important reference point for parents when navigating parenting strategies. Many referred to the regular encounters ‘on the side of the pitch’ and continuous messaging with other parents in social media groups. Some had made close friends with other parents in the community and would keep in touch also outside of the children’s activities. Even though not all parents were close with each other, they described ‘a mutual understanding’ on parenting ideals and priorities: they had similar life rhythms, had made similar choices as parents, valued children’s participation in activities in similar ways and faced similar struggles. This sense of community was apparent for example when parents described how they helped each other with chauffeuring:

It’s very practical, whoever can do it, does it [chauffeuring]. You take them there, we pick them up. There is no need to make a big deal about it, that’s how it goes around, in good spirit. And there is of course also people that we don’t see eye-to-eye, but especially with the two oldest sons’ teams we’ve become acquainted with the people and everyone shares the same feelings in the community. Everyone has similar practical difficulties, and we help each other out when needed to. (Interview round 1, father of three.)

Many parents also referred to themselves (often on a humoristic note) as ‘hockey parents’, ’soccer moms’, ‘sporty families’ or ‘club people’. They explained their lifestyle through cultural memes (e.g. what a soccer mom’s car looks like) and described how they joked about the ‘chauffeuring lifestyle’ amongst themselves:

When the season [in children’s activities] is on, the housework is left undone, you really notice that we spend so much time at the sports halls. Someone was just making a laugh about ‘how do you know that the season is over?’ – You see people [other parents] doing housework and gardening [laughs]. They finally have some time to spend at home! (Interview round 1, mother of two.)

These insights show how the community validated the ‘appropriateness’ of their lifestyle and parenting ideals as they recognised similarities in each other’s lives. Some of the parents also explicitly emphasized that their parenting strategy was distinct from other people they knew: ‘not everyone could do it’ and not all parents ‘understood the benefits of the investment’ of the chauffeuring lifestyle:

It’s really hectic and a good friend of mine just asked why we’ve chosen to put so much time on our children’s activities. I mean you have to think of it as a hobby for us parents also. Otherwise, it’s quite difficult to tolerate that all evenings are spent chauffeuring the children. (Interview 1, mother of two.)

As discussed in earlier studies on local parenting cultures, the community generated shared notions of ‘how we do things’ and what kind of parenting is appropriate for ‘people like us’ (Vincent, Neal, and Iqbal 2017; Vincent and Maxwell 2016). Barker (2011) has stressed that local parenting cultures inform ideologies of mobility and that helping each other to manage mobility work can be an important part of their appropriation.

The normativity of car-parenting was further explained by three interviewees, who stated that the dominant parenting and mobility logic also worked against enabling children’s autonomous mobility. They hesitated to support children’s freedom of movement because of other parents’ opinions:

I think my son was on the first or second grade when we let him cycle around with friends, and I was thinking if I was going to receive a child protection notice [laughs]. When they were cycling to the football pitch, three of them, I was thinking if that was OK. I was sure that he would manage but I was worried what other parents would think. (Interview round 1, mother of two.)

Because of the hegemonic and normative representation of car-parenting, enabling children’s autonomy beyond certain ‘normal’ limits made their parenting look ‘different’ or even ‘weird’ at times. It should not be pushed over certain thresholds or otherwise they would ‘stand out’. Individual parents had little leeway to challenge the pervasive representation of children’s mobility and the underpinning intensive parenting logic. As Barker (2011) put it, prioritising certain actions and interactions evidently means constraining others in local parenting cultures.

Crucially, the above analysis of the community social relations explains how the collective appropriation of car-parenting made it hegemonic and normative despite its widely recognised ambivalences. As Freudendal-Pedersen (2009) has argued, mobility narratives and representations can provide people with collective reassurance that ‘we are doing the right things’ even though mobility practices often entail trade-offs, compromises and value conflicts. Parenting practices can be especially prone to self-doubt, second-guessing and uncertainty (Lee et al. 2014), which arguably further highlights the meaning of mobility representations to parents ‘ontological security’ (Freudendal-Pedersen, Hartmann-Petersen, and Nielsen 2010, 28). Our findings provide novel insight on how shared mobility representations can help parents cope with the pressures and ambivalences of intensive parenting (Table 3).

Table 3. Meaning of the local community in validating car-parenting in the first-round interview data.

Key themes	Example terms and expressions	N-associated terms in data	N-participants mentioning
Sense of community among children and adults	‘Like-minded’; ‘spirit’; ‘community’; ‘mutual understanding’	22	17
(Humoristic) references to shared lifestyle	‘Soccermom’; ‘club people’; ‘hockey family’; ‘sports people’	17	13
Distinction from other parenting styles	‘Not everyone can do it’; ‘they [other parents] don’t understand’; ‘it’s hard to explain to someone else’	16	12
Negative responses to enabling children’s autonomous mobility	‘Irresponsible [parents]’; ‘shaming’; ‘weird’; ‘stand out’	7	3

5.2. Children ‘becoming mobile’—parents constructing velonomy

After four months of mobility experiments, we saw that they had indeed managed to create a shift (at least temporarily) in children’s mobility practices. Parents reported that all children who took part in the experiments and also some of their siblings had adopted cycling at least on some journeys that were previously done by car. Subsequently, all parents reported that their weekly time spent on chauffeuring had decreased at least to some degree. Eighteen parents out of 24 described that the change was ‘significant’, meaning that they had dropped multiple chauffeuring duties a week.

However, in the post-experiment interviews, parents were not describing a mere mode shift on children’s journeys to the organised activities, but a comprehensive change in children’s overall travel patterns. For most children, the constellations of their everyday journeys had changed altogether as cycling had become ‘a thing’ in the community. Parents attested that children were ‘seeing new possibilities’ in everyday life and ‘thinking differently’ about what kinds of destinations (friends’ places, recreational facilities, natural sites etc.) they could reach on their own. Also, as children were not obliged to go directly home after the activities in the car, they had the opportunity to ‘hang out’ or plan self-organised activities. This rendered the whole notion of ‘a journey’ ambiguous:

He [my son] has become a lot more mobile, he might just go for example to the trampoline park [self-organised activity] very spontaneously, just book a time there with friends and go by bike. It used to be that automatically the first thing was to check if he could get a ride, but this has changed a lot. Also, for example frisbee golf, he does that quite a bit now all around the city, and he showed me the other day on his mobile app that he’d done 40 kilometres of cycling a day just by going to the ice rink [organised activity] and then to a frisbee golf course [self-organised activity]. (Interview round 2, mother of two.)

As the above quote implies, travelling longer distances, chaining trips and activities in new ways and cycling around without a specific purpose was phrased as a process of ‘becoming mobile’. Even though children’s autonomous mobility has been widely studied, minimal research has been dedicated to how it emerges—how children ‘become mobile’ across socio-spatial contexts (cf. Kullman 2010). In the following, we explain this from the parenting perspective by describing how parents constructed childhood velonomy as a positive mobility representation that contrasted with their initial normative representation of car-parenting when the project provided the community an opportunity to reshape their ‘mutual understanding’ on parenting, mobility and childhood.

Firstly, the parents explained how cycling promoted children’s autonomy and agency in a positive way. Emphasising the distinction from car-parenting, a father reflected how this new reasoning had eroded chauffeuring in the community:

The thing is that parents have realised that their children actually like this [autonomous mobility] and can do things if they are provided the opportunity. I mean, it’s that kind of people who don’t calculate their gasoline expenses, that’s not the thing. The thing is that the [children’s] dependency [on parents] has changed. The umbilical cord is extending, so to say. And subsequently, it becomes the activity of the child, not so much the parent’s thing. (Interview round 2, father of three.)

The parents highlighted that children’s autonomous mobility includes many other elements than simply transporting themselves to a given destination. The rather mundane ancillary tasks such as making sure to leave home on time, managing equipment and organising the shared journeys with friends were deemed important constituents of agency because through these practices children were ‘actively making the decisions to participate in different activities’. By taking over this bundle of tasks and practices that the parents saw as the burden of domestic mobility work, the children were balancing their novel freedom of movement with responsibility. Parents appreciated that this ‘responsible autonomy’ was subsequently transformed into positive emotions as ‘pride’ and ‘dignity’:

It’s a kind of freedom and emancipation. There’s this responsibility to remember at what time you have to be there, but at the same time you’re not dependent on your parents chauffeuring anymore, it’s a small step towards independence. So she [my daughter] has been totally excited and experienced this sort of pride that she takes responsibility and manages it. I see from her appearance that this has been important for her. Now she has the ball to herself and she’s happy to carry it. (Interview round 2, father of two.)

Earlier studies have argued that children are highly conscious that displaying responsibility is crucial when negotiating freedoms (Nansen et al. 2015; Wales et al., 2021). Yet, as Kullman (2010) has noted, such ‘responsible autonomy’ is not negotiated only between people but also between objects and spaces. In this respect it was interesting how the parents’ construction of velonomy also concerned children’s responsibility and autonomy regarding the use, maintenance and repair of their bicycles:

I think it was key that it all started with the repair workshops and changing the winter tyres together. It’s important to get that feeling that you are well acquainted with the bike and you can manage it. (Focus group, mother of three.)

Repair and maintenance have been considered key constituents of velonomy in earlier studies analysing how communities can transform relationships of people, bicycles and spaces (Abord De Chatillon 2022; Rigal 2022). Some parents clearly appreciated these material aspects of autonomy and that cycling practices are always underpinned by the bicycle-cyclist relationship.

Second, velonomy was constructed respective to children’s new interactions and relationships among peers. Parents described how new friendships and ‘communal spirit’ had developed through shared cycling practices and how they also extended to various leisure activities:

He [my son] is a bit of a lonely wolf, there’s just one or two pals he hangs out with. He likes spending time alone, but I think now he likes cycling together with friends to the training sessions and then go play with them afterwards. (Interview round 2, father of two.)

In the study of Pacilli et al. (2013), lower independent mobility predicted greater feelings of loneliness, weaker sense of community, a lower sense of safety and less frequent social activities with friends. Similarly, qualitative studies have discussed how companionship pervades children’s autonomous mobility and how children ‘do friendships’ by walking and cycling together (respective to ‘doing family’ in the car) (Mikkelsen and Christensen 2009; Horton et al. 2014; McIlvenny 2015; Nansen et al. 2015). Even without being physically present in these social encounters among children, the parents recognised the meaning of cycling as a social space and how it contrasted with the social space of the adult-dominated car.

Thirdly, parents described how novel autonomy and sociality together generated a collective process of ‘growth’ and ‘enrichment’ among the children. Here, velonomy was constructed by pointing to the various skills and assets children were developing through new mobility practices. Some explained how this non-formal learning process was possible only through affective and embodied cycling practices with friends and without adults:

If you have a feeling that your mom and dad manage your activities at all levels, it limits the growth. And as I explained to you earlier, that growth happened as he [my son] saw others do it [cycling] and went along. I mean I can’t get it across to him by teaching or speaking, he needs to experience and feel those sensations himself with friends. (Interview round 2, father of two.)

Growth was described for example in terms of being able to ‘take initiative’, being ‘responsible’ and having ‘new awareness’ on ‘how things work’. The fact that adults were not physically present to manage, control and optimise children’s interactions and experiences freed space for different forms of being and learning:

I think that often in contemporary parenting we forget that it’s important for children to feel good and competent in something, to get the experience that you manage by yourself. We pave the way for them too much, try to soften up everything and make it easy, and that is not necessarily motivating and nice for the child. They’ll miss out on all the challenges and disappointments, but they’ll also miss out on the moments of success: that I can, and I manage by myself. I think it’s the contemporary culture, that you do everything for the child, nothing should be difficult and then you’ll make them miss out on those different kinds of experiences. I think this project has shown that we are all a bit of curling parents. (Focus group, mother of two.)

In sum, velonomy as a process of ‘growth’ through ‘becoming mobile’ was considered an open-ended process that is not contained to formal learning environments, but encompassed by free-flowing engagements with people, objects and spaces as described in earlier studies on children’s mobility (Kullman 2010; Nansen et al. 2015; Wales et al., 2021). Importantly, the parents’ accounts highlight the paradox of how these mundane engagements might seem less than spectacular, but are still deeply meaningful for children and their parents. As Horton et al. (2014, 99) put it, autonomous mobility ‘may simultaneously be described as intense, loved, vivid, vital, playful, social experiences, which are central to friendships yet also dismissed with a shrug as taken-for-granted, ordinary and underwhelming’ (emphasis original).

5.2.1. Velonomy challenging the intensive parenting logic?

The critical question remains of how velonomy as a locally emerging representation of children’s mobility was reproducing or challenging the intensive parenting discourse. As implied in the last quote, many parents explicitly contrasted enabling children’s autonomous mobility with contemporary ‘curling parenting’ and ‘helicopter parenting’. This contrast was also articulated through new priorities like ‘not stressing’, ‘letting go’ and ‘giving responsibility’. The ’good’ parent’s role was now to stay more ‘on the background’:

I don’t know if you can call it learning, but I think, regarding their autonomy, that I’ve learned to trust a bit more that kids can take care of their stuff. And trust that things happen even if I draw myself on the background. It’s more like ‘I am on the background, but I am here if you need me’. (Interview round 2, mother of two.)

However, even though parenting ideals, roles and practices were renegotiated during the project, we do not wish to uncritically repeat the parents’ account that the appropriation of velonomy meant a shift away from the intensive parenting logic. We justify this critical stance in the following by drawing attention to what important aspects of children’s autonomous mobility were left without attention in the community.

There were minimal comments on the playful character of children’s autonomous mobility and cycling even though this has been considered central in earlier studies (Horton et al. 2014; McIlvenny 2015; Wales et al., 2021). Ross (2007) has discussed how autonomous mobility provides children not only social encounters and excitement but also stress-free time for solitude and daydreaming outside adult-dominated settings, which none of the parents considered. Also, there were no remarks on how children develop emplaced knowledge and social awareness on familiar and unfamiliar environments and settings through embodied and social engagements (Christensen 2003; Milne 2009; Ross 2007). ‘Becoming mobile’ was rather deemed to accrue children’s functional and spatial knowledge on distances and travel times.

By conceptualising emplaced knowledge as distinct from spatial knowledge, Christensen (2003) has discussed how children’s understanding of themselves is shaped by their connectedness to space and place and how this understanding broadens through mobility. In line with her findings, our study evokes the critical insight that adults tend to be more interested in the ‘forms of knowledge that they believed the children would come to need rather than the knowledge that children were developing through their emplaced being’ (Christensen 2003, 15). In a similar vein, Horton and Kraftl (2006) have argued that framing all children’s experiences as processes of ‘growing up’ creates an unrealistic image of their continuous linear ‘becoming’ and considers them as future development projects. The absence of the seemingly ‘unproductive’ but meaningful aspects of autonomous mobility as ‘just cycling’ (as a counterpart for ‘just walking’ in Horton et al. 2014), ‘emplacement’ and playfulness suggest that velonomy was still influenced by the intensive parenting discourse emphasising constant enrichment, resourcing and cultivation. The notion of ‘growth’ was clearly akin to future-oriented assets and skills that children were posited to develop in the organised activities. Even though the parents considered car-parenting and velonomy as contrasting parenting strategies, the future- and productivity-oriented notion of children as social investments still provided a pertinent set of criteria against which the value of mobility was assessed.

Thus, rather than a shift away from intensive parenting ideology, velonomy was more of a locally emerging appropriation of new mobility representations and practices in the intensive parenting discourse that emerged to co-exist in an ambivalent relationship with intensive car-parenting. As Hoffman (2010) notes, the ability of any given initiative to dissemble prevalent parenting discourse should not be overestimated as parents may only find new ways to give meaning to different strategies and practices to embed them in the intensive parenting logic. In Fairclough’s (2003, 2013) terms, new social and material practices can simply be recontextualised in the prevalent discourse. Hence, aligning ourselves with Joelsson (2019), we consider childhood velonomy as a representation of ‘enabling but engaged parenting’ that was still negotiated respective to the intensive parenting discourse (Table 4).

Table 4. Childhood velonomy as a representation of enabling but engaged parenting in the second-round interview, workshop and focus group data.

Despite these critical conclusions we refuse to undermine the social change that took place through shifting representations. Car-parenting and velonomy concerned not only the differences between parental chauffeuring and autonomous cycling as mobility practices but entailed also a more general change on how children’s mobility was given meaning: what is it, how it should be performed and what it is for. These notions were enacted as ways of interacting among children and adults, inculcated in parenting roles and identities and physically materialised in cars and bicycles abilities to create social spaces (Fairclough 2013) (Table 5).

Table 5. Generalised representations of mobility and their operationalisation in interactions among children and adults.

	Car-parenting (as a representation of Intensive parenting)	Childhood velonomy (as a representation of enabling but engaged parenting)
Generalised representations of mobility	Mobility as predefined journeys according to predefined (hectic) schedules	Mobility as spontaneous and reactive movement according to children’s self-defined needs
	(Auto)mobility as a means for parents to manage the fractured family life (work, school, organised activities)	(Velo)mobility as a means for children to manage their everyday life
	(Auto)mobility facilitating participation into organised activities	(Velo)mobility being a part of the organised activities
	Mobility as work for parents (agency of parents)	Mobility as a social event for children (agency of children)
	Mobility (work) as investment—an instrumental practice for children’s enrichment and cultivation	Mobility as an intrinsic constituent of enrichment and cultivation
	(Auto)mobility enabling ‘effective’ coordination of the socio-spatial organisation of childhood	(Velo)mobility enabling autonomous and ‘idle’ coordination of the socio-spatial organisation of childhood
Operationalisation of mobility representations in interactions, roles and materialities among children and adults	Parents’ duty to invest in children through chauffeuring	Parents’ duty to support children’s autonomy through enabling mobility
	Parents defining the appropriate socio-spatial organisation of children’s lives	Parents and children mutually defining the appropriate socio-spatial organisation of children’s lives
	Parents’ role to ‘pave the way’ for children (with automobility)	Parents’ role to let children experience (through autonomous mobility)
	Parents responsibility to provide children with meaningful social relationships through organised activities	Children’s ability to create meaningful social relationships for themselves
	Car as an exclusive care space for parenting—chauffeuring as ‘doing family’	Cycling as an exclusive social space for children’s peer relations—cycling as ‘doing friendships’
	Parents managing the social-material space of the family car	Children supported to manage the social-material spaces created through bicycles and cycling equipment

6. Conclusions

Cresswell (2010) has argued that to explain mobility patterns, research must analyse the interplay between mobility representations and lived and embodied mobility practices. Following this line of thought and by applying insights from parenting culture studies to mobility studies, we have attempted a novel way to analyse the changes in children’s mobility patterns that have taken place in recent decades (Shaw et al. 2015; Fyhri et al. 2011). The paper shows how parents’ representations of children’s mobility are shaped by the intensive parenting discourse, but also negotiated locally in more or less loose adult-child communities and shared experiences within them.

Promoting children’s autonomous mobility does not demand changing the profound beliefs, values and aspirations of contemporary parenting culture. Rather the benefits of the freedom of movement must be appropriated in the locally emerging set of valuations, beliefs and ideals about ‘good’ parenting, mobility and childhood. Our study was conducted in a spatial context where urban risks are not highly prevalent and a middle-class social context where children’s cultivation through organised activities is an important parenting ideal. With these socio-spatial parameters, the study sets an example of how local communities create powerful narratives and representations about mobility and how they can be analysed and even disrupted to change mobility patterns.

The operationalisation of velonomy as a counterpart of car-parenting helps us to understand how the process of ‘becoming mobile’ is linked to notions of ‘growing up’ in parents’ perspective. Crucially, the term is apt to render visible how these processes take place in an adaptive web of people, materials and spaces that are ‘all contributing to a simultaneous sense of trust and playfulness that invites families to resolve the ambiguities of growing up in situated ways’ (Kullman 2010, 830). Yet, in contrast with this rather positive notion, we have also pointed to the inconsistencies and ambivalences of parents’ representations of children’s mobility. Some aspects of ‘becoming mobile’ were more meaningful for parents than others, which revealed the tendency towards the intensive parenting logic.

By focusing on parenting, we do not wish to undermine children’s own accounts. To the contrary, we hope that we have managed to highlight how children’s affective, embodied and social agency can prompt renegotiations on what mobilities are deemed ‘appropriate’ across communities and places. Yet, at the same time, we have wanted to emphasise that parenting culture is not a mere lens on children’s mobility but matters a great deal also to parents’ wellbeing. By disrupting ambivalent mobility aspirations and valuations through experimental and participatory research designs, studies can open discursive and transitional spaces in adult-child communities and provide new leeway in (re)negotiating what kinds of mobilities are possible and desirable.

Ethical approval

The Human Sciences Ethics Committee of the University of Jyväskylä, approval number 492/13.00.04.00/2020.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland under Grants 320403, 320400.