ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have focused on parents’ risk assessment for their children’s safety, identifying a geography of fear in which danger is associated with strangers in public space; and they have examined how, as a consequence, parents negotiate limitations on their children’s independent mobility in order to protect them. This chapter explores the consequences of these restrictions. It begins by examining the way that some parents are substituting their children’s independent outdoor play with privatised, institutionalised, adult-organised activities such as sports coaching and music lessons, and then goes onto consider why the associated decline in children’s public play matters. Finally, it considers inequalities in different children’s access to institutional play and independent environmental experiences and reflects on the implications of this. This argument is set within the context of a discussion about economic restructuring and the decline of public space in our cities.
