ABSTRACT
Chapters Two and Three have focused on parents’ risk assessments in relation to children’s safety, and the role of gender and parenting cultures in shaping these risk agendas. However, children commonly have different perceptions of their own safety from their parents; and want, as well as facing peer group pressures, to stay out further and longer than their parents usually allow. Children’s spatial ranges are therefore a product of constant household negotiations with their parents about their ‘competence’ to negotiate public space safely. This chapter explores these negotiations. It begins by outlining the concepts of competence and performance. It then considers these in relation to the processes through which parents establish children’s spatial ranges, and associated boundaries. The chapter then switches from a focus on parents’ views, to consider children’s own social worlds, by looking at how children attempt to ‘perform’ and negotiate their competence and their tactics to subvert or resist the spatial restrictions imposed on them. The discussion involves consideration of the way that children exploit power dynamics between adults in different household forms, and their attitudes to their parents’ social competence. In doing so it demonstrates the instability and contested meanings of the binary concepts – ‘adult’ and ‘child’. The final section of the chapter considers the way that similar issues of risk, competence, boundary setting and subversion, are also played out in relation to children’s on-line activities in cyberspace.
