Strategies of education in child safety in an urban space: Sociological analysis of parental behaviour practices

Abstract

The paper focuses on parental practices used to ensure the child safety in urban spaces. The city is viewed as an increasingly dangerous environment, a complex social space that provides and requires new communication patterns and social scenarios. The “Alternative” private school in the city of Krasnodar was chosen as an empirical base for the study, and parents of middle- and high-school students (grades 5–11) were interviewed for the purposes of the current research. The study identified four main child safety strategies and practices that parents implement to ensure the safety of their children in an urban space. In order to study the perceptions of strategies and practices aimed at ensuring the children’s safety in an urban environment, the researchers analysed the motives, attitudes and tactics of the parents. The results of the study suggest that the parents mainly use prevention strategies in their activities to educate their children on safety. The prevention strategies include such practices as having talks with the children, organising class meetings and training sessions at school, and participating in various educational activities. However, many schoolchildren, especially those who reside in large urban areas, appear to lack the necessary attitudes and motives that comprise safe behaviour. They demonstrate underdeveloped self-preservation behaviour tactics, including a low ability to analyse the environment and to foresee the consequences of their actions. A lack of life experience results in almost any situation a child faces daily in an urban space becoming potentially dangerous for them. Parents continuously increase safety standards and try to exercise total control over their child’s safety, which can be actively facilitated by modern technological developments which provide for constant communication with children. By implementing the prohibition strategy, parents try to calm their own fears and anxieties for their children’s safety while actively applying prohibiting practices (i. e. not allowing the child to visit certain places, limiting the time the child may spend on the computer, etc.). This kind of strategy interferes with the normal development of the child and with their gaining personal experience of the environment. Modern parenting is gradually shifting towards a prevention strategy that includes close communication between parents and children in a private school setting.