Children, parents and risk

Most research on children and risk is heavily influenced by developmental theory. This paper is based on a study which uses a different approach, drawing on recent work within the sociology of childhood. ‘Children, Parents and Risk’ explores the ways in which risks to children are understood and managed by children and parents, focusing on children's daily lives in and around the home at the ages of 3, 9 and 12 years. Data were gathered from interviews with children and their parents at home and from children at school and in a youth club. The paper draws on the findings from the study in order to discuss and compare parents' and children's ideas about children and childhood as risk‐related; it also aims to examine the findings in the context of Ulrich Beck's recent work on the risk society and individualization. Both parents and children tended to ‘externalize’ risk away from the home and into the outside world. In response to perceived risks to childhood many parents appeared to see their role as that of striking a balance between protection and compensatory provision, and their accounts included details of increasingly ‘individualized’ measures to reduce such risks. The children conceptualized their experiences of adult control as welcoming when preventing the child's exposure to risk but as constraining when it restricted their autonomy. The paper concludes that the findings accord with Beck's description of the ‘risk society’ and that they lend some limited support to Beck's individualization thesis.