A safe place to grow up? Parenting, perceptions of children's safety and the rural idyll

Abstract

This paper explores how an imagining of the countryside as an idealised place in which to grow up is constructed, mobilised and contested by rural parents in their accounts of their children's lives. It begins by considering how parents mobilise popular understandings of the rural idyll in their accounts of the opportunities for children in the village of Wheldale. It then goes on to explore how parents simultaneously challenge this imagining of the rural in their accounts of their children's safety, contradicting popular constructions of the rural as a safe, harmonious place, and contesting assumptions about the idyllic nature of rural childhood. Finally the paper considers how in order to justify their claims about the relative safety of the village as a place to grow up, in the face of their own descriptions of the dangers it may hold, parents further mobilise another ingredient of the ‘rural idyll’ — community. The paper concludes by considering the importance of recognising that places, like people, can have multiple meanings and identities.