"I didn’t listen. I continued hanging out with them; they are my friends”.: The negotiation of independent socio-spatial behaviour between young people and parents living in a low-income neighbourhood

Abstract

Several studies show that parents can play an important role in buffering the effects of neighbourhood risks on their children, but pay limited attention to the processes of negotiation that take place within the family. To provide insight into these processes, interviews with young people and parents were conducted in the Feijenoord district in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Young people were often more familiar with and positive about the neighbourhood than parents, which resulted in different ideas about the places young people could or could not visit independently. This paper shows that young people’s and parents’ perceptions and practices should be seen as relational rather than independent. Young people’s independent socio-spatial behaviour is the outcome of active negotiation between parents and child, in which parents want to achieve a balance between trust and fear and the young people seek a balance between autonomy and authority.