Browsing by Author "Mäkelä, Katariina"

In this Master’s Thesis I study the meanings that parents attach to childhood in relation to the residential environment in their narratives. In particular, I examine the concept of urban childhood and the rural-urban dichotomy when speaking about childhood. This topic is current and relevant because more and more children are born in cities and raised in urban environments due to ongoing trend of urbanization in Finland. Thus it is crucial to study the perceptions and assumptions about urban childhood that prevail in the Finnish society. Before conducting this research my hypothesis was that parents actively use the rural-urban dichotomy when describing their children’s relationship with their residential environment. Most academic publications that address this topic have been published in the United Kingdom, where academics such as Colin Ward, Gill Valentine, Stuart Aitken and Owain Jones have researched the spatial implications of the way childhood is constructed. This literature suggests that childhood is constructed differently in urban and rural environments and that a traditional view of a good childhood is associated with a rural residential environment. This construction is visible in the everyday individual and public discourse as well as popular fiction. The traditional view of a 'rural idyll' as the favourable environment for growing up influences both adult and child experiences in different residential environments. In Finland there is not much academic research on this topic, but a similar traditional view of childhood has been recognized to exist also here. In this study I also utilized Margaret Somers’ theory about the narrative identity, according to which narratives are a way of portraying personal experiences, entertain and share information, but also they are cognitive tools for perceiving the surrounding world. Through narratives people can for example portray and understand causality. Personal narratives are influenced by the rules of storytelling that we begin to adopt as children, as well as popular narratives repeated in the public discourse. My research data consists of seven semi-structured thematic interviews with eight parents who live in Kallio with their families. In the interviews we addressed various themes about childhood and its relationship with the residential environment. The participants described their experiences, memories and fears mostly through telling anecdotes and stories, which is why I decided to focus my analysis on these small narratives. I used thematic narrative analysis to study these narratives, which means I analysed what the narratives were 'about' either literally or figuratively. On top of that I analysed the structures, intertextualities and patterns of similarity and difference in the narratives. The results of the study showed that the narratives were divided into four categories: attitudes, fears, practices and social life. These categories consist of sixteen different themes, most of which are familiar from the previous research literature on childhood and residential environments. However, three themes arise from these narratives, which appears related to this particular residential environment. These themes are called 'NIMBY', 'junkies and dossers' and 'happy parents'. In this research I analyse the way in which my participants address these themes and the differences in their usage compared to previous research. Some of the narratives reproduce the traditional views of childhood for example by emphasizing the centrality of nature, creativity and play. However, the parents did not perceive these things to be unattainable for urban children like the traditional view portrays it. In the contrary, the parents feared children to be lonely, bored and prejudiced in the countryside. The participants appreciate the fact they are able to spend more family time due to a short commute over having a bigger apartment or their own yard outside the city. The threat of stranger danger varies a lot and different participants experienced this threat in different residential environments. One of the main conclusions is that the dichotomy of urban and rural is widely present in the narratives by Kallio parents. The dichotomy arises in regard to almost all of the sixteen themes. Mostly the dichotomy is used to highlight how inner city living is the best option for these parents and their children. The parents highly value tolerance and deem it as characteristic for urban living. They believe that children’s natural openness and tolerance towards difference is preserved as they grow up in a city, because they are subjected to encountering difference from early on and difference becomes normalized as a part of their world view. I think it is interesting to compare the results of this study to the narratives about childhood circulating in the public discourse that mostly repeat the traditional views on childhood. The parents I interviewed were well aware of these ideas and both supported and contested them in their narratives. However the dichotomy of urban and rural childhoods is ever present and got reinforced by the narratives which my participants shared. An interesting topic for further research would be to study children’s own narratives about childhood in the city or in the countryside. Children could be interviewed before and after moving from one residential environment to another.