Examining Child Mobility and Transport: Challenges for Theory and Practice

The paper provides an outline of the ways in which general theoretical concerns in the Sociology of Childhood relate to child mobility and transport. This paper raises questions about the kind of knowledge and insights such theorising can offer transport experts and decision makers. The argument proposed here is that the study of children and childhood is incomplete unless mobility and transport issues are located in an understanding of the complexities and varying realities of children’s everyday life. The paper (1) examines children’s social representation, inclusion and positioning within South Africa’s transport policy and interventions, and (2) the extent to which these frameworks incorporate national data on children’s daily transport and mobility activity patterns. This paper also contributes to the growing scholarship on the social perspectives on child mobility. This emergent field has occurred alongside the child rights movement and shifts towards evidence-based policy developments and practice interventions. Congruently, contemporary mobility and transport discourses promote the idea of transport as a public good and human right and this implies that all citizens’ interests and needs are of equal importance. Yet, within the sector there is still a bias towards studying the impact of child mobility on adults’ mobility, their daily lives and schedules with children’s voices, experiences and needs remaining obscured. This empirical marginality and invisibility fuels knowledge gaps and generates a passive, univocal and constrained view of children. It certainly impedes the development of child-centred and participatory transport policies and interventions.