Placing caregiving: parenting in diverse localities in suburban Auckland

Abstract

The thesis questions how the varying socioeconomic and community resource characteristics of suburban neighbourhoods impact on the social practices of Pakeha parents of young children. It is an empirical study in which parents living in six diverse suburban localities situated in greater Auckland's Waitakere and North Shore cities are interviewed about aspects of their daily lives, their service and amenity use and their perceptions and experiences of the social relations of place. The inquiry is framed within recent debates on the determinants of health inequalities and, more specifically, the polarisation of viewpoints on the roles of social capital and material infrastructure as neighbourhood pathways to health. These debates have arisen in response to evidence from epidemiological studies that disparities in health between neighbourhoods is determined by characteristics of places as well as the characteristics of people who live in places. Neighbourhood, in the epidemiological paradigm, is conceptualised as a unit of geographic space whereas in the thesis neighbourhood is conceputalised as place, and the nuanced meanings ascribed to the term are considered. The study identifies locality and individual attributes that enhance and impede parents' access to the social resources of place. Public spaces and government funded services and amenities are the local meeting places in which formal and informal neighbourhood contact between parents occurs: information is exchanged, reciprocal care is negotiated and parental peer networks are formed. In higher and lower socioeconomic localities social capital resources are generated in, and through, these environments. Walking within a neighbourhood facilitates contact with local people; however, parents are less likely to walk in neighbourhoods in which there is a perceived lack of child-safe destinations, dispersed compared to clustered amenity and service access, and few local meeting places. A lack of neighbourhood meeting places is, in turn, associated with fewer community events and activities and more limited opportunities for serendipitous encounters with local people. The thesis concludes that without occasions at which to see local people, and be seen as a local person, engagement in place, and a sense of belonging to place, is slow to form. The social practices of parents living in diverse places illustrate a recursive relationship between characteristics of the physical and social environments of place.