Parent Concerns Around Road Safety of Children En Route to School—A Study from the Western Cape, South Africa

At the start of the 1990s, transport planners and child health experts turned their collective attention to the significant change in modal preference for children en route to school. A decline of over 50% in walking was documented in some areas; and growing problems of child health and childhood obesity were thought to be linked to this issue. A new body of transport research, named the Walk to School (WTS) research, grew and has been a focus in most industrialised countries over the past three decades. While the body of WTS research is extensive, some useful examples include Ward et al. (2007), Chillón et al. (2014) and Kim and Heinrich (2016).

WTS research offered an unusual opportunity to identify not only the specifics of what many parents in industrialised countries were concerned about when it comes to their children getting to and from school but importantly highlighted that parental concern about children’s commute to school, particularly for pedestrians, is high and has been growing for some decades. Clearly, road safety is an area of concern that for many parents has become a source of active worry. For some, the safety of children on the roads has been elevated from one of a number of standard concerns that parents need to keep an eye on to actual worry: generated by repetitive, negative, and fear-based imaginings about the possibility of physical harm to their children.

The concept of parental worry as a construct is difficult to pin down—much of the research literature on parental worry addresses it only as a factor in anxiety disorders - where worry becomes disproportionate to the issue and ultimately a factor in Generalised Anxiety Disorder (Llera and Llera, 2011) - or the impact of excessive parental worry on child anxiety (Aktar et al., 2017; Dub et al., 2008). ‘Normal’ parental worry is less well defined or researched in the literature, and little current research exists on the everyday worrying that most parents engage in with regards to their children’s well-being. Our focus in this research was to concentrate on active worrying, an emotional state more taxing than general concern. To this end our working definition of worry is adopted from Borkovec et al. (1983,9): “Worry correlated more highly than general tension [and] reports with a variety of affect scales and characterised by: (a) feelings of anxiety, tension, and apprehension; (b) moderate awareness of somatic cues including muscle tension and upset stomach; and (c) concerns over future rather than past or present situations”.

There is no agreement as to what constitutes normal as opposed to excessive levels of worry, and while individual research projects have questioned what parents do worry about, most such research is either age-specific or focused on developmental or health-based concerns. Research into differences in worry levels between parents of socioeconomic groups is in very short supply in the literature (with notable examples such as Cloutier (2010) and Cloutier et al. (2011)), and equally few studies have looked at the impact of the physical environment (including traffic system) on parent’s concern levels (again with only a few exceptions, many of which are linked with WTS). It is probably not surprising, then, that there has been little research to assess how parents of South African children may feel about their children’s relative safety, even though the risks facing SA road users exceed those of most other countries.

Of course, the distribution of crash risk across South African cities, like most other cities, is not uniform. Crashes and pedestrian crashes in particular (which more typically involve local residents) tend to be more concentrated in certain neighbourhoods than in others. In this way, residents in some neighbourhoods are more exposed to crash risk than in others. In exploring the concept of parental worry, we were particularly interested to see whether the proximity to high pedestrian crash locations made any difference to how worried parents were about their children’s travel to school.

The ecological systems theory of child protection (Bronfenbrenner, 1977) forms the fundamental theoretical basis for the research. This systems theory presents the welfare of children largely as a function of the complex nested and interactive relationships that exist within and between families, communities, and societies. Through the lens of this theory, children and young people are understood in the context of the multiple environments (known as ecological systems) within which they exist, and which influence all aspects of their lives. For this study, the ecological system has been expanded to include the physical environment in which these relationships occur. Both the physical and social environments are sources of potential risk for children—how parents assess and act on these risks is what is salient here. The most influential social relationship in the child-protection complex is considered to be that between parents and children (where parents are understood to be most immediately responsible for identifying and mitigating risks to the children) while the physical environment itself is seen as the primary source of risk. Various other environments (the wider community, the school community, the communities of youth in the neighbourhood, the community of officials and authorities that are appointed to regulate the safety of residents, etc.) co-exist within the same physical space, and may well influence the ultimate safety of children, but our immediate concern was the relationship between the parents, their children, and the physical environment.

Research into the experiences of child pedestrians during their walk to school (WTC), and the concerns of their parents and guardians, has evolved primarily out of an interest in why fewer children in developing countries walk to their schools now than in previous decades. The decline in the number of children walking to school has been one of the most significant changes in child mobility over the past few decades. For example, Buliung, Mitra and Faulkner (2009), documented a decline in walking mode share for trips for Canadian scholars of between 53%–42.5% for 11–13-year-olds and, 38.6%–30.7% for 14–15-year-olds, between 1986 and 2006. In a similar vein, a survey carried out by MacDonald (2007) in the US, reported a 68% decline in children walking to school between 1969 and 2005. These trends have caused concern around child health, and numerous research efforts have been dedicated to understanding why this shift occurred (and indeed sustained). The research around parental concerns and traffic has not been driven so much by child safety specifically, as it is by understanding what the obstacles may be in getting more children to walk to school in the future – with an underlying motive of improving child health and reducing child obesity rates (Cloutier et al., 2011).

That said, child pedestrian injuries are of course the subject of a wide range of research, mostly emerging from health science literature, and more is now known about what factors of the physical environment are correlated with child pedestrian crash risk. At a very high level, these include poverty and population density: the greater the degree of poverty and the higher the population density, the greater the likelihood of child pedestrian fatalities (Cottrill and Vonu, 2010). Multiple research projects have also confirmed the higher vulnerability of pedestrians, and child pedestrians, even in lower-income areas of industrialised countries (Edwards et al., 2006; Lyons et al., 2013).

Research has also identified some of the factors that contribute to this vulnerability, including road and child development factors. From a general road perspective, high traffic volume, higher density of on-street (curb) parking, and mean speeds greater than 40 km/h are indicated as factors influencing child pedestrian risk (Roberts et al., 1995). The complexity of the roadway environment is another factor, with environments of high cognitive load more prone to pedestrian crashes than those with less complexity (Tapiro et al., 2020). The number of lanes on a road (influencing both the prevailing travel speeds and the distance needed to cross the road) is a crash risk factor for child pedestrians; as is the absence of safe play areas in the neighbourhood (Roberts et al., 1995; Cottrill and Vonu, 2010); the absence of street lighting (Clifton and Burnier, 2009) and a lack of suitable traffic control measures. In terms of safety of children in the immediate vicinity of schools, Rothman et al. (2017) identified three key factors: a safe drop-off place for children at school entry, the level of traffic congestion around school and the facilities regarding road safety such as traffic signs and signals surrounding a school.

Minimising risk exposure by providing safe pedestrian crossings for children at intersections has long been the responsibility of traffic departments, yet research over many years shows that most crashes involving child pedestrians are found to occur away from intersections, at midblock locations in residential streets, often close to the home of the child (Lightstone et al., 2001; Rivara, and Barber, 1985).

From a child development perspective, crash involvement by children increases with child age. This is probably related to the increased level of mobility they experience with age, though injury severity does not necessarily follow the same trajectory. As with driver competence, hazard recognition and pedestrian competence improve with child age and exposure to the pedestrian environment (Meir et al., 2015), but the development of these skills is complicated by the cognitive development of children, their tendency towards erratic behaviour (in fact the term “mid-block dart-out” was coined in the 1990s to capture this (Malek et al., 1990)) and unsafe behaviours (reflected in the fact that many fatal crashes involved children running, unlike adult pedestrian deaths (Yao et al., 2007)).

Given what is known about child pedestrian risk, it is probably unsurprising that the number of children involved in walking to school has dropped so significantly across many parts of the world. Evers et al. (2014) noted that parental concerns about the safety of their children on the roads were strongly tied to whether children walked, or took private or public transport, to school. Although safety seemed to be the primary concern in the Evers’ study, safety is only one of multiple factors influencing the decline in the number of children walking to school. Others that have been identified by parents include walking distance (62%), weather (18.6%), crime (11.7%), and school policy (6.0%) (Martin and Carlson, 2005). Research in Texas showed that children were more likely to walk to school if the parents were satisfied with the quality of their neighbourhood and its sidewalks, and if there were safe crossings (including the presence of crossing guards) (Oluyomi et al., 2014). Other issues of concern to the parents in this study were prevailing traffic speed, traffic volume, and the history of road safety in the area.

Increasingly, the personal security of children is being considered by many parents to be of similar significance to safety from traffic injuries. The perceived personal security of pedestrians as a factor in road use has been a concern for a long time. Appleyard (1980), some decades ago, showed that the level of pedestrian activity is directly related to that of perceived personal security—the more pedestrians use a street, the safer it tends to be. However personal security of children as pedestrians specifically is growing an issue (Veitch et al., 2006; Crawford et al., 2017).

The difference in worry levels—and worry specifics- between parents in high-income countries and lower-middle-income countries is still a matter of speculation. No international comparisons have been found in the literature, and the level of engagement with parents in developing countries is remarkably low; with exceptions found only in South Africa (Simons et al., 2018; Muchaka et al., 2011), Iran (Mehdizadeh et al., 2017), in Ecuador (Huertas-Delgado et al., 2018), in Nigeria (Oluyomi et al., 2014) and in Pakistan (Ali et al., 2020). All of these studies highlight parents’ concern about their children’s safety on the journey to and from school.

The views of parents regarding the road safety of their children have not featured large in the development of road safety interventions internationally. Most commonly, parental engagement has been limited to asking for explanations about mobility choices and explaining those choices in terms of parental concerns (Mehdizadeh et al., 2019; Woldeamanuel, 2016). In its most generous application, the role of parents in road safety promotion has been largely limited to that of being role models for their children (Muir et al., 2010) or as participants in the implementation of community road safety campaigns (McDonell et al., 2015), seatbelt campaigns (Simon et al., 2017; Weaver et al., 2013) or driver education programmes (Simons-Morton and Ouimet, 2006). Nowhere in the literature is there evidence that parents’ views have been incorporated into the development of new road safety infrastructural or policy interventions. The field of road safety, like many others associated with policy interventions or behaviour change, tends to be seen as the domain of trained professionals. Urban designers and transport engineers typically combine forces to assess and evaluate traffic risks for children, and will typically develop solutions such as school zones (Dumbaugh and Frank, 2007; Lizarazo et al., 2021) or other forms of traffic calming, following principles of Safe System Design (SSD), which is the current design paradigm guiding road design at an international level (U.S. Department of Transportation, 2020). Parents are seldom viewed as experts on what makes their neighbourhood roads unsafe.

The international research literature on factors influencing child pedestrians’ risk highlighted the fact that while parents have frequently been documented as being worried about their children in transit, this finding has largely emerged from fairly niche research into why child mobility levels have fallen so dramatically over the past decades. At a simplistic level, reduced mobility has primarily been found to be the result of parents reacting to their growing concerns about the physical and criminal risks facing children in their local environment, by changing either their children’s school or their mode of transport. However little research into risk has been carried out in neighbourhoods where children have no option but to walk to school, and none could be found which examined how parents in such contexts articulate their concerns about their children’s safety. This study was designed to fill this gap, specifically in the context of the Western Cape of South Africa.

The research questions that were addressed in this first phase of research were as follows: