Abstract
In this article, we analyse the formation of local communities from the perspective of the practices of parental involvement. Adopting a practice-based approach to empirical research on six estates in three Polish cities, we reconstruct the connections between the spatial logics of the housing areas, national education, and housing polices, and their impact on the everyday life practices inside and outside the estate. Using the category of practice of parental involvement, we show the complex, long-term impact of state and local education policies on everyday life and, as a result, on the processes of structuring or fragmentation of territorial communities. The results of our qualitative studies not only develop knowledge about the connections between national polices and everyday life practices but also, we hope, could help to design effective public policies.
Introduction
This aticle is based on the assumption that the most important dimension of reality for people consists of their everyday activities. A huge part of everyday life practices is people’s activities and interactions where they live, regardless of how much time, attention, and engagement they locate in the digital world. The time of COVID-19, even if many of us have spent it mainly online, demonstrates how important for our being and well-being are our routines, immediate interactions, physical and not only virtual contacts, and care. Using a practice-based approach, we do not question the power of global or national systems, institutions, or relations. Rather, we emphasise that the local dimension is the best place to explore “the local ends” of the global and national processes, institutions, and policies: How do they work and how are they “done” by people in local, socio-spatial realms and, specifically, in housing estates?
We focus on the practice of parental involvement, which is not only one of the most important drivers of local community structuring. Many studies show that it also plays an important role in social integration and implementation of public policies across cities and in societies as a whole. 1 At the same time, there are still many gaps in our knowledge of the local and national factors that co-shape these processes. 2 Our findings from research on six housing estates in three Polish cities contribute to this topic area by indicating the role of national policies and neighbourhood infrastructure.
Utilising a praxeological approach, we examine diverse parental practices as realisations of possible and essential “duties” defined by social policies, including above all educational ones. We show how the materiality and infrastructure of an estate participate in the configuration of parenting practices and other practices of everyday life, resulting in the relocation of practices and a shift in practice beyond the place of residence. 3
The text consists of four main parts. In the first, we review the state of the art on the role of children in the socio-spatial production and reproduction of the neighbourhood. In the second, we present the theoretical premises and methodology of our own research. The third section introduces Polish educational and spatial policy. In the fourth, we show the parenting practices associated with care and education of children, which are organised and reorganised in specific spatial and infrastructural conditions. In the conclusion, we identify the social consequences to which spatial disintegration of the social infrastructure and chaotic educational policy leads.
Growing up in a Neighbourhood—Through a Class Lens: Literature Review
The focus on children and teenagers as agents of urban practices caused a major shift in social research in the twentieth century. This focus on young people as agents in urban life contributed to the development of the concept of the urban environment, which both shapes and is shaped by them. By exploring spaces, even those as close as backyards or streets in their neighbourhood, they make the places meaningful and thereby create the city. At the same time, this environment socialises or co-educates children and teenagers about growing up. Their habitus, attitudes, ethics, and aesthetic tastes are formed in the space and through the space. 4
In the context of our subject, two questions from previous research are particularly worthy of attention.
First, research on children and teenagers in the urban setting opened our eyes to their importance in the processes of class-based/spatial production and reproduction. The fact that parents’ various childrearing styles are connected to class was noticed in early work on intergenerational transmission of familial advantages and disadvantages. 5 Also significant were the findings of Lareau, 6 who used the categories of diverse “cultural logics” and “concerted cultivations” associated with parents’ class to account for the reproduction of class structures in urban space. In the neighbourhoods she studied, middle-class children essentially had all their so-called free time (including play) meticulously organised by their parents, and the activities “set” for them were carefully chosen to develop knowledge and specific skills that the adults saw as necessary in life (e.g., participation in public performances). Parents, especially mothers, were required to invest a huge amount of time in putting into practice the elaborate plans for their children. Working-class children, on the other hand, demonstrated much greater freedom in engaging in play uncontrolled by adults, spending their time mainly with peers, and much more frequently roaming around (which middle-class parents see as a waste of time). Other case studies have produced similar conclusions. 7 Kampmann 8 has pointed to “institutionalised individualisation,” which, especially in middle-class environments, is defined as “normal socialisation.” A desirable and “appropriate” model of spending free time for children is visiting formalised institutions (e.g., culture centres, youth or other clubs) offering organised, planned activities. A radical change in the models of spatial practices has been observed by Skar and Krogh 9 in Norway, where spontaneous use of the space around the home initiated by children is giving way to activities that are planned, organised, and controlled by adults. De Visscher and Bouverne-De Bie 10 make an important conclusion on the basis of research in Ghent: “Children tend to accept most boundaries imposed upon them and to elaborate strategies to maximize their social and cultural opportunities within these boundaries, rather than consent to them.” 11 For this reason, the neighbourhood space is one of the key environments through which socialisation of children in the role of the citizen takes place—in the broad sense of a set of values and norms associated with relations with others, also outsiders in the public space.
The second question covered in previous research on children in the urban space and significant for our analysis leads to the discovery of the axionormative intricacies of local policies, and especially spatial planning, and their implicit influence on the reproduction and reinforcement of sociospatial inequalities. Marguerite van den Berg 12 examines revitalisation strategies that have been implemented, concluding that they are “productions of space for different gender relations, notably post-Fordist gender notions,” 13 including productions of child-friendly space. This is de facto “gentrification through families,” which van den Berg calls “genderfication.” This means a (declared) departure from the simple premise that the engine of a city’s development should be oriented towards middle-class consumption (gentrification), as well as a (declared) withdrawal from a policy in which children and teenagers are seen as “problematic residents.” The consequence, however, is “that the city then becomes a place for dual-earner higher educated families at the cost of other urbanites, and working-class families in particular.” 14
Among the crucial and more specific subjects of research in this area are parents’ decisions regarding their child’s school from a class perspective—the motivations for their decisions and their consequences—both individual and collective, that is, their influence on what happens in the school and neighbourhood and, more broadly, demographic processes in the city. Linn Posey-Maddox, Shelley McDonough Kimelberg, and Maia Cucchiara 15 have outlined the state of research in this field, pointing to a trend emerging in Europe and the United States among the urban middle class to send children to racially and socio-economically diverse public schools, which is treated as an element of urbanism in keeping with the parents’ politically liberal or progressive views. When it comes to applying for school, they “search for an acceptable or ‘good enough’ public school option in the city, typically one that had earned the praise of similarly resourced peers, or held the potential for improvement.” 16 Various authors analyse the findings in this research area, covering the motivations of middle-class parents’ decisions to choose urban public schools, the strategies of middle-class parent engagement and their consequences, and the relationship between neighbourhood socioeconomic change and school change. Posey-Maddox, Kimelberg, and Cucchiara 17 outline topics for future sociological research on middle-class parents’ engagement in urban education. They formulate, for example, questions on the scale and dynamics of the phenomenon, the impact of gentrified schools on the achievements of low-income students, the relationships between middle-class and low-income students and parents, the role of educational policies and of school leaders in long-term integration, and the causality and directionality of the relationships between neighbourhood change (especially gentrification) and school change.
The practice-based approach we applied in our research on everyday practices in Polish housing estates, apart from developing theoretical-methodological proposals for social research, also raises sensitivity to the practical manifestations and consequences of policies regulating social life, demonstrating how various agendas, programmes, and policies “work.” Our research confirms the importance of parental involvement, including their activities and decisions about children’s education. Compared to the processes in Western European and American cities, we have found many similarities. However, we also discovered some specific features rooted in Polish educational and spatial polices. This configuration leads to specific consequences in the formation of urban communities.
A Practice-Based Approach in Research on Housing Estates
Housing Estate—a Site for Doing Praxiography
In a praxeological approach, the central category of “practice” refers to the model of doing something (e.g., doing family, energy consumption), comprising explicit and implicit parts of practice. According to this perspective, the smallest unit of analysis is social practice, and not people or structures, roles, or groups. A specific place—neighbourhood, estate, city, or region—can be understood as a site for doing praxiography, 18 meaning the place where the methodology of the research is used corresponding to the needs of practice theory.
In the analysis of practices of parental involvement, we are interested in social practices taking place on a housing estate and their connection with social policies, and not doing family itself, as is the case in family studies. 19 We apply the term “practices of parental involvement” proposed by Melissa Freeman. 20
We understand parental involvement as, firstly, the system of activities, mostly outside the home, that people living on an urban estate do as part of bringing up a child or teenager. Secondly, it means the ways of doing these activities, the rules and understandings organising them into the “model” of raising children—or “living with children”—on an estate. We concentrate on those actions that are realised outside of the home. Although some of them appear to “begin” in the home space (e.g., decisions on where a child will go to school or whom he or she can meet), or “end” outside the estate (e.g., applying for a place in a school or extra classes elsewhere), as the empirical material shows, the actions of parental involvement are synchronised with those of other people from the estate and organised in relation to other practices (e.g., mobility, shopping). Our aim is to reconstruct the relationships between the explicit and teleoaffective parts of practices and the material components of the estate. Materiality is an important record of the structuring of everyday life, combining what is regulated by official and political rules (e.g., spatial planning, social policies) and people’s routine, pragmatically oriented activity.
This article is based above all on the results of research on the mechanisms of structuring big-city territorial communities conducted in 2016–2018 in six housing estates in three large Polish cities: Krakow, Lublin, and Tychy.
Theory of Social Practice—Basic Concepts
In the praxeological approach, it is assumed that social reality means everyday activities forming the explicit part of social practice: “a set of doings and sayings,” 21 which are primarily and in the last instance tacit knowledge and meanings, anchored materially in bodies and in artefacts. 22 Thus, the explicit part consists of the basic actions “which almost always constitute further actions—organised in ‘tasks’ and ‘projects’ in the contexts in which they are performed.” 23 The implicit part, also known as teleoaffective, means practical understandings, norms and rules, meanings, and desires, which initiate and connect actions, causing their reproduction and modification. 24 People doing things together and social order (Schatzki’s socio-material arrangements) are the outcome and effect of order-establishing nexuses of practices. 25 The social mechanisms that establish and coordinate the social orders are commonalities in and orchestration of the tasks, ends, projects and emotions, and prefiguration actions based on expectations and desires, in terms of constraints and possibilities. Key aspects for joining individual activities into social systems are their temporality and materiality. Temporality, because “While some forms of coordination ‘just happen,’ the effective accomplishment of many practices—like that of holidaying as a family—frequently requires deliberate scheduling and synchronisation.” 26 Last but not least, materiality, understood as the arrangement of objects and their relations, is organised according to the unfolding of the practice and its teleoaffective structure. 27 Materiality both participates in the formation of practice (e.g., children’s prams and buggies, playgrounds, roofing, pavements, or parking spaces are part of specific estate practices) and determines it: by enabling, restricting, or preventing (e.g., the existence or lack of a school in the housing estate either allows a child to attend it or makes this impossible). Materiality can have various scales: from small items to buildings and the entire system of the wider infrastructure. 28 According to Shove, Pantzar, and Watson, 29 materiality is one of three constitutive elements of practice, alongside meanings and competencies. Silvia Gherardi specifies that materiality in fact means sociomateriality, “with special consideration of the materiality of bodies, technologies, discourses, meanings and material-institutional contexts of interconnected practices.” 30
The consequence of these premises is the need to analyse activities and rules, norms, or values (determining what people do and how they do it) from the perspective of their local performances and arrangements. It is in these specific systems that urban, national, and supranational policies are realised, adjusted by the practices of everyday (familial, neighbourly, etc.) life. Christian Bueger, proposing a methodological and in fact inductive “strategy of looking down,” defines this micro or macro scale not as naturally existing but as “the outcome of the local.” He conceives praxiography as the way to the “transcendence of the division between such levels, such as that we are able to understand practice as taking place simultaneously both locally and globally, being both unique and culturally shared, ‘here and now’ as well as historically constituted and path-dependent.” 31 In empirical analyses of concrete practices, the institutional rules contained in policies can be treated as specified a priori (regarding practice observed here and now), but their effects are the result of concrete “execution,” which always leads to the formation of local modalities of a given practice.
Methodology
The analysis is based on data collected in 2016-2018 within the research project “Differences and Boundaries in the Process of Creating Neighbourhood Communities in Large Cities. A Socio-spatial Study.” The methodology was built according to the principles of the case study research design, and because the ultimate goal was to discover the mechanisms at the highest level of universality, we sought the greatest possible diversity in choosing the cases. 32 The cases were selected in two stages, on the basis of several criteria. In the first stage, we selected the cities, taking into account the diversity of their economic profiles, size, and location in historically different parts of Poland (also in terms of the culture resulting from the partitions of the nineteenth century). The population numbers of the cities we selected range from approximately 130,000 (Tychy) to almost a million (Krakow). Their functions in the country and regions are different: The city of Tychy is part of the Silesian conurbation, mostly built after the Second World War, with the labour market still oriented towards industry; Krakow is one of the most important academic, business, and tourism centres in Poland; and Lublin, a metropolis on the regional scale, is an academic and tourism centre in the eastern part of Poland.
In the second stage, the estates were selected after a reconnaissance and interviews with local experts. We considered the profile of the housing estates, their location in the wider urban structure, and their history (built in the twentieth or twenty-first century), which, in Poland’s case, has an impact on the local social and technical infrastructure. In our study, the housing estate is understood as a formal—but not necessarily administrative—unit in the city. It is recognised as an “estate” (its name is known and used by the city’s inhabitants, in the city maps, as the name of the public transport stops, in the local media, etc.). Even if the original estate structure has changed over time (e.g. new blocks have been built, a new administrative structure has been introduced), the boundaries of the estate are still defined by the historically established road system. When selecting the sites of our field research, we were looking for estates both different (in terms of the construction period, type and number of buildings, demographic profile) and, somehow, typical of the city (see Table 1). This is why, for instance, the new estate chosen in Krakow is a relatively small gated community (the land ownership structure is fragmented in the inner city), while the new estate in Lublin is a comparatively large complex of several gated communities developed on the edge of the city). New housing estates in Poland, and particularly gated communities, are inhabited by members of the middle class. This class is, as in other Western societies, characterised by having an at least moderate level of social, economic, and cultural capital resulting from its members’ educational and occupational position, lifestyle, specific ethos, and life aims. 33
Comparison of selected characteristics of the researched estates
Tychy has no city centre, so distance to the most important square is taken into account in the table.
In each estate, the study began with an exploratory section and estate ethnography (photographic documentation, enquiries, observation). We carried out individual interviews on an ongoing basis (sometimes interviews with two or three people), aiming to differentiate the interviewee profile in terms of age, gender, economic status, time spent living on the estate, and family situation. In total, we conducted almost 160 in-depth interviews, 20–30 on each estate (see Table 2).
Interviewed Inhabitants of the Researched Estates
Source: Own research.
The interviews were transcribed, followed by the first phase of coding, in order to identify all the activities done by the research subjects on the estates. This procedure was performed on twenty interviews, resulting in identification of the most visible practices organising estate life in the empirical material, such as practices of car parking, of parental involvement, of care. The current state of research involves analysis of all the practices—that is, not only activities—and reconstruction of the individual estates’ complexities of modalities of practices in the wider urban and extra-local system. 34
Following Schatzki’s theoretical model of social practice, in the analysis we applied a coding scheme consisting of both the performative, implicit part of a practice and its organisational dimension—how, why, and for what do people do (what they do). The operational definition of practices of parental involvement encompasses all these elements. First, activities concerning care for children, providing the opportunity for participation in education and other ways of spending time outside of the house; second, practical knowledge, meaning the experiences disclosed in the interviews concerning beliefs on “how to do it,” as well as the beliefs, motivations, and evaluations applying to these activities. Some activities are not simply “looking after” children or “organising” their time and can be regarded as examples of other practices. For instance, in our interviews, the interlocutors quite often broached the subject of the excessive number of cars endangering the safety of pedestrians on the estate. We categorised their experiences and beliefs mainly as elements of practices of mobility. However, as we show in the analysis of the empirical material, activities resulting from such rules and beliefs reorganise the practices of parental involvement, if, for example, parents limit their children’s uncontrolled movement around the estate. We reconstructed the materiality and temporality of practices based on statements on routine, everyday activities (when and where they take place, how they are synchronised with other activities), as well as statements on factors of crucial decisions for practising, especially concerning the decision to apply for a place in preschool or school.
How Are Urban Planning and Education Policy Done in Poland?
Historical Paths of Urban Planning
After 30 years of transformation in Poland, the year 1989 remains a turning point, and no analysis of contemporary phenomena and socio-spatial processes is possible without considering it. Yet the ensuing political and economic changes took place in a historically shaped socio-spatial system—in societies in which rapid industrialisation took place in the postwar period, combined with migration from the countryside to the cities. Researchers show that this was not a process of complete urbanisation, with changes also in the lifestyle sphere. 35 What is significant is the fact that in the second half of the twentieth century, a modernistic city tissue formed: particularly housing estates, but also an entire urban system (the example of Tychy), at state level giving flats to around a third of the population. 36 The housing estates built from the 1950s to the 1970s are today a very important, albeit under-researched, system of urban social practices.
The transformation beginning in 1989, and Poland’s later access to the European Union, delineate new trajectories of change in Polish cities. First, a rapid marketisation of spatial development and housing took place, and this—as shown by public opinion polls in the 1990s and early 2000s—received society’s approval as a counterproposal to the centrally planned economy from before the transformation. The neoliberal urban planning doctrine from the 1990s was reinforced in 2003 with a law on spatial planning and land development, which de facto eliminated the influence of local authorities on investments made on private land. Based on the idea of the possibility to rationalise socio-spatial processes through the free market, in reality it unleashed the free-market forces of the spatial economy of large Polish cities and their surroundings. Henceforth, planning permission decisions for buildings and entire complexes of buildings might be only loosely related to the urban planning concept for the area, and where there were no local plans in place, the investor could be guided solely by the rule of profit maximisation, limited only by the shape of the land. 37
The socio-spatial changes resulted not only from internal factors and cultural models introduced from elsewhere. They were also measurable factors, including investment funds and regulations associated with Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004, and diverse legal and financial tools stimulating economic and educational mobility. The result of all this was a dynamised real-estate market. There was increased demand (including from investors and private individuals from abroad) for property and land in large cities. At the same time, a process of suburbanisation took place. This was the consequence, on the one hand, of the dreams of the nascent Polish middle class of having their own house with a garden in a suburban area, and on the other, of new out-of-town housing developments taking advantage of lower land prices than those in locations nearer to city centres. 38 The law on spatial planning in force at the time did not specify a requirement for investors to provide a minimum public infrastructure.
The two decades of the twenty-first century in Poland’s big cities have therefore been characterised, firstly, by the development of large, commercial investments in the construction of housing and services (shopping and office centres); secondly, by the outflow of a section of residents to the suburbs; 39 and thirdly, by a shaky balance in the system of the city and its suburbs, given the lack of mechanisms simultaneously adapting the social and transport infrastructure to these changes.
The Ways Policy Makers Reform the System
Nurseries, preschools, and schools make up the infrastructure that is an important element of the practices of the everyday lives of families with children. Access to such facilities in the place of residence was one of the mainstays of the modernist model of the city, fulfilled through planning and building housing estates. In this article, we refer to neighbourhood-level realisations of educational policy, which requires us to outline the formal links between the educational policy of the government and the local authorities.
Changes in the makeup of political forces in the government have also resulted in changes to the priority tools of state support for families with children, although researchers note that in 1989 in Poland this was directed by maternalistic and pro-natalist concerns, “without a system” and connections to other social policies and housing policy. 40 The major institutions of family policy were dismantled in the 1990s, as indicated by radically reduced numbers of places in nurseries and preschools, which mostly affected women. 41 The situation improved after 2004, partly as a result of EU funds for infrastructure and social capital. In recent years, family policy has been dominated by allowance benefits (e.g., the 500+ programme).
The child care institutions that parents of the youngest children (aged up to 3) may use are nurseries. Public institutions, with a number of available places well below the demand, are supplemented by private ones. Data from 2018 shows that some 77.2 percent of institutions are private owned (some of them part-financed by EU or local authority funds). However, indicators of institutional care for children under 3 in Poland remain lower than the EU average (see Table 3).
Basic Data on Institutional Child Care for Children under 3
Source: Own elaboration based on (1) Eurostat 42 and (2) GUS, Żłobki i kluby dziecięce 2019.
Institutional forms of child care and education for older children are regulated by the Education System Act of 7 September 1991. The law has been amended several times, but the main aspects from the original version, in which the method of organisation and administration of the education system is determined, still remain. Dualism was also introduced to the Polish educational structure, making it possible to establish private preschools and schools. 43 The law stipulates that a key role is played by the minister of national education and the ministry itself, designating the strategic direction of the state education policy and the substantive foundations of the education system. The main tasks of municipalities are to run and administer schools, resulting in a number of administrative, financial, and technical responsibilities. 44 The costs of maintaining preschools and schools are borne by the municipalities—and although they receive subsidies from the state budget, nationwide data show that this covers on average around 70 percent of the municipality’s costs. 45 Since it is the municipalities that are responsible for establishing networks of public schools and preschools in their area, in order to minimise costs—especially where the effects of the decrease in the birth rate are most visible in the population of children—rationalising measures are implemented, such as closure of institutions. At the same time, municipalities are unable to keep up with building social infrastructure in areas of intensive construction of housing, in cities and suburbs. 46 A large section of the network of schools in cities continues to consist of those built in the 1960s as part of the “Schools—Monuments of the Millennium of the Polish State” scheme in 1966. It is estimated that in the 1950s and 1960s almost 1,500 school buildings were constructed within this programme, the majority of them as an element of the housing estates built at the time.
Municipalities’ rationalising actions are not helped by the reforms of the education system implemented in Poland by the government in the last twenty years. The reform of 1999 confirmed the decentralisation of education, shortening primary school to six years and introducing a three-year lower secondary school (gimnazjum) (both types run by the municipalities) and upper secondary (run by the districts [powiat]). The current educational structure is the result of a reform introduced in 2017 by the Law and Justice party government. Preschool education encompasses children aged 3 to 7, followed by a mandatory eight years of primary school. Pupils leaving primary school can choose between further education at a high school (liceum), technical school (technikum), or vocational school.
The 2017 reform constituted a de facto return to the structure of the education system in operation between 1973 and 1999 and was presented as a response to social expectations: according to opinion polls, half of all Poles were in favour of a return to the model of eight-year primary school and scrapping lower secondary schools. 47 At the same time, the government introduced a second major change: in 2015 the age when children begin their education at primary school reverted to 7 (after mandatory schooling from the age of 6 had been introduced just a year earlier). But the 2017 reform was also very controversial, with opinion polls continuing to show that the percentage of advocates and opponents of the series of education reforms were similar and correlated to support for the ruling party and opposition. 48
The changes of the last reform were introduced at high speed and constituted a challenge both for municipalities (financial and organisational) and for parents and children. Reorganisation of the school networks was essential, and a problem arose with overcrowding of primary schools, with two further additional groups of pupils beginning to attend. Boundary conditions were determined by infrastructural and budget possibilities. In cities, and especially in areas of new housing investment, a private sector of preschool and school education developed, reflected by the data for the cities we researched (see Table 4). 49
Percentage of Private Educational Institutions and Pupils in Private Educational Institutions in the Studied Cities in the 2018/2019 School Year
Source: Own elaboration based on Oświata krakowska w roku szkolnym 2018/2019, Kraków 2019; Informacja o stanie realizacji zadań oświatowych Gminy Lublin za rok 2018/2019, Lublin 2019; Informacja o stanie realizacji zadań oświatowych w Tychach w roku szkolnym 2018/2019, Tychy 2019.
The cited data clearly indicate (1) the significance of the private educational sector (especially in preschool education) and (2) the “intimate” and therefore attractive nature of the private education sector (a much larger ratio of schools compared to the number of pupils attending).
Radical and hastily implemented changes in the education policy resulted in an unstable system as well as uncertainty and disorientation of parents regarding organisation of their children’s school life and educational path.
Polish middle-class parents have had special motivations to adapt to the consequences of the reform, providing private lessons and looking for less crowded, but high-ranking, schools for their children outside of the area where they live (e.g., close to the workplace of one of the parents). 50 According to research conducted in 2020 by the Public Opinion Research Center, 77 percent of Poles classified themselves as members of the middle class, of whom 14 percent saw themselves as lower-middle class, 46 percent as “proper” middle class, and 17 percent as upper-middle class. As this research shows, the key factor of self-identification is the economic situation; this, in turn, correlates with the education level achieved. 51 Thus, despite the internal differentiation of this class, 52 a large part of the Polish population is concerned about its future and invests in children’s education. At the turn of the twenty-first century, almost 40 percent of parents of school-age children declared that they were willing to fund extracurricular lessons, and by 2018 the figure had risen to 67 percent (among parents with higher education, 91 percent declared willingness, and among those without, 55 percent). The (fee-paying) alternative was and remains private institutions. 53 Of course, the entrance conditions for access to private institutions result in a profile distinctly shaped by class.
“Yes, That’s Our Lives”—Policies in the Practice of Parental Involvement: The Case of Urban Housing Estates
Analysing the practices of parental involvement in urban estates, we reconstruct the de facto consequences of connecting changes in the spatial policy and social policies, especially educational, in Polish cities: their praxeological image, and not only statistical or sectoral contours. The analysis of the empirical material is organised around three categories: locality, proximity, and mobility. It is these characteristics, together with the child’s age, that organise the practices of parental involvement.
Local Practices of Parental Involvement
In studying social practices in housing estates, we are interested in those systems of activities and beliefs that are formed after the birth of a child, although family studies researchers indicate that parenting practices can in fact be formed even before birth, or even conception.
54
Systems of activities are formed above all by ongoing responsibilities, as well as “prefiguration actions (. . .) through the establishment of how future things are channelled, in terms of constraints and possibilities.”
55
From the point of view of new responsibilities and essential activities, one rediscovers the materiality of one’s home and estate: the pavements, crossings, and steps that people move around with a pram or young child, the cars that now seem to race along the streets of the estate, or park on pavements, blocking or hindering the passage of a pram within the estate space. Parental responsibilities are connected to the fundamental infrastructure: doctors’ surgeries, nurseries, preschools.
56
The distances in space—“far–near”—are defined within these practices. Parents encounter a lack or deficiency in infrastructure of care for young children, especially in new estates. Regardless of the city, such a situation is often described by respondents with young children: We didn’t get into the public nursery. [. . .] The public one is [. . .] on the other side of the city, the other one is next to the centre, but that’s also some distance away from us, and I think there’s one more, but we didn’t get in, despite applying everywhere. In the public ones they rejected us everywhere, even in some of the private ones, because there weren’t any places. [L10_N_M_33]
57
An alternative when there are no places in nurseries (or, less often, preschools), is the support of a family member, usually the grandmother, or hiring a childminder.
Grandmas, grandmas, grandmas come out [to the playground]. And the grandmas arrive, we see these grandmas, right, and sometimes you help to carry the buggy upstairs, because there are quite a few stairs. But the grandmas are there. And later on, the parents come home from work, I often see that, and we even talk, and they go for a walk with the child, or get in the car and go out somewhere for a longer walk. [K05_N_W_65]
For parents living in large cities such as Krakow or Lublin who have arrived from other places, without family support available, hiring a childminder is the only possible option.
Parents of young children (in the daytime mostly mothers), grandmothers, and childminders meet in the estate space, particularly at playgrounds. Routine, everyday activities in the estate space result in children’s caregivers coming to recognise each other. Those in the “unknown” 58 category become recognisable “known” people. Despite being in the same space of the playground, the distances between mother-caregivers/grandmothers and paid childminders are recognised and maintained as an informal norm.
Although mothers when they come, I don’t know, somehow I haven’t had that kind of contact with mothers. [. . .] I don’t know, babysitters tend to be young people, twenty-something, somehow it’s easier to make contact with them than if I were to talk to some forty- or thirty-year-olds. [L06_O_W_22]
On an older estate in Tychy, where the residents have known each other longer, the people looking after children tend to be older women from the neighbourhood or recommended by neighbours.
We have a lady called Krysia downstairs. She even helped us at a certain point looking after Tomek [younger son, now aged 5]. Yes, because Artur’s [her husband] mum helped, but later she managed to find some casual work, so she couldn’t come to Tomek every day any more. [T10_O_W_45]
The materiality of the estate is a factor that organises practices: this means ramps, steps, or pavements, but also the lack or presence of trees providing shade as well as the presence of benches and rubbish bins. The wooded space of older estates “lets you do more”—especially in summer: On the estate here, near to the estate, people go out, they really go out with blankets. And, for example, the older children play on the playground, and with the younger, little ones who can’t walk yet people put blankets out. There’s no shade yet. So actually, you can only lie on a blanket in the evening. Because in the hot summer you can’t even go out. Only after 7 p.m. [L05_N_W_40]
However, even an unwooded playground is a micro-space of the estate where elements of individual activities of parents are combined into estate parenting practices. This is particularly evident in the spaces of new estates, where the residents’ age structure is similar and having similar-aged children organises parental involvement on the estate.
We happened to move here in the spring, I think it was May, and that’s quite an easy time for meeting people, especially when you have young children. Because I just went out to the playground with Jaś and [. . .] well, I met the neighbours, who also went out to the playground with their children. That was actually the way I met most of the people here. [L05_N_W_40]
Playgrounds on estates are either places with an area under 20 square metres, consisting of a sandpit, swing and bench (usually provided by the housing developers next to new, gated blocks), or larger areas with a large amount of apparatus for children and sometimes also exercise equipment for adults—these are usually found in sites belonging to a housing cooperative or municipality. Irrespective of the size of the playground and its equipment, they become places of synchronised activities of parents and children and an element shaping other, later forms of parental practices. They are a place where unspoken rules and norms are materialised, and an information resource used when making various decisions. Parents share their parenting experiences, give warnings, compare knowledge on childrearing subjects, and also (in fact most of all) exchange views on nurseries, schools, and preschools in the estate and city:
But on the whole, when you go to the playground it’s difficult to sit on your own, even if you’d like to, there’s always someone who’ll join you, because you have a shared topic.
What are the shared topics?
[Immediately] School. The children who go to school, to preschool. Kids the same age, their behaviour. [T14_N_M_45]
Playgrounds as a place of production and reproduction of the social structure continue to be an understudied topic of research. As the research of Wilson 59 and Bader, Lareau, and Evans 60 show, it is here in neighbourhoods that class-based social networks are formed, and habitus reproduced. A similar role is played by playgrounds on new estates in Poland, which are inhabited by people whose economic status allows them to buy (or rent) a flat or receive a loan for one. In comparison to British or American playgrounds, in Polish estates for the time being, race-based networks are invisible, as a result of the still low percentage of immigrant children in Poland. Especially on new estates, the playground is a place where practices of free time, education, and consumption of middle-class children are formed and reproduced.
[At the playground] the most important things are always connected to school.
Now with school, and previously with preschool, the children’s health, their allergies, development [. . .]
Extra classes.
Yes, where you [can sign up]
Ideas for spending time at the weekend.
So generally children-related subjects.
Yes, that’s our lives. [T12_N_M_35, T12_N_W_34]
Parents “grow out” of the estate playground along with their child. If a second child does not come along, one source of information about events on the estate is cut off.
There might have been more of those contacts when I was still going outside with my son and with my daughter. You had more of those contacts then, because like it or not, sitting with the children in the sandpit or on a bench somewhere you knew more people here and had continuous contact with them. Especially going out everyday, especially in the spring and summer going outside. Sometimes you’d sit outside with the kids for three or four hours, and so those relations were formed somehow and then I knew a lot of people on the estate. Now I say that I’ve noticed—because even last year I wasn’t going out with my son—that I don’t know what’s going on on the estate. So I’m not in the know any more. Because you used to hear gossip. Something going on here, something there. Someone’s moved out, something happened to somebody, someone else had a baby. And so on . . . Now you’re out of the loop, because there aren’t any more meetings. [T05_N_W_41]
The above statement concerns a new estate, with two unique characteristics, compared to other estates built in the first decades of the twenty-first century. First, adjacent blocks, despite being built by different developers, some of them within the so-called Social Construction Societies system, are not fenced off, unlike most estates built after 2000. Even blocks within one estate are usually divided by fences and gates if they were constructed by different companies. Secondly, there is a large playground in a central position, which, despite being surrounded by the streets of the estate and parked cars, is a place of integration for parents caring for their playing children as well as older children. This shared estate square plays a similar role to a school playground, which Helen F. Wilson 61 describes as “a site of productive sociality.” According to Wilson, its significance is even political as a result of the transformative impact of everything that takes place there, which we can refer to, following Valentine, Piekut, and Harris, 62 as an “encounter.” It is here that the everyday, routine interactions of children and parents reveal, in a corporeal–material dimension too, class, ethnic, and religious differences, as social divisions are built and “relations across difference can develop.” 63 The playground has an integrative effect, eliminating social divisions.
They [the children from the estate] act as if it’s a courtyard! Because it’s beautiful, our kind of courtyard, and they are one big family on the courtyard. Nobody has any idea if you’re from this block or that one. No, no. The playground definitely integrates them. The playground is a-maz-ing! This one! And it really integrates them. [T22_N_M_80]
Holloway, Holt, and Mills 64 point to the significance of the category of encounters as a conceptual lens that “allows a politicized focus on the making of difference” and “to challenge differences between ‘them’ and ‘us.’” In the authors’ view, this category is a bridge in geographies of children, youth, and families between “scholarship which retains a keen interest in the idea of a human agency, and the post-structuralist/NRT-inspired studies of materialities, assemblage, and so on.” We also refer this suggestion of combining perspectives to the praxeological approach: the category of encounter supplements the theoretical–operational model of social practices, allowing it to be differentiated from the broad system of diverse elements and relations and for its empirical, socio-spatial realisations to be named.
A playground—adjacent to a block or on an estate—is often the only meeting place. New estates lack places aimed at teenagers, childless people, and older individuals, and their material “sterile,” minimalist facilities and rules for using the space make it impossible for places of encounters to be formed on a bottom-up basis, with such simple activities as sitting on a bench, ball games, and going for walks.
[We spend time] inside the fence, and if we go out to the playground, we go out to the playground. To be honest, I hardly use the estate space at all, because I get away whenever I can. If I have any free time, I get away from here. I don’t really go to other playgrounds. . . . Sometimes when my son was younger, he’d persuade me, but I didn’t like to do it, so he let it go. I either get away to the old estate where I used to live. [. . .] We go there for walks to the gorge. Or if I have more time, we just go to the countryside. A weekend spent here is a weekend wasted, I’d say. [L05_N_W_40]
In older estates, until the 1990s, local preschools, schools, cultural centres and parishes played the role of performative and socialising spaces. In many interviews with long-term residents, topics that came up referred to going to and from school together, parents with children meeting up in their free time, school meetings, and the social activities of parents. Little more than a decade ago, decisions to apply for a place in the local nursery, preschool, or district school were self-evident. The preschool, school, and parish defined the boundaries of the estate and practising neighbourhood. This model is less common nowadays, although it still does occur, especially in the case of those parents who themselves grew up on the estate. A resident of one of the estates we studied (and an employee of the local library) signed her child up to the same preschool, which she too attended as a child: “it’s very close by,” and she takes it for granted that her son will attend the local school: The playground is the same as I remembered, it has almost never changed, [. . .] and the school was OK [when I attended]. [K06_O_W_35]
For others, the proximity of the local school (although formally located on the neighbouring estate) is a distinct virtue, especially if the school satisfies the parents’ basic expectations.
The children go to school across the road, so for the first three years that’s a very big plus. [T11_N_W_41]
The interviews clearly showed that a model that was once reproduced automatically—the obvious decision to send one’s child to the nearest preschool or school—is being questioned. Spatial proximity is significant, but middle-class parents reflexivise the criteria and consequences of the choice of school, aware that this choice has an effect on the way they and their children function on an everyday basis.
Proximity Practices of Parental Involvement
Decisions on choice of preschool are preceded by a long enquiry process—collecting information on potential options. Among the ways this process is played out are conversations at the playground, visiting the institutions themselves, and recruitment. The area of research goes beyond the estate. Locality is replaced by proximity, which provides more options for gaining the anticipated knowledge. Such research is essential especially in new estates, because even if there is an institution nearby, for most it is unavailable: There definitely aren’t many nurseries and preschools here. And there’s no chance of my child getting into preschool, right? Because it’s the first one at the beginning of the estate, and this year they only accepted three new children. [. . .] So that’s a drawback. Because apparently everything’s far away. And on these old estates it’s not much problem if you don’t live far away. But here that’s a problem. [L04_N_W_32]
For new families arriving in the neighbourhood and not familiar with the schools and preschools, Internet and community groups are a substitute for playgrounds as places of encounters. Finding “the best local” preschool or school is the goal of middle-class parents living on old and new estates, but while a major role in choosing a preschool is played by opinions on the quality of care and close proximity, when it comes to schools, status factors become more important. In Poland, public primary schools are district schools, that is, assigned to a specific catchment area of the city (often a local district, estate or part thereof). It is possible to apply for a place in a school outside one’s district, but there must be places, and sometimes other criteria are also considered (e.g., an elder sibling attending), which limits the possibility of a free choice of school. Restrictions are essential for high-ranking public schools (based on final examination results): People have these expectations and pass them onto their children, and there’s a reason why the children from the X estate don’t just go to primary school no. XX across the way, but get ferried all over Tychy. Parents search for some idea for the school. My daughter first went to primary school no. 1 [outside the district, with a good reputation in the city], and now goes to the [private] Y school in Katowice, because that comes from certain expectations and ideas. If you don’t find that on the estate or nearby, you go further. And it’s not a problem these days, mobility. [T16_N_M_44]
Nearby public schools are carefully analysed in terms of their curriculum, league table positions, teaching quality, and approach to children. One woman living on one of the estates, who also teaches in a local school, said: It’s that, the walking and so on, looking for the so-called better schools, middle schools, driving somewhere, giving the children a lift, that for me is a drawback. [K18_N_W_45]
An important role in decision making is played by the opinions of acquaintances: You know, I tried to choose a school for my child that would be good, better, and from the views of friends I’d heard somewhere I compared schools no. X and no. Y [on the estate where she lives], and I have these schools at arm’s reach, as it were, very close, so from these two schools we chose no. X, and so far we don’t regret it. [. . .] So I hadn’t checked that information, but you know, when you hear something it stays in your mind, and you start to worry about certain things, and if you have another, better choice, of course you take the better choice into account. [T15_O_W_39]
Decisions regarding primary school reorganise parental involvement practices on the estate. If a school on the estate or nearby is chosen, the place of encounters of younger people tends to be the school playground or all kinds of events connected with the school: meetings, parents’ evenings, and, since religion has been a subject in Polish schools, also the period of preparation for the first holy communion. If a child attends a faraway preschool and non-district school, however, “leaving the sandpit” leads to weakened practices of parental involvement in the place of residence. If the area lacks institutions aiding or stimulating encounters of parents and children (e.g., a sports club or cultural centre), mobility becomes a more important factor of parental involvement than previously. Communal activities, concentrated in the space of the estate, disperse and reconnect diverse “family parental practices.” This is evident in new estates and gentrifying older ones. In the older estates we studied, we observed a process of marginal gentrification, understood as people aged 30–40, distinguished by greater capital than economic capital, settling down (buying homes). Gentrification of these estates, however, is not directly related to the quality of the schools located there, since, despite moving, some parents register their children for schools outside the estate. 65 The public institutions that are formally supposed to be places of linking for parental practices and socialisation of children in neighbourhood groups—preschool, school, cultural centres—are lacking or inaccessible, or fail to live up to parents’ expectations and are therefore removed from the list of possible options by the parents themselves. Inadequacy of local institutions depends in part on class (expectations of the school as a factor of a child’s opportunities for further education in a good secondary school, the profile of the school community in terms of habitus, etc.). Less obviously, though, “adequacy” is also related to mobility practice: on the one hand, the possibilities and habits associated with parents’ mobility (mainly entailing use of a private car) and on the other, restrictions on the independent mobility of children in the space of big cities in Poland, especially in areas of new estates and the links between these estates and the local area.
Mobility Practices of Parental Involvement
Applying for a place in a preschool or primary school in another district of the city makes it necessary to reconnect various activities and organisation of movement between the home, preschool, work, and sometimes also the school of one or more additional children as well as shopping. Daily activities and rhythm are arranged to make sure things are “on the way,” and time calculations make it clear that the most rational mode of transport for the whole family is a car. This situation is most visible in estates located in the outskirts of a city (in our research on the new estate in Lublin).
[Because there is no school on the estate, parents take children] either to Y estate or to X Street too. Some to one, some to the other. It’s also quite a distance, so the younger children. I remember when my older son was in [. . .] when it was the early school education period. We lived in a place where school was not far away, on the same estate, so they came home on their own. Children here don’t even go home alone, so usually they’re given a lift by their parents, which also doesn’t help them to integrate. [L05_N_W_40] Very few [children from the estate attend the school]. Most are from outside. In our school, I’d say that 60 percent are from outside of the so-called catchment area. [B]ecause it’s also as a result of parents taking their children nearer to their work, for example. [K18_N_W_45]
The commuting time to another district of the city limits opportunities for practices of parental involvement in the place where families live, and thus also parents’ and children’s relations with neighbours: If it’s a normal school day, we don’t really spend too much time on the estate, apart from in the morning when I go out to get rolls, make them, and we go out to work and to school and preschool. We come back in the afternoon, and life is organised here at home. Because our children have training at various clubs, my daughter’s acrobatics and my elder son’s football, so in the afternoons from Monday to Friday we feel more like taxi drivers, and after those classes drive from one to the next. When we come back after the classes, we are all so tired, us parents too, because in the meantime there’s also some shopping that needs doing—a normal kind of life. So we don’t really feel the estate life. [T09_N_M_39]
The organisation of everyday life and connecting family activities dispersed in various parts of the city takes place through using a car as well as in the car, where inevitably a part of this life, conversations about school, homework, and making appointments and plans for the next days, takes place.
An additional factor that reinforces the significance of the car as a means of transport in Poland is suburbanisation, which was not accompanied by adequate development of public transport. Just one example to illustrate this phenomenon: according to measurements of mobility, in Krakow in October 2019 every day around a million cars used the city’s roads (in traffic jams), a quarter of them belonging to residents of nearby towns. While a link between the size of the services sector and the scale of individual transport is observed, 66 the public debate is yet to address the connection between quality and accessibility of public infrastructure, including education, in the place of residence, and practices of pedestrian, bicycle, and public transport mobility. The number of cars in the city and the scale of their use in everyday life, including in attending to various parenting obligations (taking children to preschool, school, additional lessons, facilitating their social contacts with children from preschool and school), has manifold consequences. Yet the mechanism of connected factors also has to be supplemented with the material equipment of the estate, because our research showed that it is on the estate, as attempts are made to arrange parental practices, that key decisions are taken for both the family and the entire urban community.
Conclusions
The praxeological approach has been unfolded and applied to empirical research on energy consumption, 67 organisations, 68 or production of knowledge and innovation. 69 In our project, we intended to advance the concept of social practice by its application into the very complex and dynamic realm of the urban neighbourhood and explore why people behave the way they do and how urban institutions work the way they do. We followed the assumption that “all social phenomena—large or small, fleeting or persistent, micro or macro—have the same basic ingredients and constitution,” 70 so social life is not a multileveled structure but a single plane, and this means, further, “that an important feature of social phenomena is scale. Scale is the continuum between small and large and is a matter of lesser and greater spatial-temporal spread.” 71 We are aware of the heuristic traps and limitations on drawing general empirical and theoretical conclusions from the case studies we have done. 72 Nevertheless, the concept of social practice, understood as a heuristic device or a set of sensitizing concepts 73 helps to discover the connections between specific elements of parental practice, with a focus on human actions, interactions, and arrangements in a broader picture. 74
Analysis of practices of parental involvement reveals the real—practical, direct—effect of combining educational policy and materiality (of infrastructure), as well as showing the mutual formation of practices of parental involvement and other urban practices, including especially practices of walkability and car mobility, and practices of sharing information. This effect is the way in which parents deal with the need to choose preschool and school and to organise their children’s time outside of these institutions. Disconnected spatial and social polices encourage parents to plan and apply their individual, private parental tactics and strategies.
Liberalisation of spatial policy and the progressive privatisation of the housing question in Poland in the last thirty years has led to unbalanced development of urban residential areas. This has resulted in concentrations of housing developments being built in free spaces of large cities and their outskirts with little if any social infrastructure, inhabited by young representatives of the middle class. Public institutions—preschools, schools, cultural centres, and libraries—are largely remnants from the communist era. This type of infrastructure is found especially in older estates, the majority of which in Poland are prefabricated concrete estates. Nowadays, however, such estates do not satisfy the housing demands of the middle classes, especially families with children. Even if blocks are modernised (lifts, insulation, installations), the flats and rooms are regarded as too small and uncomfortable for families. The addresses of such estates also do not reflect middle-class status, in contrast to new-build developments or gentrified city-centre spaces. New-build estates, meanwhile, for which Polish law has low urban planning standards, follow a free-market logic of maximisation of floor space of flats. Consequently, most estates built in recent years are complexes of gated buildings connected by access roads with small lawns—sufficient only to satisfy the condition of a so-called biologically active area. The effects of the spatial and educational policy therefore often result in a failure to meet the needs and expectations of the residents of Polish cities.
As the data from our research show, the “unravelling” of the connections between children’s and their parents’ everyday lives in the place of residence begins at the preschool stage—in cases where the estate lacks adequate infrastructure. The role of places “binding” the community is played by playgrounds that are often the only local encounters linking the performative and material dimension of practices. But on gated estates playgrounds organise the practices of smaller groups of parents and children as residents of specific blocks.
Choices concerning primary schools outside of the estate are regarded as essential or necessary if other parents from the reference group communicate that the locality of the school is an important criterion. The lack of places of routine, everyday contacts of parents and their increasingly older children means that every decision concerning the school and extra classes is taken within newly formed, non-local systems of practices. Practices of mobility become essential in order to make fulfilment of these dispersed practices possible.
The redefinition of locality, significance of proximity, and increased mobility as a result of realisation of the practice of parental involvement identified in the analysis lead to questions about the “non-educational” significance of education policy—in family, neighbourhood, and city life. Polish education policy takes place at the municipal level (albeit determined centrally), resulting in increased competitiveness in the educational sphere, leading (especially urban middle-class) parents to search for satisfactory (the best) schools or preschools for their children. This in turn reinforces intra-urban mobility processes, but also causes a redefinition of locality and the treatment of the estate solely as a place of residence—something also encouraged by the chaotic spatial policies conducted in cities and their functional areas. Locality pursued in educational institutions can reduce social inequalities and excessive urban mobility, which is undesirable at its current scale. Practices of parental involvement are a litmus test of diverse policies—they reveal the infrastructural and class-based possibilities and limitations of bringing up children on an estate and in a city, showing the local and actual integration of policies.
Our final remark is inspired by the circumstances in which the article was written: the situation of isolation and suspension of social relations, but also of the work of educational institutions, connected with the COVID-19 epidemic. It is very likely that the situation from the time of the epidemic will also contribute to redefining the category of encounters. Perhaps it will increasingly refer to relations and contacts taking place in virtual space. On the other hand, at present, reduced access to public spaces and the suspension of educational institutions show how important they are for the everyday functioning of residents of estates. Missing being in a space with other people could result in a new quality of social relations in estate spaces, appreciation of existing places, and the emergence of new ones. Implementing parenting practices with the material support of local public institutions helps to build ties and a feeling of responsibility for the estate. In this sense, practices of everyday life in neighbourhoods—through care for local institutions and accessibility of public places for people of various ages and genders and through pedestrian mobility—make sustainable development of cities a reality.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The article is a product of the research project “Differences and Boundaries in the Process of Creating Neighbourhood Communities in Large Cities. A Socio-spatial Study,” funded by the Polish National Science Centre, under grant no. UMO-2014/15/B/HS6/01949. Research team: Marta Smagacz-Poziemska (PI), Andrzej Bukowski, Marcjanna Nóżka, Karol Kurnicki, Natalia Martini, and Krzysztof Bierwiaczonek. The open access license of the publication was funded by the Priority Research Area Society of the Future under the programme “Excellence Initiative –Research University” at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.
