Academic interests
- Children's everyday lives
- Parenting and the parent-child relation
- Family practices
- Discourse- and interaction analysis
Background
- PhD in Educational Sciences, NTNU
Publications
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Farstad, Ida Engan
(2022).
Responsibility at a distance: parents’ accounts of their children’s unaccompanied travelling.
Children's Geographies.
ISSN 1473-3285.
21(3),
p. 533–546.
doi:
10.1080/14733285.2022.2084602.
Full text in Research Archive
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Young children’s movement in public places outside adult supervision tends to be regarded as problematic and may be met with scepticism. This study builds on interviews with parents in Norway whose children (age 5–11) have travelled by public transport without an adult caregiver. Using a discursive approach, the focus is on parenting and how parents account for their children’s travelling. The analysis examines the discursive resources parents use to build credible accounts and thereby manage issues of facticity as well as expectations of parental responsibility. By accounting for how they work to ensure that their children can cope with the journeys, the parents position themselves as responsible also while they are physically distant from their children. The study contributes knowledge on the relation between parents, children and their mobility in public space through an investigation of the discursive construction of children’s unaccompanied travelling and responsible parenting.
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Farstad, Ida Engan & Aarsand, Pål
(2021).
Children on the move: Guided participation in travel activities.
Learning, Culture and Social Interaction.
ISSN 2210-6561.
31.
doi:
10.1016/j.lcsi.2021.100546.
Full text in Research Archive
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The present article explores how children appropriate travel competence. The data material consists of 12 h of video recordings of five families prior to journeys where children travel by public transport without a known adult. Through analyses of adult-child interactions in an airport and a train station, we show how children become positioned and act as learners in busy and semiotically complex public spaces. Situated activities such as finding an airport gate and planning an upcoming train change became learning activities in which adults guided children in identifying, understanding and acting upon travel information. We show how adults highlight features in the environment as relevant for the task at hand, and in cooperation with children establish and sustain a joint focus of attention. The activities were organised as collaborative tasks that enabled children to develop and display competence in using such sources of information as signs, tickets and audible messages, and to identify and solve emerging problems.
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Published
Aug. 5, 2025 9:07 AM
- Last modified
Oct. 16, 2025 10:54 AM