School trips in Germany: Gendered escorting practices

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Highlights

  • Relationship between escort and mode in school trips is not compulsive.

  • Age and gender structures in independent trips intersect with spatial context.

  • Urban areas support independence of adolescents, but are less suitable for children.

  • As in other countries, women carry a disproportionate escorting burden.

  • In large cities fathers are more involved in child escort, suggesting more gender equity.

Abstract

Children’s trips have become a growing issue of interest in recent transport studies. This paper studies parental escort on children’s school trips in Germany. It uses binary logit regression models to look at social and spatial context factors simultaneously, as well as considering the gendering of parental escort, i.e. the allocation of escort trips to fathers and mothers. The results generally support other studies in terms of parental and children’s sociodemographics, and trip attributes. The results for parental employment complement previous, somewhat inconsistent results. Descriptive analysis sheds some light on the interplay between escort and travel mode, as well as on age and gender structures and their intersections with spatial context. The effects of spatial context in regression are mixed. Urban locations seem to be more suitable for the independent mobility of adolescents, but less suitable for smaller children. Within municipalities escort is less common in inner city areas with mixed land-use and a well-established public transport system. Shorter distances to school in areas with mixed land-use further encourage independence. As in other countries, women carry a disproportionate burden of escorting. In large cities fathers are more involved in child escort, suggesting more gender equity.

Introduction

Children’s trips have become a growing issue of interest in recent transport studies. This is motivated by a number of concerns (see Carver et al., 2013, Fyhri et al., 2011, Lopes et al., 2014, Mitra, 2013, Shaw et al., 2013, for more discussion).

  • 1.

    Increasing concern about child health and, more specifically, obesity and deficits in motor skills and cognitive development, which research suggests are related to a lack of independent mobility and active travel (walking and cycling);

  • 2.

    Children’s decreased independence and knowledge about their environment (see Fusco et al., 2012 for a nuanced discussion), both of which have been linked to children being increasingly driven in their parents’ (and other people’s) cars;

  • 3.

    Increasing concern about the environmental, social and financial effects of free school choice and the associated increased trip distances and modal shifts towards the car, including local congestion and traffic safety problems at school sites (Marique et al., 2013, for energy consumption; McDonald et al., 2016, on the public and private financial effects of increased walking);

  • 4.

    Increasing political interest in family issues including their time budgets and mobility. For instance, in Germany the latest federal governmental family report is dedicated to families’ time budgets (BMFSFJ, 2012), the government’s demography strategy places emphasis on strengthening families (BMI, 2013) and, most recently, the Federal Ministry of Transport has commissioned a project on travel behaviour in families (Manz et al., 2015), on which this paper builds;

  • 5.

    A general increase in interest among transport researchers to better understand the social fabric of travel and mobility as opposed to earlier decades when transport studies focused more on questions of engineering, modelling and forecasting. This research, if mainly hosted by planners and geographers, is now broadly embedded in feminist and gender studies, studies on time use and activity patterns, and the sociology of the family.

The latter two points do not just refer to a child-centred perspective on school trips, but also to the gendering of parental escorting practices,1 i.e. to a parent-centred perspective (e.g. Schwanen, 2007). The first three points need to be seen in light of the general observation that children’s use of active travel modes has steadily decreased over time, while car use has increased (see McDonald, 2007, for the US; Fyhri et al., 2011, for Denmark, Finland, Norway and the UK; Boussauw et al., 2014, for Belgium; Funk, 2008, for Germany). Children’s independence in school travel has also decreased over time (Kyttä et al., 2015, for Finland), although the emerging patterns in travel mode use may have developed differently according to school location (Shaw et al., 2013 for Germany). At the same time school trip distances have increased (Shaw et al., 2013; Andersson et al., 2012, for Sweden; Boussauw et al., 2014, for Belgium; Schlossberg et al., 2006, and McDonald, 2007, for the US), which is a composite effect of concentrating schools in larger units, shifting from public schools to private schools, and demographic aging and the associated decline in the number of students and, hence, schools in developed countries.

While a large number of studies from the US have investigated children’s travel, there is somewhat less research from Australia, Asia and Europe, and, specifically, considerably less from Germany, despite the seminal comparative study (UK and Germany) conducted by Hillman et al. (1990) and its follow-up study (Shaw et al., 2013). Other studies on school travel in Germany either focus on mode choice and the associated cost effects of school closures (Müller et al., 2008), or on long-term trends (Funk, 2008), which show inconclusive results due to data limitations.

This paper studies children’s and adolescents’ trips to school in Germany. It builds upon findings from a study commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Transport on travel behaviour in families (Manz et al., 2015). The focus here is on escorting. Escort purposes account for 16% of parents’ trips in Germany, and this share is even higher among single parents (18%) and the parents of children aged 10 or younger (22%) (for comparison: 4% for couples without children) (Manz et al., 2015, 97). Specifically, the paper seeks to explore the conditions under which children make school trips without parental escort. Other companions as well as interrelations between escorted/joint trips and mode are considered in the descriptive analysis. A gender perspective is employed by studying gendered escorting practices, i.e. by considering the conditions under which the father rather than the mother accompanies a child to/from school. The study utilises the most recent national travel survey Mobility in Germany (MiD) 2008.

The next section introduces the state of the research on escorting practices on school trips. This is followed by a description of the data, the methods and the variables used. Subsequently the results are presented, starting with a descriptive analysis of escorting, followed by three logit regression models of parental escorting practices. The paper closes with some conclusions for policy and further research.

Section snippets

Theoretical considerations

Research on children’s (including adolescents’) school travel can be subdivided into studies of mode use, independent vs. escorted travel, and school trip distances. These strands of research are not independent of one another, but are nonetheless distinguishable. For instance, independent travel tends to be equated with active modes in research (Fyhri and Hjorthol, 2009), as children transported in a car are clearly not travelling independently, while those who walk often make the trip alone (

Data

The empirical work in this paper is based on the national household travel survey Mobility in Germany (MiD) 2008. MiD includes a sample of 25,922 households with 60,713 individuals randomly drawn from the German-speaking residential population. One-day trip diaries were collected from all household members regardless of age. The response rate was 21% (Follmer et al., 2010). The analysis in this paper is limited to school trips (including primary school) made by children and adolescents (<18 

Age

The proportion of trips made alone strongly increases with age (Table 3), while parental escort sharply decreases. Joint travel with siblings, but not parents, is more evenly distributed over age categories, except for pre-school children of whom 90–95% are escorted by parents or, in some cases, by non-household members, such as grandparents or neighbours. Trips made with siblings reach a maximum for morning trips in the age bracket 10–13 years. Non-household members are far more common

Conclusions

This paper studied parental escort on their children’s school trips. This is the first contribution to school travel research from Germany that looks at social and spatial context factors simultaneously, as well as at the gendering of parental escort.

The results generally support other studies in terms of the effects of the sociodemographics pertaining to parents and the child, trip distance, and outward versus homebound trip. Escort decreases with age. At primary school and lower secondary

Acknowledgement

This research was partly funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the project ’Alltag im Wandel des Geschlechterverhältnisses: Aktivitäten, Wege, Verkehrsmittel und Zeitverwendung’ (Everyday life in the context of changing gender relations: activities, trips, travel modes and time use, 2009–2015). It builds upon research done by the author in the project ’Determinanten und Handlungsansätze der Familienmobilität’ (Determinants and concepts for the mobility of families),

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