Walking as socio-material micro-structures for new parents: Slow mobilities, puddles and the everyday

Abstract

New parenthood is a time of change and upheaval in which a reorientation in/to/with place occurs. Local mobility poses a promising avenue of inquiry with potential to articulate place-based parent-centred health promotion strategies. We aimed to explore the affective, sensory and socio-material encounters of new parents on their walks in their local neighbourhoods, and their role in health and wellbeing. Through walking and photo-elicitation interviews with 22 parents of young children in Aotearoa New Zealand, we experienced diverse relationalities with their local neighbourhoods. Our inquiry taught us that parents use local walking as a tool in a range of different ways that impacts their health and wellbeing. We learnt that parents encounter (1) more-than-green-spaces in their walks, and that even small, not-noticeable and mundane aspects of the neighbourhood can affectively coagulate with parent-baby-walking-assemblages. In encountering how walks (2) nourished-minds-and-bodies we learnt the varied ways in which walking was a tool for affective release, emotion regulation and physical activity. Lastly, walking provided (3) unstructured-wandering-time for parents that slowed down, enmeshed, and transversed time. Our findings suggest that further inquiry into the health-promoting capacity of parental mobility in sub/urban neighbourhoods is promising. We propose that learning about the relationalities of socio-material micro-structures in parent-baby-assemblages can create localised health-promotion opportunities for new parents. We seek to raise the visibility of everyday place-based parental needs to inform policy and systems change.