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Association of Spatial Arrangements with Parents’ Behavior and Perceptions of Child Safety in Jordan

Abstract Children playing on streets in front of a home are typically a source of worry for parents. Spatial hierarchies between the house and streetscape create zones of influence and provide natural surveillance as well as opportunities for interaction among residents that affect child safety. The hypotheses in this study were that perceptions of child safety and parents’ behavior (represented by the number of hours parents allow their children to play outdoors) are associated with perceived social interactions, privacy, and territoriality in a single-family home neighborhood in Jordan. To test the hypotheses, data were elicited from structured interviews with 102 single-family householders living in the Jordan Armed Forces Officers’ Housing in the city of Amman, Jordan. Findings demonstrate that parents’ perceptions of child safety are contradictory to their actual behavior towards their children’s play on the street. Whereas most of these parents do let their children spend one to four hours playing near the street each day, about 80% of them do not perceive their children to be safe doing that. Parental behavior is associated with perceived social interactions with neighbors but not with their perceived privacy and territoriality. Finally, perceived child safety is associated with housing and neighborhood characteristics rather than with perceived social interactions, privacy, and territoriality.