The name is absent

The importance of context

literacy resources, such as books, libraries and printed material than middle-income
communities in a large industrial city. Such differences in access to print resources
may have important implications for children’s early literacy development.

Neighbourhood also influences the availability of social supports. Several studies
have indicated that support systems may serve as protective moderators of negative
life stressors, enhancing adults’ psychological well-being and consequently impacting
upon parenting efficacy and behaviours (Campbell & Lee, 1992; Taylor et al., 1993).

Collective socialisation

Collective socialisation (Jencks & Mayer, 1990) posits that local adults pass on their
behaviours to youths in the same neighbourhood. Neighbourhood role models and
monitoring provided by more successful adults are thus considered as important
ingredients in children’s socialisation.

Brooks-Gunn et al. (1993) examined the impact of neighbourhoods singly and in
concert with family-level variables, on school leaving and out of school childbearing
among teenagers. They found that to the extent that economic characteristics of
neighbourhoods affect child development, it appears that the absence of affluent
neighbours is much more important than the presence of low income neighbours (see
also Duncan, 1994). These authors suggest that neighbourhoods with dense
concentrations of white-collar workers provide children and young people with
models of more conventional behaviour which serve to reproduce the same or similar
behaviours in the next generation of residents.

Peer groups are also likely to influence the neighbourhood. Peer group effects have
been linked to school dropout rates, teenage pregnancy and labour market
participation (Case & Katz, 1991; Evans et al., 1993) and are posited to ‘infect’
youngsters with negative behaviour and attitudes.

Multiple risks

Bringing these three mechanisms together neighbourhoods influence the kinds of
stresses with which parents must cope and the complexity of day-to-day family
management tasks. Eccles (Eccles et al., 1992) and Furstenberg (Furstenberg, 1992),
for example, show that families living in high risk, low resource neighbourhoods have
to rely more on in-home strategies to help their children develop and to protect them
from the dangers of the neighbourhood. Conversely, families from low risk
neighbourhoods are better able to use resources from their community, such as
organised youth programmes, in order to help their children develop the same talents
and skills. Fewer risks also mean that neighbourhoods are comparably safer and thus
the need to protect children from the potential hazards of their environment is not so
pressing.

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