Rural Mothers' Perspectives on Keeping Their Children Safe during Outdoor Play: 'It's Hard to Raise a Child in a Small Community'

Rural mothers play important roles in shaping their children's play-related injury experiences. It is thus problematic that their perspectives on their outdoor play-related safety strategies are often considered peripheral to the perspectives of urban and suburban mothers in play research. To center their perspectives on this topic, we examined the outdoor play-related safety strategies of rural mothers who had children aged 2 to 7 from British Columbia (n = 13) and Québec (n = 13), Canada, through semi-structured interviews. Using reflexive thematic analysis of the interview data, we identified three themes: (1) rural mothers keep their children aurally and physically close during outdoor play; (2) rural mothers enforce geographic boundaries to outdoor play; and (3) rural mothers teach their children outdoor risk-navigation strategies. Our research can contribute to informing scholarly discussions on gendered parenting identities and child safety.