Everyday Family Food Practices

This chapter considers the debates around childhood obesity and focuses on UK public health campaigns, such as Change4Life, aimed at children and their parents. It aims to broaden the childhood obesity debate commonly discussed in the UK public health literature by using Childhood Studies to critique everyday assumptions that seem to be made about children in public health policy. The chapter consider views and perspectives of children, thereby challenging assumptions that children are ‘passive vessels’ to be filled, suggesting instead that children play an active part in everyday family feeding practices. The family as a context for the negotiation of everyday food practices is explored and the dichotomous relationship of parent and child considered. Reflections are also offered on the fluidity and complexity of family structures and the importance that food plays within the context of everyday family life and how food provisioning impacts on intergenerational relationships within the family. The chapter finishes by exploring perceptions of ‘proper’ or ‘real’ food and its perceived importance for children. While the health literature assumes that children are simply recipients of parental feeding, this chapter highlights research that shows that children also construct their own understandings about the healthiness of food and that they are active participants in negotiating family food practices. Through exploring studies situated within contemporary childhood and families research, the chapter affords a much more nuanced picture of everyday family food practices and children’s roles in those practices than is often presented in childhood obesity discourses

Clustering of health-related behaviors and their determinants: possible consequences for school health interventions

Characterizing school health promotion is its category-by-category approach, in which each separate health-related behavior is addressed independently. Such an approach creates a risk that extra-curricular activities become overloaded, and that teaching staff are distracted by continuous innovations. Within the health promotion sector there are thus increasing calls for an integrative approach to health-related behaviors. However, a meaningful integrative approach to different lifestyles will be possible only if there is some clustering of individual health-related behaviors and if health-related behaviors have a minimum number of determinants in common. This systematic review aims to identify to what extent the four health-related behaviors smoking, alcohol abuse, safe sex and healthy nutrition cluster; and how their determinants are associated. Potentially modifiable determinants that offer clues for an integrative approach of school health-promotion programs are identified. Besides, the direction in which health educators should look for a more efficient instructional design is indicated