Children, Health and Well-being

Geraldine Brady is a Senior Research Fellow at Coventry University. Her research engages with policy and medicalised discourses that shape ideas about children’s health and behaviour. She is Co-convenor, with Pam Lowe, of BSA’s West Midlands Medical Sociology Group. Pam Lowe is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University. Her research is centred around women’s reproductive health, with a particular interest in pregnancy, contraception and parenting. Sonja Olin Lauritzen is Professor Emerita of Education at Stockholm University. She has a research interest in health surveillance, the construction of normality and parental understandings of child health. She is the editor of Medical Technologies and the Life World; The Social Construction of Normality (with L-C Hydén, 2007).

Notes on contributors vii

1 Connecting a sociology of childhood perspective with the study of child health, illness and wellbeing: introduction 1
Geraldine Brady, Pam Lowe and Sonja Olin Lauritzen

2 Where is the child? A discursive exploration of the positioning of children in research on mental–health-promoting interventions 13
Disa Bergnehr and Karin Zetterqvist Nelson

3 Biologising parenting: neuroscience discourse, English social and public health policy and understandings of the child 27
Pam Lowe, Ellie Lee and Jan Macvarish

4 Obesity in question: understandings of body shape, self and normalcy among children in Malta 41
Gillian M. Martin

5 ‘You have to do 60 minutes of physical activity per day . . . I saw it on TV’: Children’s constructions of play in the context of Canadian public health discourse of playing for health. 55
Stephanie A. Alexander, Caroline Fusco and Katherine L. Frohlich

6 Parents’ experiences of diagnostic processes of young children in Norwegian day-care institutions 69
Terese Wilhelmsen and Randi Dyblie Nilsen

7 The meaning of a label for teenagers negotiating identity: experiences with autism spectrum disorder 83
Lise Mogensen and Jan Mason

8 What am I ‘living’ with? Growing up with HIV in Uganda and Zimbabwe 98
Sarah Bernays, Janet Seeley, Tim Rhodes and Zivai Mupambireyi

9 Food, risk and place: agency and negotiations of young people with food allergy 112
Marie-Louise Stjerna

10 Negotiating pain: the joint construction of a child’s bodily sensation 126
Laura Jenkins

11 Understanding inter-generational relations: the case of health maintenance by children 140
Berry Mayall

Index 153