Read more
This book brings together new and leading scholars, who demonstrate the importance of research with children and from a child perspective, allowing for a fuller understanding of the meaning and impact of health and illness in children's lives.
* Demonstrates the importance of research with children and research from a child perspective, in order to fully understand the meaning and impact of health and illness in children's lives
* Encourages critical reflection on contemporary health policy and its relationships to culturally specific ways of knowing and understanding children's health
* Brings together new and leading scholars in the field of children's health and illness
* Moves the highly important issue of children's health into the mainstream sociology of health and illness
List of contents
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
About the author
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).
Summary
This book brings together new and leading scholars, who demonstrate the importance of research with children and from a child perspective, allowing for a fuller understanding of the meaning and impact of health and illness in children s lives.
