Children, Health and Well-being: Policy Debates and Lived Experience (Sociology of Health and Illness Monographs)

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 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 Hydn, 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