Children’s food,power and control: Negotiations in families with younger children in England

Abstract

This article focuses on children’s food in families and the power relations in which it is embedded. Drawing on paired interviews with parents and younger children in a qualitative sample (N = 47), and taking a case approach, the article analyses ways in which power and control are negotiated in parent–child relationships in relation to food. Types and extent of control over children’s eating are described, and the importance of resources and parents’ conceptions of ‘the child’ considered. In distinction to polarized debates about who does, or should, control children’s food in families, the article notes considerable variation between families.

Keywords

Agency children’s food food practices negotiation power

Introduction

Research within public health nutrition has tended to conceptualize children as passive ‘recipients’ of nutrition – as objects to be acted upon rather than as the subjects or agents of change (e.g. Benton, 2004; see also Christensen, 2004; Woodhead and Faulkner, 2000). ‘Parenting styles’ (Baumrind, 1971; Maccoby and Martin, 1983) have been postulated as explanations for child and adolescent outcomes, including food consumption, Body Mass Index (BMI) and other health behaviours (e.g. Kremers et al., 2003; Pearson et al., 2010). Some of this research suggests that parenting styles generally, and feeding styles in particular, are related to parents’ socioeconomic status and may account for observed differences between the nutritional status of children in higher and lower social classes.¹ Some research also links mothers’ hours of employment with children’s BMI and eating behaviours (e.g. Hawkins et al., 2008, 2009). In suggesting that only parents, and more specifically mothers, determine children’s diets, such research mirrors hegemonic discourses which ‘blame’ mothers for negative child outcomes (Garey and Arendell, 2001; Maher et al., 2010; O’Connell, 2011). Public health interventions have tended to reflect these approaches, positioning mothers as central to reducing rates of childhood obesity (Warin et al., 2008). Such models have been criticized for assuming parents are willing and able to prioritize nutrition (Murphy et al., 1998) and for reproducing ‘a hierarchical, unidirectional understanding of intergenerational relations, which highlights parents’ responsibility for children’s food and eating practices’ (Curtis et al., 2011: 429). In addition to diverting attention from the wider social determinants of health, such discourses fail to acknowledge children’s agency and the role children themselves play.

In contrast to this determinist model it is also suggested that the ‘negotiated provisional family’ is a feature of late modernity (Beck, 1992: 129). Accordingly, parental authority is said to be less taken for granted than in the past and family relations increasingly negotiated at the everyday level (Giddens, 1991; Solberg, 1995). Some suggest parallel processes, namely that as children’s freedoms become more constrained outside the home so children’s control within it becomes more important (Mayall, 2002; Zeiher, 2001) with more autonomy ‘in their private self-expression, especially in regard to activities of daily living, personal appearance, and defiance of parents’ (Rutherford, 2009: 337). However, critics of the ‘negotiated family’ argument suggest that child–parent relationships are still fundamentally hierarchical and unequal (Jamieson, 1998: 65), with some research suggesting contemporary parents often play down the control they seek to exert over their children (Brannen et al., 1994; Jamieson, 1999; Walkerdine and Lucey, 1989).

In the field of food studies, Dixon and Banwell (2004) propose that children’s demands are being responded to in unprecedented ways. ‘Metaphorically’, they suggest, ‘children are displacing male adults at the head of the table’ as parenting practices become more child centred (2004: 192). Some highlight how the commercial world exploits children’s expression of agency (Schor, 2004), pointing to the deleterious consequences for children’s health of food marketing, which undermines parents’ attempts to feed children a healthy diet (McDermott et al., 2006; Schor and Ford, 2007). Particular attention has been paid to children’s ‘pester power’; that is their influence over adult purchasing. However, as Cook (2008b) and Gram (2010) point out, this literature tends to suffer from a conceptualization of consumption as a rational, linear and explicit process and an assumption that children make individual, self-conscious decisions about their consumption.

A crucial element of current sociological thinking about children and childhood is that childhood is a generational concept and can only really be understood in the context of adult–child relations (Alanen, 2003). Sociological studies of children’s food in families have focused on food as an index of generational relations (James et al., 2009), a medium for negotiating meanings (Cook, 2008a), a vehicle for expressing identity (Valentine, 1999) and a forum for enacting resistance (Grieshaber, 1997). With the exception of the last, however, studies of children’s food practices which have taken power and control as their foci have tended to study children’s institutions such as nurseries (e.g. Alcock, 2007), schools (Gustafsson, 2002; Pike, 2008) and care homes (McIntosh et al., 2010).

But families are also political sites (Ochs and Taylor, 1992), involving power relations and engaged in the control of resources (Brannen and Wilson, 1987). For most children, families also mediate wider power structures (Backett Milburn and Harden, 2004). Power is exercised covertly as well as overtly (Bernstein, 1977) and is not always or usually coercive or explicit (Clastres, 1987 [1974]; Foucault, 1995 [1977]). Indeed, as Lukes (2005) suggests, dimensions of power include setting the agenda and influencing preferences and desires. Since the inculcation of tastes is highly relevant to a discussion of children’s food, a focus on the covert, as well as overt, control practices of parents and children is required.

Drawing on children’s and parents’ paired accounts in a qualitative sample (N = 47) of families with children aged 1.5–11 years, this article focuses on children’s eating in families and, in particular, the relations of power and control in which children’s food is embedded. Identifying overt and covert means by which parents and children seek to exercise power over children’s food, the article uses case examples to illustrate five patterns of control found in the data. The discussion considers the importance of parents’ resources and objectives, and conceptions of ‘the child’ in the extent and modalities of control over children’s eating. It suggests that these practices emerge in relation, and sometimes response, to children’s practices. Finally, the article reflects that whilst children’s food is subject to and a means of control for parents, public discourses around children’s food are also a means of regulating parents.

The purpose of this analysis is not to make generalizations about different social groups; the size and variation within the sample (particularly geographical region and ages of children) do not permit us to do so. Rather, the article sets out to examine how children and parents negotiate food practices and the contexts in which they do so.

The study

Food Practices and Employed Families with Younger Children (October 2009–September 2011) was a mixed methods study which aimed to map and understand the effects of the rise of maternal/dual parental employment upon the quality of children’s diets in England. In order to examine associations between parental employment and children’s diets,² the study design included secondary analysis of three large datasets – the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, the Health Survey for England (HSE, 2007–2008) and the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) Year 1 (2008/2009). In the second part of the study a subsample of 48 families was drawn from the NDNS in order to examine how food and eating fitted into working family lives. This article draws on the qualitative study only and the analysis conducted to shed light on one of the overarching research questions: how do children and parents negotiate food practices?

The qualitative study employed semi-structured interviews with parents³ and a flexible range of mainly visual research methods with children age 2–11 years.⁴ Parents were asked whether and how they limited or encouraged particular foods and how much say children were given about what they ate at home and elsewhere. We asked children to say or write down on a time-line what they ate throughout the day and to use traffic light stickers (Mauthner, 1997) to show how much ‘say’ they had about food and eating in different places.⁵ To find out about food purchasing we gave children drawings of shopping trolleys to fill with items they would like to buy and talked to them about their choices. To seek children’s views about negotiations with parents over food we showed them two photographic vignettes: one of a man and boy fighting over a large packet of crisps in a supermarket and another of a girl refusing food being offered to her on a fork. We asked the children what they thought was happening in each picture, why, and whether this had ever happened to them. In addition, 12/48 target children took photographs of food and eating in their everyday lives and discussed these with us afterwards (O’Connell, 2012).

Given the wide age range of children in our sample (2–11 years), we were flexible in our use of methods with children and did not expect them to use them all. In the analysis we built up family case studies bringing together the data generated from the parents and the children to give us a sense of the household as a whole whilst retaining the perspectives of the different actors (Harden et al., 2010). The article now turns to the analysis of the material and the patterns of control identified in the households.

Patterns of negotiation and control

Parents and children in the families for whom we have complete information (N = 47) described a range of practices which we as researchers focusing on power interpreted as involved in the control of food, albeit that such practices may not have been presented as such by our participants. Parental control of children’s food involved restricting or encouraging consumption of particular foods, whilst children’s control practices involved demanding, taking and refusing certain foods. Some parental control was overt, that is, could be identified by the child, whilst other was more subtle or covert and not usually referred to by the child (Gram, 2010). We further categorized control in terms of strength, based on discussions of the data with all the team members who took part in the fieldwork. Table 1 presents the distribution of cases. The control exerted by children is shown on the x-axis and parental control on the y-axis.

Table 1.

Parent and child control of children’s foods: Distribution of cases (N = 47).

The practices described by parents and children operated in relation to food as described at a particular moment in time. The categorization therefore represents a snapshot, limited temporally and in scope; we do not intend to imply that these patterns may be generalized to parent–child relations within the households more generally.

Unsurprisingly for children in this young age range, the largest group of cases (21/47) fall within quadrant A, in which there is stronger parent than child control over food and eating. However, as the table shows, in about a quarter of cases (12/47) children exert a significant amount of control themselves. Each pattern is now described with exemplars of each control practice, followed by an emblematic case of each pattern.

Quadrant A

Within quadrant A there are two patterns: cases where power negotiations have been classified as overt (14) and others as covert (7).

Quadrant A1: Overt hierarchy

The average age of children in this group is 4.6 years. Parents in households do jobs in all occupational groups and there are more BME (black and minority ethnic) children (7/14) in this group than any other.

Whilst all parents used overt control strategies on occasion, in 14 households this appeared to be pervasive and accepted by the child. Strategies included not purchasing certain foods, so that they were unavailable to children at home, and locking foods away. Sophia’s mother, for example, kept crisps in the boot of the car so that her four children could not take more than their fair share. Parents overtly used food as a reward (in potty training and to encourage taking medicine), or as a punishment or bribe, for example withholding dessert, ‘until I think they’ve eaten enough of their dinner’. With the exception of making allowances for spiciness, children’s tastes and preferences were not construed as different from others in the family.

Alisha⁶

Alisha, aged 8.5 years, lives in a middle-income Indian family with her mother, father and paternal grandmother. Her mother works as a breakfast club and lunchtime assistant during term time and her father works full-time in administration, with an additional part-time weekend job. Alisha’s mother suggested there was little room for negotiation over food in this family: ‘I just make a rule that everybody’s eating the same – whatever is on the table.’ When asked, she could not remember a time when she had given her daughter an alternative: ‘It’s not happened that I give her another option, no. Did it happen Alisha? No I don’t think so.’ Alisha confirmed her mother’s account, suggesting that she was ‘made’ to eat everything and not waste food; if there was anything left over in her packed lunch when mum picked her up she had to eat it either when she got home or in the car on the journey to an after-school activity: ‘So there’s no choice, I have to eat it at the end of the day.’

Discussing her photograph (Figure 1) Alisha reiterated this, saying that ‘Maybe I don’t want to [eat everything on the table], but I have to.’ Alisha’s response to the vignette activity suggested that she accepted her mother’s authority. She said the mother in the feeding vignette was making the girl eat the food ‘because it will be good for her’ and that she herself would be threatened with a double amount if she refused to eat something. Thus compliance was enforced and food was both subject to, and a means of, overt parental control.

Figure 1.

Photograph by Alisha: Dinner.

Quadrant A2: Covert hierarchy

All cases in this category (7) are in households where a parent is in a professional or intermediate occupation, with a mix in terms of ethnicity. The average age of children is 4.9 years.

Seven cases fitted the pattern of strong covert control by parents and less control by children. Practices included ‘duping’ children into eating foods, for example hiding vegetables in sauces or ‘sneaking’ them into omelettes. Parents also made games out of eating, such as counting peas on a fork. Covert methods also included socializing children into family norms through parental modelling and extended negotiation or reasoning. In these cases, the injunction to ‘try’ foods was strong but parents veiled their expectations of children, giving them the illusion of ‘choice’ or ‘democracy’ (Walkerdine and Lucey, 1989).

Eva

Eva is 4 years old and lives with her Italian father, Polish mother and nanny in a high-income family. Her mother works part-time in the voluntary sector and her father works full-time as an illustrator, mostly from home. The parents were proud of the variety of foods that Eva ate and attributed this to their multicultural influence. Eva’s parents were both committed ethical or ‘reflexive’ consumers (Guthman, 2003). They had strong opinions about highly processed foods and limited these in order that Eva did not acquire a taste for them:

I just think you have to draw a line and Cheestrings is the line.

What if she likes it too much?

In addition to some overt control (e.g. instructing the nanny about what to prepare, limiting access to some foods), the parents also covertly controlled Eva’s diet by inculcating in Eva a sense of responsibility for what she ate – moral values about good food as well as ‘self-control’. Eva had a cupboard of treats which was presented in the interview as a means of instilling this responsibility. Her mother said that,

We agreed this policy, er we did a lot of thinking on how to handle this and we basically decided that we have to start teaching her to take responsibility from the early stage. So basically we would never say don’t have it, we would say think how many you’ve had today, and you’re very clever and you will know whether you should have more or not.

However, whilst the father said that ‘She controls [access to the cupboard] herself’, later in the interview he suggested they encouraged her to dance if she took too much and her mother acknowledged that, ‘We say “your belly will hurt”, so in that respect we don’t give her choice you know.’

Eva’s interview account suggested she understood and accepted her parents’ norms about ‘good’ food. She drew fruit in her trolley (Figure 2) and when asked if she ever asked for things at the shop she said that she did but that whether her father agreed ‘all depends … if … err … if it could or not, ’cos I only can eat good things, not bad things that are in bad things’, with ‘good’ things further defined as being ‘good healthy things’. Eva also accepted the need to sample novel foods. She recounted a story of not liking chocolate the first time she ate it. She said: ‘Well … once when I tried chocolate … I … thought that it wasn’t good. But then when I tried it again and I said “mmm not bad”.’ In this family, then, there is high control of the child’s food, albeit that this is often covert, and the child appears to comply with parental norms.

Figure 2.

Eva’s shopping trolley.

Quadrant B: Resistance

In this quadrant there is only one case, which is not surprising given parents’ adult status and their embodied power (age, size).

Amelia

Amelia is 9 years old and lives with her two parents in a higher-income white British family. Amelia’s mother works full-time as a lecturer and her father is a self-employed salesman. Neither Amelia’s mother nor father (both joined in the interview) considered her capable of making ‘good’ choices about when and what to eat, saying that ‘in fairness if she had her own choice she wouldn’t be as healthy as she is, would she?’ In addition to giving her little say about what she ate at home, Amelia’s parents attempted to control what she ate at school, instructing her about what to choose and checking what she had eaten. For these parents, as for Alisha’s, their daughter’s independence was less important than making sure she ate what they considered a healthy diet, which excluded many sweet and fatty foods.

Amelia had to some degree internalized this discourse but also desired ‘unhealthy’ foods; saying that she found cakes ‘very tempting’. In completing the time-line activity (Figure 3), Amelia said she could not choose what she ate at home on weekdays; except for school she marked all eating occasions with a red sticker.

Figure 3.

Amelia’s weekday.

Amelia rebelled, admitting to lying about what she ate at school, for example telling her parents she had eaten a roast when she had eaten pasta. She also confessed to stealing cakes and chewing gum from her mother’s handbag, eating them in secret and stuffing the wrappers down the back of the sofa. During the interview, Amelia contradicted her parents’ accounts about foods she did and did not like and, in completing the shopping activity, filled the trolley with contraband: lemonade, bubble-gum, sweets and cakes. In this case, parents’ attempts to ensure their daughter ate a healthy diet did not prevent her from desiring or accessing forbidden foods and seemed, indeed, to be counterproductive (see also Fisher and Birch, 1999).

Quadrant C: Child control

All children in this category are white British, and parents in all but one household are in intermediate or routine occupations. The average age of children is 7.5 years.

Albeit that parents ‘set the agenda’ (Lukes, 2005), for example through determining food availability, relative to other children in the sample children in this group exert a significant amount of control themselves and parents, for their part, seem to acquiesce. For example, some refused food unless it was made to their specification or demanded it served in particular ways. Nicola (age 10), for example, would only eat lamb chops with melted cheese on top and Mary’s (age 4.5) mother said that ‘she’s a bit of a control freak. Sandwiches have to be cut in certain ways.’

Parents and children also mentioned children taking food, for example, buying food and drink with parents’ money when sent to the shop for other items, or using stools to climb up to kitchen cupboards. In this group children also mentioned ‘pestering’ or persistently asking for foods. For example, Zoe (age 7) suggested they sometimes went to McDonald’s because ‘my brother keeps on asking’ and Gemma (age 8) said she ‘gets down on my knees’ and ‘I go on and on and on and on till I get it’. Displaying overt control, Luke (age 9) said he would ‘swear at [his mother] or something’. Although his mother said this did ‘not work’, she admitted to compromising in order to ‘keep the peace’, buying foods such as Fruit Winders which ‘he thinks are sweets’ and ‘50/50’ bread.

Jade

Jade is 11 years old and lives with her mother, a part-time administrator, and brother and sister, who are young adults, in a low-income white British family. Parental control over food was very limited in this house and there was little surveillance. When asked to describe food and eating for the day, Jade’s mother said ‘That’s hard. I don’t see half of what they do consume.’ Although she did nearly all the food preparation, Jade’s mother had to some degree ‘opted out’ or given up on being responsible for food since separating from her husband and as her children had grown older:

I think what it is, is, because from, what, 17, I’ve been the mother and the housewife and that’s all I ever did, and it was always a routine when the kids were younger … and it was such a routine that I think once they started to sort of do their own thing and get their own bits and pieces, I could relax.

Paradoxically, this ‘freedom’ created more work for Jade’s mother. Meals were highly individualized and shopping catered to her children’s different tastes. Although Jade said she was encouraged to try foods, she found unhealthy food tastier, saying that ‘I would choose chocolate over roast potatoes.’ She often did not eat meals and preferred to snack, helping herself to crisps in the evening even if she did not eat dinner. In direct contrast to Amelia, Jade’s time-line (Figure 4) suggested she had more say about food at home than at school. She put a green sticker for home because ‘you can get to choose whatever, and we generally have a good range of stuff in the house’.

Figure 4.

Jade’s time-line.

In explaining her reluctance to ‘force’ her daughter to eat particular foods, Jade’s mother drew on her personal experience (being made to eat Brussels sprouts) and of seeing her son grow up and broaden his tastes of his own accord. She suggested that forcing children to eat foods they do not like is counterproductive, ‘cos all the way you’re being pushed, it’s more of a reason to turn away from it’. Instead she mentioned activities outside the home where Jade had tried new foods (a residential trip with the school and a holiday with her father) thus affirming that children’s tastes develop as they mature.

Quadrant D: Negotiated order

All but one child in this group are white British, parents work in jobs in a mix of occupational categories and the average age of children is 7.5 years.

This final cell includes cases (13) in which it was difficult to establish a ‘direction’ of control because parents generally gave children what they liked and children asked for what they were likely to get. Power and control are exercised, but not overtly nor coercively. We termed this pattern ‘negotiated order’ (Strauss, 1978).

Parents in this pattern cooked meals that children liked and were likely to eat, to avoid wasted food and emotional energy. Victoria’s mother said she usually gave the children food they were familiar with and this meant ‘I just eat what they eat really; what they like, I eat’ (cf. James et al., 2009). Furthermore, when selecting foods during shopping or at mealtimes, children in this group tended to ask for what they expected parents to give them: Zoe, for example, described appealing to adult priorities, which in her family involved considerations of cost (see O’Connell, 2012).

In these cases mothers and fathers not so much complied with children’s demands, as in quadrant C, but rather engaged in a process of co-consumption (Cook, 2008b) that was a product of implicit negotiations and understandings.

Charlie

Charlie is aged 3 and lives with his 18-month-old sibling, his mother, a full-time employed technologist, and his father, a full-time, self-employed IT professional, in a high-income white British family. In this family, both parents work full-time hours four days a week. His mother said they were ‘creatures of habit’ and ‘very little disrupts our routines’. In the context of their busy working lives, she found ‘sticking to what we know’ helpful and took a ‘relaxed’ approach’. She tended to give the children food that she knew they would eat: ‘[I] try to find, cook things that [Charlie] will eat or just accept that he won’t eat it some of the time.’ Although she worried that she ‘should be introducing more variety’, Charlie’s mother was also aware that this lack of innovation helped them manage their busy lives: ‘cos obviously we’ve got a busy life and I tend to stick to the things that I’m sort of used to cooking and eating’. When shopping, she always bought the same products using the ‘favourites’ menu of an online service: ‘we tend to stick to the same food in the week’. She was aware that this tended towards conservatism and thought her children’s diets ‘probably could be a little bit better’, but noted that ‘we’ve all got busy lives and he’s a picky 3-year-old’. Whilst she accepted that time limited her capacity for innovating, she worried that she should be doing more, explaining that ‘I think it’s just my mum cooked everything pretty much from scratch so you kind of feel like you should do the same don’t you?’

In this case the ‘negotiated order’ is reproduced in the context of tight time schedules and little time or energy for doing things differently, despite that Charlie’s mum desired change.

Discussion

The article has described ways in which control of children’s food is negotiated between parents and children. While to some extent all parents exercise control at times over their children’s eating, as the cases demonstrate there is variation in their practices. Five different patterns were identified.

As might be expected, most parents in the study (21 cases) exercised strong control over their child’s eating, especially over the youngest children, and children had little apparent control over their food. However, within this pattern power was exercised covertly as well as overtly, the former involving the inculcation of particular tastes and preferences. In the pattern where parent control was strong and likewise the child exercised considerable control, there was only one case. In this instance, the child and parents were involved in a struggle, with the child resorting to covert methods to obtain her preferred foods. In the pattern where the child’s control over food appeared stronger than the parent’s (12 cases), parents generally capitulated to children’s demands. But in a group of roughly the same size (13 cases) there was little evidence of the strength or direction of parents’ or children’s power, a pattern we referred to as ‘negotiated order’. This pattern suggests that children’s food consumption needs to be understood in relation to their parents as practices of ‘co-consumption’ (Cook, 2008b), undermining the idea that greater power can be attributed to one party.

Given the range of children in terms of age and geographical location, the qualitative study did not set out to compare the food practices of households in different social class or ethnic groups. Rather the methodological approach taken is to examine the processes at play and to extrapolate the conditions that apply in particular cases (Brannen and Nilsen, 2011).

The approaches adopted by parents towards their child’s diet relate to their priorities and to their material, symbolic and emotional resources. Parents, such as Eva’s, who encouraged children to broaden their preferences, were those in the higher socioeconomic groups; those more concerned that their child ate what they were given or gave them what they would eat, tended to be in the middle- or lower-income categories. Given rising food prices (Dowler, 2012; OECD, 2012), it is not surprising that material resources limit parents’ willingness to ‘experiment’ with children’s food. But time also mattered (Daly, 1996). In the final case example, Charlie’s mother’s experience of ‘time poverty’ (Brannen et al., 2013; Hochschild, 1989) was important in understanding her ‘laid back’ approach. Given that children may need to be offered a new food eight to ten times before accepting it (Birch and Marlin, 1982), availability of time is a prerequisite for those wishing to expand children’s diets.

As discussed at the outset, control may not be conceived as such by parents themselves and, as in Eva’s case, may be exercised covertly. As Walkerdine and Lucey (1989) have argued, the pseudo-democratic parenting style is normative for middle-class parenting, whilst Wills et al. (2011) found adolescents’ tastes and food intake the subject of parental scrutiny in middle- compared to working-class families in Scotland. This pattern contrasts to that found in Alisha’s case, which corresponds with patterns of overt authority/obedience identified in British South Asian families by Brannen et al. (1994) and Mayall (2002).

Children’s age also seems important: unsurprisingly children in quadrant A are on average younger than those exerting more control (quadrant C). Parents’ control over children’s food also appeared to be informed by, and revealed, different conceptions of the child, in terms of their capabilities and status as idiosyncratic individuals. For example, Amelia’s parents expressed a need to regulate her food, not only at home but also elsewhere, as she was seen as lacking the competence to do this herself. Eva’s parents saw her (a much younger child) as increasingly competent, by contrast, and fostered a sense of ‘self-control’, albeit this was somewhat illusory. Jade’s mother saw children’s tastes as their own concern and resistant to coercion; rather change arose because of ‘growing up’, and through exposure to different contexts. Furthermore, it has been suggested that children have gained autonomy at home as their freedom outside home has diminished (Mayall, 2002; Zeiher, 2001). Comparing the cases of Amelia and Jade, however, it is clear that this is variable and contingent; the two time-lines (Figures 3 and 4) represent opposing experiences of autonomy across the domains of home and school.

In contrast to determinist models, parents’ approaches in some cases appeared to be responses to children’s behaviours (Coleman, 2010). Jade’s and Liam’s mothers both suggested their indulgence of children’s preferences were guided by a desire to avoid conflict, although they adopted different approaches, with Liam’s mother opting for ‘compromise’ foods and Jade’s mother opting out of responsibility for her daughter’s diet. Reflecting on how her own childhood experiences influence her food interactions with Jade, Jade’s mother’s account also highlights the role of food and memory in the intergenerational reproduction of childhood (see Curtis et al., 2009; Knight et al., forthcoming).

Finally, the analysis demonstrates that whilst food is subject to and a means of parental control of children, children’s food is also a means by which society disciplines parents. Self-surveillance or regulation arises in the context of discourses of parentalism (Furedi, 2002) and maternal blame (Garey and Arendell, 2001). Many women reported that their children could eat better, with Charlie’s mother describing particular feelings of inadequacy. In contrast, food in Jade’s home seemed to be a vehicle for, and indeed a symbol of (Geertz, 1972), freedom from gendered social expectations. It is, however, difficult for women to ‘opt out’ completely (Metcalfe et al., 2009) and Jade’s mother ultimately capitulated to her children’s food desires. In this case, as in the rest of this group, children had perhaps replaced the father at the head of the metaphorical table.

Conclusion

Food is political (Lien and Nerlich, 2004). It is embedded in power relations, including between adults and children. In distinction to polarized debates about who does, or should, control children’s food in families, this article suggests there is considerable variation between families and that children and parents are engaged in everyday power negotiations about food. In some families, control over what children eat is largely ceded to children. In others, food is the focus of overt conflict, whilst in some families control is covert. Whilst some parents seek to act in their children’s best interests by instilling preferences for those foods they consider to be appropriate, the market also has an interest in inculcating tastes in children.

Parents today are held responsible both for nourishing their children’s bodies and nurturing their developing agency. Whilst children may be regarded as sophisticated and critical consumers (e.g. Buckingham, 2007), in the context of parents’ busy lives and a highly marketized food environment, child-led approaches to parenting are likely to result in children’s diets being high in ‘children’s foods’, which, in the UK at least, are foods considered ‘junk’ or highly processed (James, 2008). On the other hand, parent control can be counterproductive. Given this tension, and that not all parents have the resources with which to resist children’s exploitation by commercial interests, stronger regulation of the food industry, rather than of parents, may be important for supporting parents to do the best for their children and to protect children’s health and well-being.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The study which is the focus of this article was funded as a collaborative grant between the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Food Standards Agency (FSA) in 2009 (RES-190-25-0010). On 1 October 2010, responsibility for nutrition policy transferred from the FSA to the Department of Health (DH). As a result, the research project also transferred to the DH. The authors would like to thank colleagues at HNR (Human Nutrition Research) and NatCen for their help in drawing a sample from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey, their co-researchers (Ann Mooney, Abigail Knight, Charlie Owen and Antonia Simon) and of course the families who generously gave their valuable time to participate in the study.

Notes

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Children’s food,power and control: Negotiations in families with younger children in England

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The study

Patterns of negotiation and control

Quadrant A

Quadrant A1: Overt hierarchy

Alisha 6

Quadrant A2: Covert hierarchy

Eva

Quadrant B: Resistance

Amelia

Quadrant C: Child control

Jade

Quadrant D: Negotiated order

Charlie

Discussion

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Notes

References

Alisha⁶