Childhood obesity: mothers, children and liberal public health
Dr Suzanne Fraser, Dr JaneMaree Maher, Professor Jan Wright
Contemporary medicine is locating the origins of common health problems such as diabetes, heart disease and bowel cancer earlier and earlier in the lives of individuals. As a result, scrutiny of the diet and lifestyle of children is increasing, with parents, especially mothers, also coming under increasing scrutiny. Moral frameworks are regularly deployed in the press and in politics in discussing these issues, with childhood obesity often operating as a symbol of all that is unbalanced, excessive and permissive about modern life. While obesity should not be dismissed as a legitimate health issue, its various incarnations in contemporary public debate have a range of political effects and invite urgent feminist sociological analysis.
How, for example, should we view this development in light of what Alan Petersen among others identifies as the new public health’s demand that each of us become responsible for our own health? Clearly, children do not qualify as full liberal subjects able to self-regulate and manage their own health. Instead, it is parents, largely mothers, who become responsibilised around children’s eating patterns and weight. By the same token, children are not readily managed in this respect. Instead, they are often experienced by parents as formidable agents able to impose their will via what is popularly called ‘pester power’. In this sense the struggle over obesity can be seen to externalise what has otherwise become a properly internal, private battle of the will between good, moderate, healthy consumption and bad, excessive, toxic consumption.
Via a combination of qualitative interviews with mothers of children who have received a diagnosis of obesity and analysis of medical and popular health texts, this study asks how the mother/child unit operates within the strictures of a public health oriented towards an autonomous self-regulating subject, and what the implications might be for women as mothers. In the process it aims to produce knowledge to support parents in dealing with diagnoses of childhood obesity in the family.
This study is currently in development.