Children, Health and Well-being

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

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