All in the Family? Parental Roles in the Epidemic of Childhood Obesity

Childhood obesity is a serious global health challenge. Families and consumption are at the nexus of the problem, as childhood weight issues depend significantly on family-related influences (genetic predispositions, physical activities, and household food consumption practices). This article focuses on how a family socializes a child toward or away from obesity. It advances a family consumer socialization framework to characterize key elements and processes. Biological predispositions, parent/family inputs, elements of child development, parent-child interactions, and intergenerational transfer are all major contributors to weight status and life course potentials. Time is also a crucial component, here represented in two forms -- linear and cyclical. Drawing on extensive research from other disciplines and related consumer research, five “Foundational Properties” are distilled, representing fundamental tenets underpinning the family’s role in this problem. Each property is then used to chart promising opportunities for consumer researchers and others interested in advancing knowledge on this pressing concern.

Is childhood a 'disability'? Exploring the exclusion of children from age discrimination provisions in the Equality Act 2010

The Equality Act 2010 was enacted with the aim of simplifying existing equality legislation and included extending age discrimination protection beyond the workplace to cover the provision of goods, facilities and services. Under-18s, however, were omitted from such provisions, despite lobbying from a number of different organisations and parliamentarians. This article considers the significance of this exclusion. It both challenges the legitimacy of the decision to exclude children, and considers the difficulties that arise from including under-18s within age discrimination provisions, namely those relating to children’s autonomy, capacity and right to equal treatment. In particular, it asks whether the question of children’s capacity to make decisions, the main ground on which children are denied all the human rights enjoyed by adults, should be revisited in light of the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, under which a finding of incapacity on the basis of disability constitutes discrimination. It goes on to explore other areas of convergence between childhood and disability studies, and particularly the benefits, and shortcomings, of a ‘social model’ approach to childhood.

(un)childhood: performing the voices and times of childhood through relational video-making

This practice-based PhD is comprised of two interrelated elements: (i) ‘(un)childhood’, a 53’ video-essay shown on two screens; and (ii) a 58286 word written thesis. The project, which is contextualised within the tradition of artists working with their own children on time-based art projects, explores a new approach to timebased artistic work about childhood. While Stan Brakhage (1933-2003), Ernie Gher (1943-), Erik Bullot (1963-) and Mary Kelly (1941-) all documented, photographed and filmed their children over a period of years to produce art projects (experimental films and a time-based installation), these projects were implicitly underpinned by a construction of childhood in which children, shown as they grow, represent the abstract primitive subject. The current project challenges the convention of representing children entirely from the adult’s point of view, as aesthetic objects without a voice, as well as through the artist’s chronological approach to time. Instead, this project focuses on the relational joining of the child’s and adult’s points of view. The artist worked on a video project with her own son over a four-and-a-half year period (between the ages of 5 and 10) through which she developed her ‘relational video-making’ methodology. The video-essay (un)childhood performs the relational voices of childhood as resulting from the verbal interactions of both children and adults. The non-chronological nature of(un)childhood offers an alternative to the linear-temporal approach to the representation of childhood. Through montage and a number of literal allusions to time in its dialogue, (un)childhood performs the relational times of childhood by combining children’s lives in the present with the temporal dimensions that have traditionally constructed childhood: past, future and timeless.