Bad television, unhealthy computers? Children’s mapping of health, fun and morality

ABSTRACT

The article aims to examine the meanings that Polish children (age 8–11) attribute to computers, television, or smartphones, in the context of health. Basing on childhood studies literature and the concept of healthscape I show how children include electronic media, as material and symbolic objects, in health discourses. In children’s worldviews these objects meet with healthy food and fit culture, as elements of healthscapes. The healthscape infrastructure allows children to simultaneously adopt different viewpoints and moral orders in the field of health. It could seem that the ‘perfect’ child would be a self-controlling child who never watches television or plays computer games, and who eats only healthy food. But this expectation contradicts another one, according to which children should be wild, free, and disobedient. Children need to navigate between contradictory viewpoints, and they need to find balance and a way to create their own identity therein.

KEYWORDS:

• Healthscapes
• children’s health
• health education
• media
• computer games
• television

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their suggestions which greatly improved this paper. I am grateful to my colleagues from the Childhood Studies Interdisciplinary ResearchTeamfrom the University of Warsaw for their discussions about this research and my text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names of children are changed. The number next to the name indicates the age of the child.

2 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this aspect.

3 It was interesting to study how the approach to and definition of health have been changed as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic.

4 The anonymous reviewer of my article indicates that other European school systems also include parents/families as targets for school health promotion, but ‘the point is not to put responsibility on the children per se, to let them promote health. Rather, the point is to have a holistic approach to the family in efforts to reach the parents as well. In some countries it is explicitly stated that school and parents have a joint responsibility to ensure education and health’. As Zofia Boni’s (2015) research shows, in Poland this approach is presented in health promotion programmes, but in practice it does not work. I think it is an interesting issue, but additional studies are needed to develop it.

Additional information

Funding

The research on which this article is based was made possible through financial support from the National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki) in Poland [No DEC-2014/15/B/HS3/02477].