Domestic Experiments: Familial Regimes of Coping with Childhood Asthma in New Zealand

Abstract

In this article, I examine the self-positioning of many New Zealand mothers of children with asthma as parent-experts whose authority supersedes that of implementing the self-management strategies advocated by medical professionals. In a socio-political context that emphasizes neoliberal values of autonomy and self-responsibility, these parent-experts experiment with a variety of pharmaceutical regimes, determining familial modes of care that privilege the achievement of what they consider to be ‘normal childhoods.’ While some families accept asthma as a chronic condition and encourage children to adopt standardized, daily preventative regimes, others craft alternative strategies of pharmaceutical use that allow them to experientially maintain asthma as a sporadic and temporary, if frequent and sometimes dramatic, interruption of everyday life. Childhood asthma care practices are thus not only vested in kinship networks, but often arise out of familial-based experiments whose goal is to determine regimes that enable the preservation of ‘normality.’

Keywords:

• family relations
• neoliberalism
• pharmaceutical use
• responsibilization
• self-management

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ethical approval for this project was granted by the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee (reference #210/328). Many thanks to the six research assistants—Dr. Samuel Taylor-Alexander, Laura McLaughlan, Mythily Meher, Pauline Herbst, Julie Spray and Lexi Potter—for their contributions. Thank you also to Julie Park, Catherine Trundle, Samuel Taylor-Alexander, and Laura McLaughlan for their insightful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. The research for this article focused on the views of parents and medical professionals. An investigation of New Zealand children’s perspectives of living with asthma, and in particular their perspectives on self-management programs, is currently being carried out.

2. The names of all the parents, young adults with asthma, and medical professionals in this article are pseudonyms.

3. Unless otherwise noted, the use of italics within quotation marks indicates the participants’ own emphasis.

4. Like many children who have allergic asthma, this child frequently suffered from mucus clogging her nasal passages.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susanna Trnka

Susanna Trnka is associate professor of anthropology at The University of Auckland. Her current research is a comparative examination of approaches to childhood asthma in New Zealand and the Czech Republic.