Between urgent and lifelong matters: overweight children’s voices on health promotion pedagogies

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the learner perspective on being overweight by listening to 39 Danish overweight children aged 8–13 years. In accordance with the existing critique of the ‘obesity epidemic’ and medico-scientific discourses around food and exercise, this article explores how new health imperatives shape overweight children’s self-narratives. Health pedagogical activities in Denmark are between urgent and lifelong approaches to achieving health, and the article presents overweight children’s voices on having to learn new health behaviour in between these two schisms. From a social constructionist and post-structuralist perspective, the analysis demonstrates how the children both subscribe to discourses of discipline and control over health actions, as well as legitimate narratives of having to adjust, accommodate and negotiate health challenges to everyday life practices. The article addresses what can be learnt from listening to overweight children’s voices in the context of performing meaningful health pedagogies.

KEYWORDS:

• Health pedagogy
• health behaviour
• obesity epidemic
• children
• pedagogical urgency
• lifelong learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Ditte-Marie From http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7109-7343

Notes

1 For further information on the New Obesity Paradigm, see http://www.jenschristianholm.dk/en/obesity.aspx.

2 My PhD was funded by the Technical University of Denmark, the Danish National Food Institute and the Graduate School of Lifelong Learning at Roskilde University.

3 The two municipalities were given pseudonyms, as they served to illustrate examples of public health promotion courses, rather than publicly having their health courses exposed.

4 The organizers had anticipated that families would drop out, if the course was free. Although a course fee of 135 € paradoxically also eliminated lower socio-economic class families, who are more likely to develop obesity (see Matthiessen et al., 2014), the local reasoning behind this exclusion was that overweight was as much a problem for the middle class and that the socio-economically disadvantaged citizens often had more acute problems to deal with than overweight.

5 The pre-selection of photographs was due to an upcoming summer break, which complicated the process of producing new photographs for the children.

6 The selected photographs were lent to me by childhood researchers Rasmussen and Smidt (2002), who investigated childhood by using photographs taken by children. It is not possible to display the photographs from that research study.

7 Although it is not possible to show photographs from this production either, due to an expired agreement with the Danish Data Protection Agency, I find it relevant to include the process of photo elicitation in this article to illustrate how I worked with the children’s voices.

8 See From (2012) for methodological reflections on how the children used the cameras, interview questions and ethical considerations in the photo elicitation process.