Feeling, caring, measuring, knowing: the relational co-construction of parenting knowledges

Abstract

Parenting practices, including the maintenance of a child with a healthy body weight are subject to normative and institutional regulation. This paper explores the specific practices of parenting in line with this regulation in relation to the creation and maintenance of knowledge, focussing on how parents come to know their child as healthy. Drawing on examples in which parents discussed their experiences of parenting in light of their understandings of ‘obesity’, these illustrate differentially constituted parenting ontologies which challenge the idea of a singular correct way to parent. This paper foregrounds the ways in which embodied knowledge may be constituted and enacted not only in and of a parent's own body but also through, alongside, and together with, the bodies of their child(ren). This is not to move away from embodied knowledge that centres on the self, but to highlight the relational and co-constitutive characteristics of embodied knowledges that arise through parenting.

Keywords:

• parenting
• knowledges
• empirical ontology
• body size
• health

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Jo Little and Dr Jennifer Lea for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/J50015X/1].