Families, Young People, Physical Activity and Health

Critical Perspectives

Symeon Dagkas, Lisette Burrows, Symeon Dagkas, Lisette Burrows

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138838185
• eBook ISBN: 9781317561378
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Physical Education

The family is an important site for the transmission of knowledge and cultural values. Amidst claims that young people are failing to follow health advice, dropping out of sport and at risk of an ever-expanding list of lifestyle diseases, families have become the target of government interventions. This book is the first to offer critical sociological perspectives on how families do and do not function as a pedagogical site for health education, sport and physical activity practices.

This book focuses on the importance of families as sites of pedagogical work across a range of cultural and geographical contexts. It explores the relationships between families, education, health, physical activity and sport, and also offers reflections on the methodological and ethical issues arising from this research. Its chapters discuss key questions such as:

• how active living messages are taken up in families
• how parents perceive the role of education, physical activity and sport
• how culture, gender, religion and social class shape engagement in sport
• how family pedagogies may influence health education, sport and physical activity now and in the future

This book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in health, physical education, health education, family studies, sport pedagogy or the sociology of sport and exercise.

1 Family matters An introduction

Symeon Dagkas and Lisette Burrows

DOI: 10.4324/9781315734576-1

Introduction

Families are the target of sport, health and physical activity initiatives locally, nationally and globally. Rendered variously responsible for the ill health of children and capable of ameliorating it, the interest in families as sites for health surveillance, monitoring, enhancement, sport participation, and as hubs for fostering physical fitness has burgeoned. Imperatives such as ‘families need to …’ and ‘families should …’ pepper healthy and physical activity policies (Burrows and Wright, 2007; Fullagar, 2009; Vander Schee, 2009; Dagkas and Quarmby, 2012), and, in many cases, the scientific literature (McCormack, 2013). This is hardly surprising. A recognition that schools are not the only institutions where learning occurs (Tinning, 2010), that boundaries between home and school are porous and that families do informal pedagogical work that matters (Rich and Evans, 2008; Leahy et al, 2016) has fuelled this focus on families. So, too, has the developmental investment in children as hopes for the future. When children can be removed from their homes and parents prosecuted because their child’s weight is construed as a sign of neglect (Herndon, 2010), the extent of professional interest in families as places where future lifestyle habits are inculcated is evident.

Drawing on social science scholars who embrace a variety of theoretical perspectives (e.g. Foucault, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Bernstein, Barad) this book takes as its focus families as sites of pedagogical work. In particular, the book explores, across a range of cultural and geographical contexts, the relations between education, health, sport and physical education imperatives and families. Chapters address questions about how active living messages are taken up in diverse families, how parents perceive the role of education, physical activity, sport, health pedagogy and healthy living practices in their own and their children’s lives; the ways in which culture, gender, religion and social class and family identities shape engagement in sport, physical activity and health initiatives; the constraints, facilitators and enablers families experience in relation to health and physical education (PE), and the impacts family pedagogies may yield for health education, sport and physical activity now and in the future.

When inviting contributions to the book, we did not prescribe how authors should think about or define families in their work. As a result, there are chapters which construe family as a biological entity, others that push for a more expansive notion of what constitutes family, and still others who challenge the ways in which family is envisaged in policy and practices related to health and physicality. As editors we want to maintain that family structures or formations and family relationships are in a state of flux paving the way for the development of a host of different families, parental styles, physical activity and health habits and sporting participation. In our minds, the standard biological definition of the family restricts the family unit to persons related by birth, marriage, adoption or those living in the same residence. This definition of family excludes various other families, including those living apart and/or in multiple homes and those not blood related.

Despite the diversity of theoretical perspectives, methodological orientations and subject matters embraced by contributors, there are several themes that reappear across the chapters, provoking fresh and enduring questions about what constitutes family, the affects and effects of family-focused health and physical activity interventions, and the ethical and pedagogical implications of academic and professional work in this sphere. It is through the hearing and telling of the stories within each of the chapters that we can begin to appreciate the range of positionalities and experiences on issues of family, pedagogy and health, PE youth sport and physical activity. Understanding difference, and respecting the interests of children and young people whoever they are, and whatever their needs, are first steps towards developing advanced pedagogies of inclusion in physical education and youth sport. We have divided the book into three sections: family, practice and pedagogy; family’s health and physical activity; and family physical education and youth sport yet on reading the entire volume, we recognise the division as somewhat spurious. The theoretical, practical and philosophical conundrums the Health and Physical Education field grapples with are evident across and between each of the sections. While not wishing to impose a particular ‘reading’ of the chapters, or to prescribe how one should think about the relation between family, health and health pedagogy, and physical culture, we offer the following thoughts by way of a preamble.

Readers will notice the repeated appearance of ‘matters’ in each of the sub-headings that shape this chapter. We use this word as a verb and a noun. That is, we think that each of the things we refer to below matter, yet there are also questions, conundrums, dilemmas, conversations to be had about each of them.

Childhood matters

Several chapters in this book disrupt widely held presumptions about the nature of young people’s health and physical activity experience in relation to family. The narratives of young Muslim women in Allen’s work (see Chapter 3), for example, fracture dominant understandings of youth being caught between two worlds, negotiating ‘conflicting sexual ideologies from home and school’. Instead, she shows how dispositions and actions that at first glance seem contrary to familial or cultural norms, are, for at least some young people, in keeping with values they hold dear. Allen’s chapter illustrates, albeit for one young woman, how young people can and do make sense of the borders between school and family life and sexual moralities across the two, in unexpected ways – ways that do not necessarily reflect everyday presumptions (i.e. stereotypes) about what life is like for young Muslim women in New Zealand. The tension between home and public pedagogy culture was documented also in Dagkas’s (see Chapter 10) chapter using an intersectionality approach to uncover physical culture positionalities of young people in Asian families. Specifically Dagkas proposes that Asian family’s enactment of physical culture is a result of a complex interplay of markers of habitus and capital. McMahon and colleagues (see Chapter 4) similarly disrupt common beliefs about the realities of so-called ‘disengaged’ young people’s family life and dispositions. The testimonies from young people in their study point to the largely positive pedagogical work their families engage in. While assumptions that disengaged youth hail from families who don’t support them prevail, McMahon and colleagues found that such deficit understandings of young people’s worlds were unsubstantiated. Parents, siblings, aunties were pivotal in young people’s decisions to re-engage with education and often served as inspirations driving future aspirations. Dowling’s young people too (see Chapter 16) talk candidly about what constrains and enables their access to dominant sporting practices, and whether or not they care about these. They are acutely aware of how family priorities shape their engagement in sports and school-based physical education, yet their responses to family influence are varied and unpredictable. Similarly, Smith and Haycock (see Chapter 14) discuss extra-curricular sporting activities and the disparities experienced between families based on their economic capital. More specifically, they unpack issues of social class as both enablers and barriers to engagement with sport. The voices of three young disabled boys are foregrounded in Fitzgerald’s Chapter 17. Each provide vivid descriptions of the ways in which family dispositions (and, in particular, parental values) shape their sporting life and, in turn, how their own sporting passions (e.g. wheelchair basketball) can inform what their families value.

As Quarmby (see Chapter 12) and Fitzgerald (Chapter 17) suggest, the voices of young people in care and those regarded as disabled are glaringly missing in most scholarship that examines family engagement in physical activity. Each of the aforementioned chapters urge a centring of young people’s voices, attention to the nuances of individual and family experiences, and a recognition that everyday truths about young people, families and well-being are just that – everyday, common (perhaps), yet not necessarily reflective of the messy, located and unique experiences of persons engaging (or not) with health and physical activity messages from multiple places and positions.

Ethics matters

In terms of research engaging families, what we do, how we do it, and what we do with what we research matters. Several authors raise ethical and educational questions about not only policy work, interventions and health and physical activity measures, but about our own research investments, rationales and processes for doing work around families. For example, contributors point to the ways in which health and physical activity is diluted, repackaged and distributed for family consumption. They point to the ironing out of complexity, the problematic assignment of causal links between what families do and what children become, the convenient, yet unwarranted swing to emotive language in otherwise ‘scientific accounts’ (e.g. Pluim and Gard in Chapter 6; Petherick and colleagues in Chapter 8; and Babakus Curry in Chapter 9) that position and persuade parents to be morally culpable for the well-being of their young. When, as is often the case, academic work is recruited to justify, rationalize and/or support courses of action in relation to health, physical activity or sport, it would seem crucial to ensure that the evidence garnered is sound and any repackaging of it portrays the whole picture, rather than selective bits that service interests of specific health/physical activity promotion agendas. The role researchers themselves play in the pedagogization of families warrants further attention.

The spread of governmental technologies (Rose, 1999) into the domain of family life is an enduring theme across the chapters in this collection. While some authors regard governmental endeavours to ensure the well-being of children via family pedagogies quite favourably, others find the extent and repetitiveness of intrusions into family life deeply troubling. It is somewhat paradoxical that at a time when neo-conservative and neo-liberal forces (see Macdonald, 2011) are on the rise, the government of life (Dean, 2015) appears more intense and widespread than ever. As most of the contributors to this book contend, the neoliberal, individualistic and healthist intonations of most policies and interventions designed and enacted in the name of family health bear little relation to how families who are South Asian, comprised of young people in care, new immigrants, or youth who are disengaged from education think about who they are or their relation to others in their worlds.

Unsurprisingly, it would seem that families, however they may be conceived, have not escaped the imperative toward monitoring, assessing, reporting and measuring so endemic in education more broadly (Ball, Maguire and Braun, 2012). Justifications for funding of health and fitness products (Pluim and Gard, Chapter 6), introduction of family-focused physical activity policies (Burrows, Chapter 5) and health and physical activity scholarly research (Lindley and Youdell, Chapter 2) are more often than not premised on their likelihood to procure measurable outcomes. This requirement to illustrate ‘impact’ is difficult to achieve when dealing with something as multidimensional as ‘health’. As several authors in this volume evidence, the fall-back indicator of programme or policy success tends to be Body Mass Index, or fitness testing results, or success in sports activities that are highly valued in any particular context (see Dowling in Chapter 16; Smith and Haycock in Chapter 14). The wisdom of continuing to fund and found health and physical activity programmes with recourse to these brands of evidence is a conundrum worthy of consideration. If, and the chapters in this book would suggest it is the case, the practice is problematic, then what, if anything, could public health or sports agencies consider as an alternative mode of gauging the value their interventions accrue?

Digital matters

Pluim and Gard (Chapter 6) deal directly with the ways digital technologies (in their case, Fitnessgram) can be and are used to reach and engage families in surveillance and monitoring of their children’s behaviours. While digital pedagogies are rarely mentioned in other chapters, clearly the spread of online modes of engagement rates further investigation. Understanding how families negotiate health and physical activity promoting and monitoring devices, how engagement with these is embedded (or not) in family life, and with what effects and affects for their sense of selves as healthy or well would seem a fruitful ethnographic task for the field.

Efficacy matters

Much of the collection raises questions about the efficacy of family-focused fitness and health interventions. While millions of dollars and substantial human capital are expended on large-scale fitness, physical activity and health initiatives by governments, empirical work throughout this volume complicates any claims to the efficacy of these. While none of the chapters directly address whether or not such interventions work, they each problematize the notion that all families will necessarily respond to the government of life (Dean 2015) in predictable ways. Dowling’s (Chapter 16) narratives of Norwegian immigrants’ lives points to the complexities of doing life in an adopted country. Her ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Family matters An introduction
• PART 1 Family, practice and pedagogy
• PART 2 Family's health and physical activity
• PART 3 Family Physical Education and youth sport
• Index