Food, Families and Work

Rebecca O'Connell, Julia Brannen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780857855084
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857857859
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With dual-working households now the norm, Food, Families and Work is the first comprehensive study to explore how families negotiate everyday food practices in the context of paid employment.

As the working hours of British parents are among the highest in Europe, the United Kingdom provides a key case study for investigating the relationship between parental employment and family food practices. Focusing on issues such as the gender division of foodwork, the impact of family income on diet, family meals, and the power children wield over the food they eat, the book offers a longitudinal view of family routines. It explores how the everyday meanings of food change as children grow older and negotiate changes in their own lives and those of their family members. Drawing on extensive quantitative data from large-scale surveys of food and diet – as well as qualitative evidence – to emphasise the larger global context of social and economic change and shifting patterns of family life, Rebecca O'Connell and Julia Brannen present a holistic overview of food practices within busy contemporary family lives.

Featuring perspectives from both parents and children, this innovative approach to some of the most hotly-debated topics in food studies is a must-read for students and scholars in food studies, sociology, anthropology, nutrition and public health.

1

Introduction, themes and methods

Children’s food is at the centre of global concerns about nutritional inequalities and rising obesity levels. In the UK, debate about the nation’s diet and children’s diets in particular is taking place within the context of a whole range of social and economic changes, one of which is the changing pattern of family life. Moreover, food is an increasingly salient issue for families in the context of economic austerity measures and rises in global food and fuel prices that have reduced disposable income.

With the growth of employment of mothers with young children in both Western and non-Western societies, dual earning households have become the norm. Public anxieties about the inadequacy of children’s diets suggest explanatory factors including working parents’ lack of time and, because of work, a supposed decline in ‘family meals’ and increasing use of commercially produced food. While being set in Britain, the book has wider resonances, as it concerns how parents feed their children – in most societies, it is typically the mother who takes on this role – while attending to the need to generate income as well as other needs of their families.

In the UK, an emphasis on parental employment as a route out of child poverty (DWP & DfE 2011) leads to public policy interest in what is known as ‘work-life balance’ and in the well-being of children and parents in working families (Working Families 2014). However, some survey research in the UK and the US has found a negative relationship between maternal employment and children’s dietary intakes. Yet, little is known about how food fits into the working lives of families and how mothers, fathers and children negotiate everyday food practices in the context of parents’ employment, including the role that children themselves play, and the ways that food and eating in families change over time. Since the working hours of British fathers are among the highest in Europe (Crompton and Lyonette 2006), the UK is a particularly pertinent case study for investigating families, food and work.

The book has its origins in a study conducted in two phases between 2009 and 2014. Supported by the ESRC jointly with the FSA and latterly the DH, the study was funded in response to a bid that invited both the further exploitation of an existing national data set and the exploration of ‘dietary decisions’ of working families with young children. Its policy relevance lay in a concern about the adequacy of children’s diets in the context of rising levels of maternal employment.

The study’s ‘long view’, or in other words, its longitudinal research strategy, afforded greater possibilities than a cross-sectional design for understanding how and why individuals and families eat as they do. Through the qualitative data collected as part of the study, the book shows how food practices changed over time. In addition, it illuminates the embedded practices and processes that shape children’s diets in British working families.

How do the demands of parents’ paid work shape and influence family food practices? What is the gender division of foodwork in dual earner families and how do parents account for it? When do working families eat together and what affects this? How do children negotiate food and eating with their parents? What do children of working parents eat at home, childcare and school and how do parents manage children’s diets across settings? How do changes in the eating habits of children and families relate to interventions in and the shifting contexts of family life, such as transitions in children’s lives and changes in parents’ jobs and working hours and family income? Focusing on families in England, both at a moment in time but also over time, Food, Families and Work addresses these questions.

Conceptual approaches

It has been suggested that ‘many claims about contemporary meal patterns may be seen as a criticism of the working woman’ (Bugge and Almas 2006: 206). Outlining how researchers may be able to ‘put children in the center of our research on “children, work and family” without blaming employed mothers for real or imagined social problems’, Garey and Arendell (2001: 296) draw on the work of C. Wright Mills. Sharing his vision of a sociological approach which must ‘take account of context and structure as well as individual subjectivities’ in order to ‘create a better “fit” with complex and diverse realties’ (Brannen and Nilsen 2005: 412), the approach taken in the book is that of situating children’s diets in the context of everyday working family life.

Public health policy has attached a lot of value to individual consumer ‘choice’, considering choices made about food simply as a matter of individual preference, in the process obscuring the socio-structural conditions in which food practices evolve and neglecting the cultural and emotional factors that influence nutrition (Attree 2006: 67). In the book we have chosen to eschew the vocabulary of dietary decisions because it is imbued with ‘rational choice’ models of consumer behaviour. In rational choice models ‘decisions’ or ‘choices’ are understood to be influenced by relatively stable attitudes and beliefs which individuals carry with them through life, and from one setting to another, selecting which elements are relevant for deciding on a course of action (Whitford 2002: 325; Southerton, Díaz-Méndez and Warde 2012: 20–1). The implication is that to change behaviour (such as unhealthy eating habits) the challenge is to change the attitudes that shape consumer choices – for example by providing information about healthy eating. However, the relationship between ‘attitudes’, ‘values’ and ‘behaviour’ is not as straightforward as the rational choice paradigm assumes (Shove 2010). Rather there is a ‘gap’ between ‘values’ and ‘action’ (Warde 2011) so that, for example, knowledge of what is ‘healthy’ to eat does not necessarily lead to ‘healthy eating’ (Worsely 2002).

In this book, we have chosen instead to conceptualize matters to do with children’s and families’ food and eating as ‘food practices’. In order to understand and explain human action, the aim has been to focus upon what people do. The concept of ‘food practices’ acknowledges that understanding food and eating requires approaches that confront ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1977) – the situatedness of (food) practices in the everyday routines and social relations of the lives of children and parents. This entails paying attention to the constraints and affordances of the daily schedules of parents and children and how these intersect; the role of food in gender and generational relations; and, since the children of employed parents may eat in a range of settings, the consideration of children’s diet intake across contexts. The framing of the research problem in these ways also required attentiveness to the meanings of food and eating beyond nutrition, that is, an acknowledgement that food is also about sociality, pleasure, power and care.

The book focuses on children at two points in time: when children were aged between two and twelve years and two years later when the same children were aged between four and fourteen years. Given the speed with which children develop, it is expected that children’s food practices change over relatively short time periods. In this endeavour, the book adopts a life course perspective, which by its nature is concerned with temporality. Elder, Johnson and Crosnoe refer to the life course as consisting of age-graded patterns that are embedded in social institutions and in history. This view is grounded in a contextualist perspective and emphasizes the implications of social pathways in historical time and place for human development and ageing (2006: 4). It examines interactions over time between structural constraints, institutional rules, subjective meanings and decision-making (Elder 1985; Elder and Giele 2009; Heinz and Kruger 2001: 33). Critical to the life course approach is the timing of social transitions, especially in relation to the domain of health. For example, where food practices are established early in life they have implications for well-being later in life. The life course approach brings to the fore the relationship between individual development and situational factors such as community and social institutions, peer networks and families in which lives unfold; and the ways in which individuals and groups, including families, adjust to both expected and unexpected transitions and in response to societal and economic circumstances. Whether a life course transition or ‘moment’ is consequential can depend upon timing and the resources to which individuals have access (Holland and Thomson 2009: 458).

Consistent with a sociology of childhood perspective, children are conceptualized in the book not only as ‘becomings’ but also as ‘beings’. This entails treating children as social actors in their own right, acknowledging, for example, that they have likes and dislikes and recognizing the ways in which they use food to construct identities, forge connections with others and enact power and control.

The study

The study upon which the book is based was a two-phase multi-method research project.¹ Phase 1 of the study (also referred to as Wave 1) was conducted between 2009 and 2011 and Phase 2 (also referred to as Wave 2) between 2011 and 2013. Both phases included quantitative and qualitative components.

The quantitative research

In Phase 1, the quantitative work examined the effects of maternal/dual parental employment in England upon the quality of children’s diets. Ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• The authors
• 1 Introduction, themes and methods
• 2 Is parental employment linked to children’s diets? The survey evidence
• 3 Who does the foodwork in working families?
• 4 When do working families eat together? Families, meals and mealtimes
• 5 How much power do children wield over what they eat?
• 6 How does children’s food play out across the different spaces of their lives?
• 7 Changing families, changing food: How do children’s diets change over time?
• 8 In conclusion
• Appendix I
• Notes
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Copyright