Paper short abstract:

In the context of an unstable or unwell world, more and more children are not thriving. This paper explores dilemmas that arise when primary health care providers suspect that a child is subjected to maltreatment, and react to signs that move parenting and social practices into the biomedical realm.

Paper long abstract:

In an increasingly uncertain world with unstable and unsettling conditions, more and more families are pushed into precautious and sometimes desperate situations. In recent periods of social lock down during the Covid 19 pandemic, contacts to child protection services show that child maltreatment has risen substantially. In Denmark, a Nordic welfare state, the extensive social system plays a significant role in ensuring child protection, in close cooperation with pediatric and forensic departments at health care system, which is critical in determining whether child maltreatment has taken place. However, primary care also plays an important role in terms of early detection, and in recent years ore and more children who are seen here, are failing to thrive – for a wide range of (often socially conditioned) reasons. Some of these children are being maltreated. But when is a child at risk? What is the proper way of protecting the child from that risk? And what is best for the child? Drawing on fieldwork in Danish primary care this paper explores some of the dilemmas that health care professionals in the front line of the health care system face, when encountering vulnerable and unstable families, who often live in difficult social circumstances. It engages with the challenges of discovering and determining that child maltreatment is going on through definitions and practices of safeguarding, and of transferring parenting and norms of behavior that belong in the realm of the social into the realm of the biomedicine.