Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the disconnect between discourses of parental agency and empowerment around children’s food amongst UK public health and industry actors, and the entanglement of parent enactments of kinship and care with branded children’s foods, which challenge agentive capabilities in practice

Paper long abstract:

How does the current food system crisis affect the agentive capabilities of parents/carers in the UK to feed their children? The failure of governments to regulate the food and drink industry coupled with neoliberal discourses of personal choice, freedom, and autonomy, have resulted in an intense responsibilisation of parents/carers for children’s diets (Lindsay and Maher, 2013; Maher et al., 2010). Both public health interventions and activity by children’s food brands to address poor diets and rising child obesity focus on education and information, with a rhetoric of empowering and supporting parents to make “good choices” for their children.

However, based on an ethnography of feeding children under ten in Brighton, UK, across a range of socio-economic backgrounds, this paper argues that parents/carers experience limited agentive capability around children’s food in practice. On top of well-documented resource constraints, parents feeding young children are caught up in a web of kinship relations and care practices, which are targeted by, and entangled with, branded children’s foods, shaping ideas about nutrition, feeding practice and parent subjectivities. Parents thus have very little agency to feed their children outside the norms of a processed food imaginary and to make the good choices advocated by public health guidelines; feelings of failure abound.

I conclude by exploring potential alternative experiences of agency opened up by children’s food brands in the face of unrealistic expectations of intensive parenting discourses (Hays, 1996) and public health, through the legitimatisation of the practical and convenient child feeding solutions they offer.