Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses how a group of primary school children in Barcelona manage the meanings about health in their everyday experiences, taking into account the children’s own perspective and their role in shaping these meanings.

Paper long abstract:

The way in which children manage the meanings concerning health in their everyday experiences and understand their and the other people's body reality in the elaboration of what is a healthy or unhealthy body is linked to a series of representations of cultural and moral categories of knowledge of the society in which they live.

However, the different existing discourses about health are also subjectified by children, whom not only reproduce but also reconstruct and reinvent those discourses, and therefore, do not always assign to health the same meaning, significance or links as institutions and experts. This is why it is important to start from an approach to health experiences derived from the children's own perspective and consider them not only as discoverers of the meanings that come from their reality but also as creators of these meanings through their own understandings and interpretations.

Based on these considerations, this paper goes into more depth on the study of narratives and drawings of a group of children between 6 and 12 years of primary school in Barcelona. It analyses how they manage the meanings around health, pain and illness in their everyday experiences. It also explores the existing links between these lived experiences, the activities and the actions that shape and guide them and social representations as construction of reality.