Paper short abstract:

Relying on video-recorded family interactions and interview data with parents from a larger study of thirty-two dual-earner families with children living in or near Los Angeles, California, this paper explores what is lost in dominant discourses that construe health as primarily an individual-level concern.

Paper long abstract:

Relying on video and interview data from a larger study of thirty-two dual-earner families with children living in or near Los Angeles, California, this paper explores health as enacted in family interactions and in parental talk about matters of health and well-being. Several examples, drawn from the larger corpus, show how distinctive views of family health and well-being are revealed in everyday family interactions. Despite the observed variability in health as enacted, parents typically convey widely shared and conventional views about health and well-being in interviews and other talk, largely in alignment with public health discourse in the United States. I consider the implications of this study for discourses that construe health as primarily an individual-level responsibility. Without dismissing the import of health as self-related experience or as an individual-level concern, this paper shifts attention to matters of health as lived in concert with others in quotidian social settings and the analytic challenge of understanding matters of health and well-being as embedded in everyday life and bound up in familial relations of care. As part of the discussion, I explore the linkages and tensions that inhere in bridging methodologies and analytic perspectives from linguistic and medical anthropology to study how family health takes shape in everyday engagements.