Author: Dr Francesca Vaghi 

In the U.K., as in most of the world, the early years are considered an important (if not the most important) time for medical and policy intervention. Yet, despite international and local consensus about the need to ‘get it right’ for infants and young children, early childhood education and care is a notoriously underfunded domain in many countries, including England (e.g. Adamson and Brennan 2014; Moss and Cameron 2020). The impacts of this lack of meaningful investment are felt across the areas where early intervention is meant to have most effect, from educational attainment to oral health, and it is no different in matters related to school meals. Because early years education is not statutory in England, school food guidelines are voluntary; provision thus varies across the highly diverse and marketized early years services landscape, as does local government funding made available to support healthy eating initiatives within settings.

In this context, in which food is seen as crucial in determining children’s future health and potentially also becomes a ‘unique selling point’ of different childcare providers, what children eat is important to adults. However, in my recently published book, Food Policy and Practice in Early Childhood Education and Care (2023), I argue that how food is eaten matters most to children. I base this observation on twelve months of ethnographic research carried out in an inner-London nursery between 2016 to 2017. As well as conducting semi-structured interviews with early years practitioners, parents, policy actors, medical professionals, and people working in third sector organisations, I also spent that year learning about children’s everyday life at nursery, developing a child-centred approach to meaningfully include children in research.

The universalism of policy vs the particularism of caring (through food)

Public health messaging and voluntary food guidelines pertaining to the early years tend to focus on the nutritional value of food, and on teaching children about healthy eating so they can learn how to make ‘good choices’ about their diets. Ensuring children have access to adequate and sufficient food is fundamental, however evidence shows that a policy discourse that over-emphasises individual choice has significant limitations when structural issues are not addressed simultaneously (e.g. Ulijaszek and McLennan 2016; Mozaffarian et al. 2018), with particularly severe consequences for children living in poverty (O’Connell et al. 2019). The idea of ‘choice’ is further complicated in the early years, because this is a time when children have limited autonomy – choosing (or refusing) particular foods is one of the few ways in which infants and toddlers can exert agency. And, because the very young are particularly dependent on their caregivers, parents are often framed as solely responsible for their children’s diets in policy (and mainstream) discourse, again minimising the impact of structural determinants of health.

Drawing from Abel and Nelson (1990), I argue that dietary guidelines and public health messaging belong to the universalism of policy, which does not account for the complexities of people’s lives and often relies on positivistic assumptions where e.g. increased knowledge leads to behaviour change. Indeed, in my analysis of policy materials, I identified that ‘problems’ (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016) related to children’s diets are framed as a result of ‘bad’ parenting, lack of knowledge/skills, and insufficient early intervention – as such, solutions are designed to address these ‘problems’. Yet, what is left out of these policy initiatives? First on the list are the material constraints that families face, as alluded to above; this can include lack of sufficient income, fuel poverty, not having access to adequate cooking facilities, or lack of time to purchase and cook food. Second, by focusing on individual choice as a key determinant of health, the consequences of living in a highly industrialised food system are also undermined in policy discourse. Parents spoke at length about their anxieties in relation to the foods available in shops or fast food outlets. Third, diverse ideas of ‘healthy eating’ and wellbeing are often excluded. This links to a final, key, element missing in children’s food policy discourse: the social value of food, and caring through food.

Caring through food means paying attention to individual needs and preferences; as such, it is particular, and contingent on context. Within early years settings, where practices are determined by public health and institutional guidelines, adults’ ability to care through food can often be limited, particularly due to time constraints. In this context, children might resist adult attempts to regulate their mealtimes or to use food as a ‘pedagogical tool’ (Vaghi 2023, 77). It is in paying attention to children’s practices during mealtimes that it becomes apparent that how food is eaten matters most to children; whilst strategies like humour and role-play are used by children to resist adults’ norms and control, these are also ways in which children turn mealtimes into pleasurable occasions. When engaging children in child-centred research activities, such as role-play, drawing, and photo-elicitation, a recurring theme that emerged was that of the loving or emotional dimension of preparing and sharing food.

It would be, of course, unfair to suggest that this does not matter to adults too; parents and childcare practitioners also wanted to validate children’s preferences as a way to show care. Giving children treats is a practice that communicates affection, even when this might often entail an act of nutritional ‘transgression’; in the words of Deborah Albon, some foods are “nutritionally empty but full of meanings” (2015), and may contribute to wellbeing in a broader sense. Yet, again, because the social and caring value of food is missing from policy, this expanded vision of health is undermined, and conceding children the occasional sweet or nugget led many adults (particularly mothers) to experience guilt and anxiety.

Children’s participation

I note above that, whilst generally children and adults have competing priorities when it comes to food and eating, there are also commonalities between them. In my research, this is not only the case when it comes to consuming ‘unhealthy foods’, but also for more ‘nutritionally valuable’ foods, as per public health guidelines. Children, who are active participants in the different social worlds that they inhabit, brought practices from the school into the home, and vice versa; this often involved different ‘rituals’ around the consumption of healthy foods. At the nursery, practitioners encouraged children to try vegetables or new foods by making animal arrangements on their plates, or by cutting up fruits in ‘fun’ shapes; when speaking to families, parents mentioned their children asking for food to be prepared in these ways, helping them encourage their children to eat what they considered to be healthy meals. Just as children develop strategies to resist adult attempts to control their eating, they also reinterpret and recreate adult norms around them.

This is why I argue that listening to children matters to children's food policy. When the social value of food is recognised – when how food is eaten is given as much attention as what is eaten – we expand notions of health and wellbeing. All foods (‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’) can acquire a caring, pleasurable quality. As suggested earlier, however, any attempts to rectify health policy shortcomings should address structural factors, which is crucial particularly when thinking about improving health inequalities. A rights-based approach to food policy (e.g. Dowler and O’Connor 2012) and cash-first interventions to alleviate food poverty (O’Connell et al. 2019) are some of the ways this can be achieved, in addition to ensuring communities – which include children and adults alike – can have a say on policies that directly impact them.

References

Abel, Emily K., and Margaret K. Nelson. 1990. ‘Circles of Care: An Introductory Essay’. In Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Life, edited by Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson, 4–34. New York: State University of New York Press.

Adamson, Elizabeth and Deborah Brennan. 2014. "Social Investment Or Private Profit? Diverging Notions of ‘Investment’ in Early Childhood Education and Care." International Journal of Early Childhood 46 (1): 47-61.

Albon, Deborah. 2015. 2015. ‘Nutritionally “Empty” but Full of Meanings: The Socio-Cultural Significance of Birthday Cakes in Four Early Childhood Settings’. Journal of Early Childhood Research 13 (1): 79–92.
Bacchi, Carol, and Susan Goodwin. 2016. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dowler, Elizabeth A., and Deirdre O’Connor. 2012. ‘Rights-Based Approaches to Addressing Food Poverty and Food Insecurity in Ireland and UK’. Social Science & Medicine 74 (1): 44–51.

Mozaffarian, Dariush, Sonia Y. Angell, Tim Lang, and Juan A. Rivera. 2018. "Role of Government Policy in nutrition—barriers to and Opportunities for Healthier Eating." BMJ (Online) 361: k2426-k2426.

Moss, Peter and Claire Cameron. 2020. “Introduction: the state we’re in.” In Transforming Early Childhood in England: Towards a Democratic Education, edited by Moss, Peter and Claire Cameron. London: UCL Press.

O’Connell, Rebecca, Abigail Knight, and Julia Brannen. 2019. Living Hand to Mouth: children and food in low-income families. London: Child Poverty Action Group.

Ulijaszek, Stanley J. and Amy K. McLennan. 2016. "Framing Obesity in UK Policy from the Blair Years, 1997-2015: The Persistence of Individualistic Approaches Despite Overwhelming Evidence of Societal and Economic Factors, and the Need for Collective Responsibility." Obesity Reviews 17 (5): 397-411.

Vaghi, Francesca. 2023. Food Policy and Practice in Early Childhood Education and Care: Children, Practitioners, and Parents in an English Nursery. London: Routledge.