Eating

Abstract

Given the salience of practices around eating in the socialization of young children beyond infancy, it is surprising that this area appears to have been neglected in childhood studies. Calls for a broader approach to studies of children’s lives and socialization than that traditionally pursued in Western psychology are not, of course, new. However, as Nsamenang (1992) argues, it remains particularly true in the discipline of educational studies inhabited by the authors of this chapter that some aspects of everyday life remain curiously occluded from academic attention, maybe owing to the dominant focus of attention on the study of the individual in psychological research. Detailed perusal of the video and other qualitative data in our study brought eating as an activity firmly in the purview of cultural practices. Although, as discussed in Chapter 1, p. 31 above and p. 109 below, we readily admit that it took us a while to recognize its true importance for our study. Eating was another family practice that revealed both child and adult agency - another potential area for the development of a ‘strong’ child.