Elsevier

Women's Studies International Forum

Volume 44, May–June 2014, Pages 209-219
Women's Studies International Forum

Food, fat and family: Thinking fathers through mothers' words

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2013.01.017Get rights and content

Synopsis

In targeting parenting and the family with advice on healthy eating and exercise, contemporary childhood obesity discourse draws attention to mothers as primary carers. In the process, fathers' roles and responsibilities in promoting healthy lifestyles and in family food work are neglected or silenced. This article addresses the silence surrounding fathers' participation in the feeding of their families. To do so we draw on qualitative data from an Australian Research Council-funded study investigating the impact of childhood obesity-related health messages on families. Using Carol Gilligan's (1982) notion of the ethics of care and Ann Phoenix's (2010) concept of ‘intertextuality’ and silence in the qualitative research process, we offer an ‘intertextual’ reading of mothers' presentations of fathers' involvement in family food provisioning. Mothers' accounts reveal how gender is relationally produced in the context of parental food work, with descriptions of maternal expertise, altruism and commitment to health being contrasted with stories of paternal authority, complacency and selfishness.

Introduction

Contemporary biomedicine identifies childhood obesity as a major risk factor for health problems in adulthood. Significantly increased rates of excessive body weight in the population have been widely reported, with moral frameworks often used in both media and public health discourses on the issue. In turn, research into, and media reports identifying, the causes of childhood obesity have proliferated. Whilst debate continues about the true rates of obesity in the population as well as the projected health effects of obesity (Campos, 2004, Gard and Wright, 2005, Olds et al., 2010), public health responses to ‘the problem’ have been mobilised in various settings (Dehghan et al., 2005, Vander Schee, 2009). The ‘family’ is commonly viewed as one of the most critical sites for early intervention and prevention of childhood obesity (Gruber & Haldeman, 2009). As a result, the roles and responsibilities of parents in caring for the diet and weight of young children have come under increasing scrutiny (see, for example, Brown and Ogden, 2004, Golan et al., 1998).

This attention to the family is shaped by, and in turn reproduces, distinctly gendered discourses. Some researchers have argued, for example, that childhood obesity-related discourse and policy rely on gender stereotypes, disproportionally burdening women as mothers (Maher, Fraser and Lindsay, 2010, Maher, Fraser and Wright, 2010, Warin et al., 2008). This is reflected in the number of academic studies addressing ‘parental’ influence on young children's eating behaviours and development that focus solely on mothers (see, for example, Jahnke and Warschburger, 2008, Topham et al., 2011). This positioning of mothers as ‘default parents’ (to use Nicholas Townsend's expression, 2002) within the context of the purported ‘obesity epidemic’ has revived traditional arguments about the complementarity of gender roles in the division of labour in public and private spheres. It has also contributed to widespread representations of women's bodies and maternal practices as sites of the potential corruption of children, and thus as in need of controlling, containment and regulation.

The intense focus on mothers and mothering in childhood obesity discourse has exposed a conspicuous lack of attention to the influence, roles and responsibilities of fathers in the provision of the family's food. Whilst recent research has examined the broader role of fathers in caregiving in relation to employment (Seard, Yeatts, Amin & Dewitt, 2006), increased paternal participation (Aarseth, 2009, Pleck, 1997), stay-at-home fathers (Doucet, 2004, Fischer and Anderson, 2012) and paternal involvement in children's health (Garfield & Isacco, 2012), there has been little research addressing fathers' roles in the provision of children's diet and the monitoring of their weight. It is thus unclear what the emphasis on ‘family’ responsibility for children's diet and weight present in childhood obesity discourse actually means for fathers, in terms of how they perceive and undertake their familial roles. Nor is it clear what such responsibility means for existing paternal roles and commitments in the day-to-day practices of family food work. This silence thus constitutes a critical gap in studies of men and food as well as obesity and family-related research.

In this article, we take an initial step toward revealing the pervasive silence surrounding fathers' participation in the feeding of their families, and their relationship to nutritional care work. In particular, we explore the different ways masculinities and femininities, as relational constructs, are being produced and regulated in the daily parental work of attending to children's food needs. To do so we draw on thirty qualitative interviews conducted with women as part of an Australian Research Council-funded study investigating the impact of childhood obesity-related health messages on families. The study focused on women's experiences as mothers because the investigators were interested in exploring the impact of the dynamics of gender described above, namely, the ‘responsibilisation’ of women in relation to feeding their children. Whilst the interviews explored women's experiences, they also illuminated issues pertaining to men's participation in food work. Here we consider how mothers speak about men's activities within the family. What gendered discourses do mothers draw on when discussing parents' management of children's diet, health and weight? In particular, what do the mothers' accounts reveal about discourses of parental responsibility for children's health? What do these articulations suggest about the contribution of gender to understandings of the ‘proper’ provisioning of family food? What do they tell us about the dynamics of normative heterosexual relationships?

Drawing on the social science literature on constructions of mothers and fathers in childhood obesity discourse, we begin by discussing the silence surrounding fathers' food work. We then introduce our theoretical approach, which utilises Carol Gilligan's (1982) notion of the ethics of care and Ann Phoenix's (2010) concept of ‘intertextuality’ to analyse data from the interviews with women. The empirical research from which our data is drawn is then introduced before we turn to our analysis. Focusing on how women build viable gendered selves in the interview process, our data analysis considers several aspects of women's presentations of men's practices, including their acceptance of fathers' marginal involvement in food provision, and their deleterious influence on mothers' ‘healthy food choices’ and strict and more disciplinary approach to children's diet and weight management. Mothers' accounts reveal how gender is relationally produced in the context of parental food work, with descriptions of maternal expertise, altruism and commitment to health being contrasted with stories of paternal authority, complacency and selfishness. In light of recent research findings and media reports that have placed a new focus on fathers as an influence on children's weight, our analysis concludes by addressing the study's implications for future feminist research in the field of gender, food and family.

Section snippets

Mothers, fathers and childhood obesity discourse

Childhood obesity discourse draws upon a number of gendered assumptions about the cause of this ‘epidemic.’ Many of these relate specifically to mothers and mothering. The decline in the ‘family meal’, too much takeaway food, mothers' child-feeding practices, guilt induced treat-giving among women in paid work, and fat mums and/or mums with bad eating habits have all been canvassed as potential contributors to obesity in children (see, for example, Birch and Fisher, 2009, Boutelle et al., 2007,

Thinking men through women's words

Feminist research has long established that gender is always relational. Indeed this was a key theme in Carol Gilligan's (1982) foundational work on the ethics of care. Gilligan's conceptualisation of a gendered ethics of care offers a critical framework for understanding the relational gendered dynamics of family food work as it relates to both morality and identity. Gilligan understands the feminine ‘conception of morality’ to be ‘concerned with the activity of care… responsibility and

The study

This analysis is based on a qualitative study involving interviews with 30 women: mothers (n = 24) and childcare workers (n = 6). Participants were recruited via three long day childcare centres in Melbourne and the greater Melbourne area in Victoria, Australia in 2011. At each site eight mothers and two childcare workers were interviewed. Representing the strongly gendered nature of the childcare workforce – a profession committed to an ethic of care involving ‘the activity of care… responsibility

Acceptable absences and maternal responsibility

All the women we interviewed claimed to assume primary, if not complete, responsibility for managing their family's diets, including attending to food preferences, shopping, planning and preparing family meals and feeding children. When asked how families arrived at that arrangement, mothers tended to describe it as a response to practical circumstances. Key explanations included fathers' absence due to work schedules, and partners' poor cooking skills or dislike of cooking. This accords with

A corrupting influence?

When asked about family food preferences, all the mothers talked in detail and at length about managing and catering for the different likes and dislikes of different members of their family, including their partners. To some extent a tension emerged in women's descriptions between recognition of a shared commitment to healthy food as a part of a healthy ‘family’ lifestyle, and what some presented as fathers' compromises on healthy eating and role as a corrupting influence. Several mothers

‘Laying down the law’

Some interviews departed significantly from notions of paternal passivity or absence in children's nutritional and bodily care. These typically occurred when male partners intervened in feeding routines, advised mothers on their practices, or expressed concern about children's weight. They portray different, more authoritarian, constructions of normative masculinity and fatherhood from those described in previous sections.

Some mothers depicted their partners as much ‘harder’ or ‘tougher’ on

Conclusion: influential interruptions

In this article we have argued that gender is central to the distribution of food work in families, and family food work is, in turn, central to the relational production and reproduction of gender. We situated our argument within the broader context of childhood obesity discourse, and, specifically, the pervasive silence around men's participation in family food provision. Using Carol Gilligan's conceptualisation of a gendered ethics of care and Phoenix's intertextual approach to silence and

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the help and support of the School of Political and Social Inquiry in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University. Many thanks must go to the women who participated in the study and shared their thoughts and experiences so generously. We are very grateful for the support of the childcare centres and their staff, who helped us recruit participants for the project and allowed us to conduct many interviews on centre premises. We would also like to thanks the anonymous

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