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There is a dearth of scholarly analysis and critique of the Australian newsprint media's role in the medicalization of child behaviour. To begin to redress this lack this paper analyses newsprint media's use of metaphors that re/describe and construct realities of ADHD with a medicalizing effect. The interdisciplinary team used the Factiva TM database to locate and review 453 articles published in Australian national and metropolitan newspapers during the decade 1999-2009. Data analysis involved generating statistical descriptions of the dataset according to attributes such as: date, state, newspaper titles and author names. This was followed by inductive analysis of article content. Content analysis revealed pervasive and striking use of metaphor in newsprint media reporting of ADHD content, especially when describing health professionals, educators, parents and children. This collection of metaphors was striking, and while the metaphors deployed were varied, this diversity seemed underscored by a common functionality that increased the risk that child behaviour was explained using medicalized knowledge. We contend that these metaphors collectively and coherently functioned to simplify and delimit meanings of children's health and behaviour to favour depictions that medicalize problems of children and childhood.

In this study we interrogate the ways nutrition and health have become increasingly influential to children's everyday life practices and conceptualisations of food. We challenge the orthodoxy of meanings afforded to food that draw a distinct binary between ‘good’/‘bad’ or ‘healthy’/‘unhealthy’; ideas widely promulgated in health texts, popular culture and pedagogical practice. Whilst these dominant medico-scientific discourses are pervasive in accounts of food, they are not the only meanings that permeate the popular cultural and pedagogical landscape; for instance, there has been a burgeoning interest in culinary cooking programmes and food sustainability in recent years. In this study, we use Foucault's notion of biopower to trace the various ways food is governed through interventions; pedagogised by popular culture; and, taken up in school policies and practices. We draw on interviews with 32 Year five students from Australian public and private primary schools. Not surprisingly, the analysis demonstrates how students reiterated food as a practice of ‘temptation’ and ‘risk’, similar to nutrition-based knowledge of food circulated in popular culture and health programmes. This suggests that other meanings of food are often socially and pedagogically marginalised. We argue that because of the perceived risk attached to food practices, these young people see food as an object of guilt and a reason for self-surveillance. After discussing the results we consider some of the consequences for young peoples’ sense of self and their relationships with food in every day life, particularly in light of the perilous effects of deeming food as ‘good’/‘bad’ from such a young age. As a point of departure we explore some of the subjugated knowledges that can be brought to the table of food pedagogies in schools in order to bring about a broader assemblage of food ‘truths’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]