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This study investigates how mothers respond to school surveillance of their children's packed lunches. In a context where increasing attention is focused on healthy eating, we adopt a biopedagogical approach to illustrate different positions and strategies which mothers occupy in relation to feeding their children in the school setting. We use photo-elicitation interviews and focus groups to trace both the discursive and practical significance of these biopedagogies. We find that the subjective experiences of feeding children at school are infused with classed notions of mothering in public. Our analysis highlights two broad positions. Firstly, there were those with strong distinctions between home-food and school-food, which was associated more clearly with middle class families. Secondly, there were those with more fluid boundaries between home-food and school-food. This was more commonly encapsulated by working class mothers who were seen to place more emphasis on their children as autonomous decision-makers. Overall the findings document localised and classed practices of resisting the school's normalising gaze., (© 2018 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness.)

In this article, we analyze the foodwork of mothers when feeding their families on low and reduced incomes. By exploring their accounts of food shopping and household budgeting, we argue that foodwork is intrinsically linked to other areas of social life and dominant values associated with "good mothering." Through a careful consideration of the contexts and relations in which foodwork is valued, embedded, and made meaningful, we draw two key conclusions. First, we find that mothers' foodwork is oriented towards avoiding devaluation and maintaining a level of respectability as opposed to accumulating cultural capital. Second, we introduce the concept of foodcare arguing that it potentially offers low income mothers an alternative to the logic of capital for their demonstration of self‐worth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the way in which Vietnamese mothers purchase, gift and share toys with their children. The study utilises a qualitative design comprising semi-structured interviews with 10 Vietnamese middle-class professional working mothers of children aged between 5 and 9. This research highlights the way in which toys defined as 'good' by mothers need to fulfil a number of important practical and social functions: they act as an investment in the child's future, as a reward, and as a means for mothers to buy time for themselves. The findings illustrate how these functions are influenced by Confucian and Western discourses of intensive mothering, generating a localized style of middle-class intensive mothering, characterized by what we have called the ideal of the triple excellent and intensive mother. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores middle class mothers’ narratives on their daily routines of preparing lunchboxes for their children. In this study lunchboxes are understood as an artefact linking together discourses and practices of doing and displaying mothering, media and government discourses of feeding children and broader issues of care and surveillance in private and public settings. Drawing on semi-structured, photo elicitation interviews and a focus group discussion, this article illuminates how mothers feel on display through the contents of their children’s lunchboxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]