The Inheritance of Health: How Social Class Shapes Family Food Practices

• In Event: 568 - Regular Session. Health, Class, and Inequality

Abstract

Although parents have an important impact on their children’s diets, the mechanisms through which parents transmit dietary beliefs and behaviors to their children are not fully understood. This study presents a novel ethnographic dataset of families with teenaged children and, using it, identifies the effects of social class on familial food practices.” Drawing on Lareau’s (2003) model of how social class membership shapes children’s educational success, this study finds that social class membership similarly shapes children’s diets. However, this study challenges Lareau’s focus on socialization by introducing control as an important mechanism. Upper-middle class parents not only engage in concerted cultivation by fostering children’s healthy eating habits through constant education about healthy food but also exert control over their children’s health through extensive policing of their diets. While middle class parents also engage in such cultivation and control, they do so to a lesser degree, allowing their children more freedom in their food choices. In contrast, working-class parents engage in natural growth, with comparatively minimal discussion of and monitoring of their children’s diets. Through regulation and socialization, upper-middle class parents minimize their children’s access to unhealthy foods and transmit values and behaviors associated with a healthier diet. The comparatively relaxed approach to food among working-class parents results in fewer dietary restrictions and stigmas around unhealthy food practices. Variation across social classes in the discussion, control, and monitoring of food habits and choices can help explain the socioeconomic reproduction of dietary practices and health outcomes from one generation to the next.

Author

• Priya Fielding-Singh, Stanford University