"Fit, Fast, and Skinny": New Zealand School Students 'Talk' about Health

Abstract There is little question that New Zealand children and young people currently reside in a context where healthy eating and exercise imperatives are proliferating both in their formal school environments and in their lives outside the school gates. This paper draws on results of a health questionnaire to consider some of the ways that children are currently articulating their understandings about bodies and health. Results suggest that these students predominantly annex health to weight, body size, and shape and that they are cognisant of the widely held presumption that achieving health is primarily a matter of eating well and exercising a lot. Despite an apparent adherence to orthodox notions of health, some evidence of 'counter conducts' is apparent, however, especially among secondary school students. To conclude, I point to potential implications for physical and health educators' work. Key words: health; children; bodies Introduction If one was in any doubt as to the importance New Zealand's government accords to healthy eating and physical activity in the lives of the young, the launch of Mission-On, in September 2006, must have dispelled it. Drawing together a raft of prior initiatives (e.g. Fruit in Schools, Healthy Eating Healthy Action, The Green Prescription, Push-Play) and incorporating several 'fresh' ones (e.g. pod-casting, youth-centred websites), the MissionOn umbrella is designed to protect New Zealand's young people, not from the rain, but from the more pernicious effects of an avowed increasing tendency toward sedentary living, unhealthy eating and the 'couch potato' culture evident amongst our youth (Mission-On, 2006). Despite a growing body of critique, questioning the veracity of claims that children are getting slower and fatter by the day (e.g. Aphramor, 2005; Campos, 2004; Campos et al., 2006; Gard, 2007; Gard & Wright, 2005), obesity imperatives, in particular, seem to have grabbed the attention of government ministers, health promoters, reality television producers and schools alike. Substantial resources (both money and time) have been committed to policies and programmes designed to halt what is regarded by some as a rising tide of obesity sweeping our nation (Taylor, 2007) and many of these are aimed at children, a population generally regarded as representing our best hopes for the 'future. ' Given the thorough saturation of children's formal and informal environments with messages about what they should eat, how much exercise they should do, and how many hours of television and/or new media activities they should engage in, it would be surprising indeed if these imperatives were not yielding at least some affect in the lives of young people. Thus the key aim of this paper is to interrogate some of the ways that children are currently articulating their understandings about their own and others' bodies, health and physical well-being, what they consider to be important indicators of 'health,' and what resources they are drawing on to come to these conclusions. To conclude, I point to some of the implications which the student testimonies yield for the kind of work we do in Health and Physical Education classes. Method I draw on research conducted with four New Zealand schools - two secondary and two primary - in 2007. Surveys were conducted with 795 students across the four schools to glean an understanding of the ways they were thinking about health and what they draw on to understand their own health and that of others. Primary school one (P1) was a suburban school ascribed a decile 1 status and largely populated by Pasifika (mostly Samoan) children, while Primary school two (P2) drew on children from a higher socioeconomic area (i.e. decile 9) and contained a mix of ethnicities, but predominantly children who referred to themselves as Pakeha/European. Secondary School 1 (S1) was a low decile school with over 90% of students identifying as Maori, Samoan, or Cook-Island Maori, while Secondary School 2 (S2) was a decile 8 school with predominantly New Zealand European students (i. …