Regulating without controlling: Children's food and self-management in the U.S. middle class

This ethnography examines how adults in an Atlanta community approached the challenges involved in children's food socialisation and emotional socialisation at large. In both realms, self-management was the ultimate goal. For parents, striking a balance between conscientious attentiveness and offensively controlling behaviours was key. Ultimately, the realm of children's food revealed emotional tensions inherent in middle-class models of selfhood, where both children and adults come under scrutiny for their comportment and tastes, and where careful regulation is deemed both necessary and problematic in ways that work to deflect attention from the compensatory labour of parents in a neoliberal economy.