Nutrition Education and Care in Day Care Centers

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Friederike Schmidt
• Subject Area: Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism ; General Education and History of Education
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491527438

Day care centers are increasingly becoming the central instances of nutritional education and childhood care. Due to changes in care and current health policies, they are steadily responsible for the supply of food to children. At the same time, they are increasingly being addressed publicly, politically and professionally to influence the children's food. With these developments, their responsibilities for the growing up of children are expanding and public and private care relationships are shifting. But still, there has not been sufficient empirical research to how institutions organize children's eating as an area of ​​responsibility. It is also largely unexplained how institutional and parental responsibilities are related.To clarify these desiderata, the praxeologically oriented research project examines everyday food-related life in day care centers using ethnographic approaches (participatory observations, brief situational interviews). Using maximally contrastive situations of everyday early childhood eating (e.g. meals, birthdays, nutritional intervention settings), the project explores 1. how the eating of children is designed as an early educational task and 2. how institutional and parental responsibility for upbringing and care are related. The aim is to reconstruct the social sense of nutritional education and care in day care centers for children. Thereby, institution-, field- and actor-specific patterns are reconstructed. With regard to research, it is expected that the actors experience everyday eating in different ways and interpret early educational tasks and responsibilities differently. It is also assumed that eating in the day care centers is associated with various concerns and conflicts for those involved. In this respect, the project also aims to reconstruct the ambivalences and tensions of nutritional education and care in day care centers from the perspective of those involved.The project aims at theoretical outputs that show: 1. how food is produced in situ and across different situations as an early childhood educational task and how (nutritive) education and care is configured in day care centers; 2. how responsibility for the education and care of children in the relationship between parents and day care centers is interpreted and established in everyday institutional eating; 3. how bio-pedagogical influences are carried out in the food-related everyday life of the day care centers and how the influences relate to current (bio) policies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants