Oxford Brookes and community-based professionals support families with food and nutrition

Oxford Brookes University is spearheading new initiatives to support families with food and nutrition in response to the rising cost of living.

Dr Irmak Karademir, Reader in Sociology and Sociology Subject Coordinator at Oxford Brookes, led a recent workshop bringing together the University’s nutritionists and early years specialists alongside child and family practitioners from across Oxfordshire.

The workshop stemmed from a two-year British Academy-funded project that included interviews with 12 families from a range of backgrounds in south-east England. Each family participated in three interviews, spaced six to eight months apart, focusing on meal preparation and sharing, food shopping, and their approaches to feeding children.

Dr Karademir said: “The project demonstrated how parents from different social groups, including those with sufficient resources, find it difficult to cope with the emotional dimension of feeding. It’s often, but not always, mothers who take on the bulk of the meal planning, preparation and the negotiation of their children’s eating behaviours.

“It can often be extremely challenging, among busy family schedules and especially with children with different tastes in one household, to ensure each child eats healthy and balanced meals.

“This is exacerbated by societal pressures and parents’ own anxieties about helping their children be as healthy as possible. It’s even worse for those parents who are less well off who receive community support to ensure their families have enough to eat.

“We know that it’s getting harder for families. My previous research revealed that family food bills in Oxfordshire doubled during the Covid-19 lockdowns and it’s well documented that we are living through a cost-of-living crisis.”

Academics and practitioners say more support is needed to help families provide easy-to-cook, nutritious meals, and for those who are experiencing difficulties developing their children’s palates.

Dr Karademir, a member of the Oxford Brookes Children and Young People Research Network, is collaborating with Donnington Doorstep Family Centre in east Oxford and Banbury Children and Family Centre to improve the experiences of parents who receive food parcels.

She added: “While families are grateful for food parcels they receive, the donated ingredients are not always suitable to make a full child-friendly meal. The family support providers are aware that some parents hesitate to seek advice on how to use these food items which leads to food waste and also inefficiency. By bringing together academic perspectives and family support providers’ insights, we want to improve the existing provision with easy to cook recipe cards with visuals and infographics.”

Natalie Allen, Early Years Family Support Manager at Donnington Doorstep, said: “Practitioners are always on the lookout for current research that supports our families and young people. Being able to have meaningful discussions with other professionals in person is so valuable and to have research in front of us to discuss is also very powerful.

“It was great to have so many individuals from across the county invested in the same research, outcome and change whilst doing such different work. We feel so grateful to have been given the opportunity to attend and voice our findings whilst listening and discussing others. We hope that the knowledge exchanges will continue and we are always willing to participate in any research findings that arise.”

Leanne Leahy, Early Help Practitioner at Banbury Children and Family Centre, said: “By coming together it gives us an opportunity to reduce fragmented working and break down barriers. Hearing stories about the positive work going on in other communities within our county allows us confidence to open up further conversations to see what is achievable within other areas.

“Everyone at the event has an invested interest in the health and wellbeing of our current and future generations. However, there are limited platforms to allow us to come together and share not just what challenges and suffering we are seeing, but how we are working to improve outcomes. Being able to share ideas for further change, from a variety of professionals trying to do the same, can only be beneficial to us individually and for the wider community.”

Dr Karademir’s latest research findings can be read here:
Guilt and Beyond: A Class Cultural Analysis of Evolving Emotional Responses to Maternal Foodwork published in the journal ‘Food Culture and Society’ and Eating with children: a practice theoretical study of foodwork in transitioning into parenthood published in the journal ‘Sociology’. Both papers were published this year. Among her previous research is a paper entitled How (not) to feed young children: A class-cultural analysis of food parenting practices.