This book brings together new and leading scholars, who demonstrate the importance of research with children and from a child perspective, allowing for a fuller understanding of the meaning and impact of health and illness in children’s lives.

• Demonstrates the importance of research with children and research from a child perspective, in order to fully understand the meaning and impact of health and illness in children’s lives
• Encourages critical reflection on contemporary health policy and its relationships to culturally specific ways of knowing and understanding children’s health
• Brings together new and leading scholars in the field of children’s health and illness
• Moves the highly important issue of children’s health into the mainstream sociology of health and illness

Geraldine Brady is a Senior Research Fellow at Coventry University. Her research engages with policy and medicalised discourses that shape ideas about children’s health and behaviour. She is Co-convenor, with Pam Lowe, of BSA’s West Midlands Medical Sociology Group.

Pam Lowe is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University. Her research is centred around women’s reproductive health, with a particular interest in pregnancy, contraception and parenting.

Sonja Olin Lauritzen is Professor Emerita of Education at Stockholm University. She has a research interest in health surveillance, the construction of normality and parental understandings of child health. She is the editor of Medical Technologies and the Life World; The Social Construction of Normality (with L-C Hydén, 2007).