‘You have a right to be nourished and fed, but do I have a right to make sure you eat your food?’: children's rights and food practices in residential care

Abstract

Many of the difficulties of applying rights in practice lie in competing interpretations of rights by different groups and organisations. This paper illustrates the complexities of putting a theory of children's rights into practice within the everyday contexts of residential child care, in particular, as part of the routines of food provision and consumption of staff and children. The challenges of operationalising children's rights specifically are also associated with different understandings of the nature of adult–child relations. Furthermore, the paper argues that the ambiguities which arise when translating children's rights into practice are partly due to the tensions involved in striking a working balance between children's protection rights as well as their participation rights. This paper is based on an ethnographic study that explored food practices in three residential children's homes in Scotland.