Platforming pickiness: the digitally mediated enactment of childhood avoidant eating

Steve Woolgar has argued that science and technology studies is a prime place for studying the relationship between children and consumption [2012 “Ontological Child Consumption.” In Situating Child Consumption: Rethinking Values and Notions of Children, Childhood and Consumption, edited by B. Sandin, A. Sparrman, and J. Sjöberg, 33–51. Lund: Nordic Academic Press]. Yet this project remains largely unfulfilled, mirroring the broader absence of children as a serious object of study in the discipline. This extends to the analysis of childhood eating. So-called ‘picky’ eating, which I refer to as ‘avoidant’ eating, involves varying degrees of food refusal, often experienced by carers as highly distressing. In response, many parents are turning to digital platforms for support. This paper analyses how parents’ encounters with avoidant eating become entangled with digital platforms, centring on a digital autoethnography of the author’s own information seeking practices via Google search. Not only does the paper respond to the neglect of parent–child relations as a site for research within STS, it also demonstrates that the so-called ‘new social studies of childhood’ could benefit from further analysing the way in which parent–child relations are entangled with relations between people and things, including digital platforms.