Health is closely intertwined with social class: people at the top of the social hierarchy have fewer diseases and live longer than those less privileged, even in a society with low levels of inequality and a well-developed welfare state like Norway (Dahl & Elstad, 2022), the empirical context of this paper. Although youth is one of the healthiest periods in life, and generally marked more by equality than inequality in health (Friestad & Klepp, 2006), it is a key period for lifestyle establishment and therefore particularly important to understand (Burdette, Needham, Taylor, & Hill, 2017). Habits formed during youth also accumulate over the years in ways that gradually and powerfully increase social inequalities in health (Power & Matthews, 1997).

What determines differences in health practices is a complex question. Structural conditions are clearly important, but so are health cultures, i.e. distinct moralities and sets of practices related to the body, particularly physical exercise and diet. In previous research, what is explored is primarily parents’ perspectives on and investments in their children’s health. This can be a fruitful inroad to the issue of intergenerational transmission of ‘healthstyles’ – embodied notions and practices of health – but it may give the impression that it is a straightforward process to mould children’s health dispositions, which may not be the case. In the present paper we take the perspective that children also exercise agency in matters of health, especially as they enter adolescence and often are allowed more freedom to make decisions on how to spend their time and when and what to eat, and move in between school, peers, leisure activities and the family. In this paper, we ask how young people assume, engage in and navigate classed health practices as they move through youth, and what their parents’ roles are in shaping the conditions for young people’s health practices.

This warrants a focus on how children negotiate, rather than passively receive, the health culture they are socialised into. We build on Bourdieu’s understanding of the socialised body (Bourdieu, 2007). In his thinking, the socialised body or ‘habitus’ is built up of the ‘active residue or sediment’ (Crossley, 2001, p. 93) of past experiences, and functions like a scheme that shapes people’s actions, perceptions and thoughts. As people who occupy similar positions in the social space will experience the world in similar ways, habitus is always classed. Mollborn et al.s’ (2021: 577) concept of ‘collective health habituses’ refers to ideas of health that are shared and incorporated among people in particular contexts. We take the view here that the transmission of health dispositions is located within broader – and classed – parenting ethoses, what Lareau (2003, 2015) calls child care logics. Lastly, we propose that relational resources (Eriksen, Stefansen, & Smette, 2022) in the family can add to our understanding of how health practices are nurtured.

This paper draws on qualitative longitudinal research data on young people and interviews with their parents. The longitudinal analysis complements the current, largely snapshot-based research on young people’s classed health practices. Most studies on class and health in youth are based on data from one point in time. While this literature has offered important insight into (middle-) classed notions and practices of health, data with a longer timespan can facilitate a more nuanced analysis of how health dispositions acquired early in life are negotiated over time as young people mature thus making it possible to grasp processes of both continuation and change (Lamont, Beljean, & Clair, 2014; Lareau, 2015). This study is based on repeated interviews with young people and single time interviews with their parents from the Inequality in youth project, a multi-sited ongoing longitudinal qualitative project on youth and social inequality, set in Norway. For the present analysis, we have selected two of the five sites included in the study, one upper-class urban community, ‘Greenby’, and one working-class rural community, ‘Smallville’. The participants were recruited via their school and the interviews were executed in school or via phone/video during covid. The young people are interviewed each of the three years of lower secondary school (age 12-13 to 15-16, 2018-2021). The parents from Smallville were interviewed in 2019 and the parents from Greenby in 2021. Rather than asking parents and young people directly about their conceptions about health as has been done in previous research (Pace & Mollborn, 2022), we look at what they do: their practices and habits, as well as their reasoning around the meaning of physical activity and food. The interviews with the young people covered topics such as the participants’ childhood, ideas about the future, and their everyday life at the time of the interview. We employed the ‘life-mode’ interview template for the last part, which details practices and activities through one particular day (Haavind, 2001) – most often the day before the interview. The parents were asked about everyday life in the family, their child’s leisure activities, how they were involved in their child’s activities and why they engaged in various ways. The concept of “health trajectories” is central to our analysis. Focusing on two aspects of health, exercise and diet, we analyse both continuity and change in how both parents and youths think about and “do” health during the early teenage years.

We found two distinct health cultures that most likely instigated long-lasting health practices in the young. In Greenby, the upper-class community, we see a culture with a strong ‘expert’ based and achievement-oriented health script. The parents led by example and supported their children’s sports participation and a healthy diet practically, emotionally, and cognitively. The youth health parenting in Greenby was defined by close parental supervision and modelling throughout youth, family togetherness in health(y) practices, and teaching the children health practices as investments for future payoff: for health itself, for achievement and for discipline. Relational resources - family love and community – were expressed through shared physical activities and nutritious meals. The youths led activity dense lives and conveyed a strong commitment to eating healthy food. Although many quit organised sports around the age of 15-16, they still dabbled in the sport or worked as trainers. In Smallville, the rural working-class culture, the parents encouraged and supported participation in organised sports in early youth – and then withdrew. Their approach was characterised by some separation between children and parents. This gave space for the child to develop their own practices, which often became heavily influenced by peers. Relational resources in the family were more linked to social meals – not necessarily healthy. Parents were less active in sports themselves, thus communicating a looser relationship between the body, moral worth and future prospects. The youths played organised sports in early youth. They, too, quit around the age of 15-16, but almost all went on to join commercial gyms. Rather than being fit for fight for challenges ahead as their upper-class peers aimed for, their goal became the good-looking body – as a means to fit in with their peers here and now. Food was linked to comfort, but also to excessive dieting.

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