Mothers under suspicion: talking about school age children's health

Abstract

This study has as its objective to explain the assistance to the school age child's health under the light of historic and dialectic materialism, including gender for the social approach. The results regarding the interviewees' representations (health professionals, teachers and mothers) revealed that the conceptions about the health-illness process of school pupils are highly biologicist, even though there were - but in a much smaller scale - references to its psychic and social dimensions. The data analysis, according to the feminist theory, shows that the idea of gender inferiority is the origin of the biased conceptions regarding the mothers of the studied children. Such prejudices were observed in the three locations studied (heath service, school and family).