Reflections of a Child. Depicting Healthy Childhood in the 1940s and 1960s

Throughout the last century, childhood has undergone some significant changes. Children evolved from miniature adults working in factories to specific actors with rights of their own. This transformation also altered the way that society perceived childhood and the way people thought children should be treated and cared for. The process has been documented on a macro level. The transformation of children themselves is somewhat overshadowed by larger study domains, but nevertheless is just as interesting. Obviously, after all, social scientists are increasingly treating children and childhood as specific research topics. This article deals with the question of how popular media have co-constructed and defined the concept of the healthy child in the 1940s and in the 1960s, two time periods with different socioeconomic and cultural climates when it comes to children, health and food. The main research goal is to find out how society perceived the healthy child and how society was concerned with the health of children. How were children portrayed and what can this tell us about the dominant discourses regarding the health of children? Based on a quantitative visual content analysis of 548 advertisements in Libelle, the earliest Flemish women's magazine published in Belgium, we discuss how the imaging (both visual and textual) of the healthy child has changed during the post-World War II decades in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. The findings are contextualized within the global historical transformation that childhood, health and food culture went through in the 1940s and 1960s.