Naturalness as a safe haven: parental consumption practices and the management of risk

Parental consumption as a risk-related practice

Overall, the interviews with parents show how they understand consumption as a risk-related practice. Risk permeates parental reflection on the purchase of all manner of goods, from car seats, to foods and toys. When Anne, for example, buys products for her two girls, she carefully reads product labels or surfs the internet for tests of product variants to be absolutely sure that what she buys does not contain any harmful chemicals and is completely safe to use:

I will simply go to [the Internet] and check up on everything. And here [in reviews and test results on the Internet] it also says if the child safety seat is filled with chemicals, because I think when they sit there for a little while, they are likely to start to grumble in the seat and then I think you might as well think about the chemicals.

The other interviewees described strategies similar to Anne’s. For example, Sandra was worried about the side effects of having her son vaccinated. However, she was also worried about the consequences of not giving him the vaccine, and she ended up accepting the vaccine although she still felt uncertain about its safety:

Sandra: So, I remember the first time I had to vaccinate Silas. I actually asked the doctor: Is it really a good idea to vaccinate children? And then we had this long talk about it, and he was really fair. He said: I’m a doctor, and I’ve vaccinated my three kids. But he is in the medical world, and works with pharma, where I’m more ambivalent about vaccines.

Interviewer: Yes, why?

Sandra: Well, it is because they contain aluminum, for example. You inject poisonous aluminum directly into the body. I don’t like that. Because that might have some negative consequences later in life.

Although Sandra thinks her doctor is reasonable and fair, she ends up concluding that with his background, he cannot be objective about vaccines, as his profession is linked to the pharmaceutical industry. Hence, she remains skeptical about the vaccine.

While all of the parents interviewed had followed the Danish childhood vaccination program and had their children vaccinated, some of them expressed ambivalence about vaccines that were similar to Sandra’s. They had carefully read up on the potential side effects and discussed what they had read with their partners. In a society, where new research results and novel technologies constantly intrude everyday life, bringing with them new and conflicting messages, people do not simply accept new scientific messages. Science is no longer a taken for granted as an authority and today’s parents engage more actively with risks – as illustrated by Sandra’s reluctance to accept the national guidelines on vaccines (Giddens, 1999).

The parents we interviewed expressed other worries. Some said they always read product labels to avoid E-numbers, additives and synthetic chemicals in food for their children. And several chose to buy as much organically produced products as possible. For these parents, organic consumption mostly involves food products, but some parents also buy organically produced clothes and toys. Often, this motivation to buy organic products begins at pregnancy. The parents described the motivation as one that was mainly based on beliefs about health; they assumed that organic products contain fewer harmful ingredients. Research shows how consumers’ understandings of organic products, and their perceptions of naturalness, share some of the same elements. Both are thought to be free of chemicals, and to be healthier than conventionally produced foods (Grankvist and Biel, 2001).

Naturalness as a harm reduction strategy

In a “risk society”, people have an increased sense of their own responsibility for managing risk. One way for individuals to manage risks is to apply what Nichter and Thompson describe as a harm reduction strategy – a strategy that entails a lifestyle or behavior, adopted with the purpose of controlling or reducing risks in one’s environment (Nichter and Thompson, 2006). Applying naturalness as a guideline in consumption practices is an example of such a harm reduction strategy. Cecilia and Bobby, a couple, and parents of an 18-month-old son, disagreed over whether they should provide a dietary supplement for their son. They did agree, however, that the question for them was whether supplements are natural:

Cecilia: Bobby doesn’t feel the same way as I do when it comes to supplements because it’s not something that is natural, it is not a piece of broccoli. So, when we deal with something that is not a pierce of broccoli, or something like that, then I think that you [Bobby] start to think like this: Why should he [son] have it this way, right?

Bobby: Yes. For example, when it comes to Vitamin D drops, then I think it is more natural if he was out in the sun. So yes, basically that’s the way I feel, yes.

Although Bobby thinks that supplements are redundant, they do actually provide their son with supplements, underlining how such child-related consumption choices follow the mother’s opinion. The example also points to how naturalness is associated with things that are safe to consume. It is a means by which one can distinguish safe products from unsafe ones. In the exchange, Bobby defines naturalness by physical appearance and draws a rather simple line between natural and non-natural products: according to this logic, he would be able to decide on a product’s naturalness just by looking at it. In the next section, however, we will describe how perceptions of naturalness involve different rationales and see that the line of distinction is often far from as simple as that illustrated in the exchange above.

At this point, it important to ask how does the concept of naturalness relate to parents’ understanding of good parenting? Charlotte, a mother of two girls, explained that she did use probiotic as a means of treatment for her daughter, but she refused to use it preventively. She referred to the unique composition of small children and clearly saw it as her job, as a parent, to protect her daughters from unnecessary products:

Charlotte: We did this (used probiotics supplements) only because she had stomach ache. Otherwise, I would never give my child Lactic acid bacteria, if I didn’t think it was absolutely necessary.

I: No, why not?

Charlotte: Because I think we enter this world as small, perfect creatures and [that] we have the composition we have, and [that] unless something is not right, we should be able to function just fine.

Charlotte explains that she considers children perfect pieces of nature: “we enter this world as small, perfect creatures”. This is the key sentence if we are to understand why parents apply the concept of naturalness in their consumption practices. As parents consider their children as perfect pieces of nature in themselves, too much interference from useless or even harmful products may cause an imbalance in them (Author et al., 2018).

Multiple perceptions of the natural

Although the parents agreed that naturalness was important when they were deciding on a product, we can identify different dimensions of the concept. We identified three dimensions of naturalness across the interviews. A parent or couple may, of course, draw on more than one of these dimensions, or on all three of them, when they explain their consumption practices.

Familiarity

The first dimension, familiarity-based naturalness, associates naturalness with a product to which one has an established relation. The line of thought is that if I, or someone I trust, used this product previously and did not experience any harm, the product is safe to use for my child. Mary, a mother of two small children, explained why she prefers to buy them products made from natural sources, such as clothes made of wool, shoes of leather, toys of wood, sleeping bags made from lamb skin and so on. When asked why she prefers such products for her children, she at first found it difficult to explain, but then described her preference for natural products as a matter of tradition:

Mary: I guess it is because I’m a bit old school or something like that. That is how you have always done it. Children have always been sleeping on lamb skin, I guess. I use lamb skin for so many things, so of course the kids should have it too. They don’t have sleeping bags, they have bags made of lamb skin. It is natural [laughing].

Mary refers to past generations, and to tradition, and to the fact that she uses lamb skin herself, in explaining her attitude. So, here naturalness is about familiarity. Familiarity with a product gives a feeling of safety.

Familiarity-based naturalness is particularly prominent when parents talk about the second-hand toys they inherited from past generations, or when they explain food practices by, for example, referring to the way they grew up with specific foods and cooking techniques, and expressing their desire to pass on these traditions to their own children.

Purity

The second dimension, the purity dimension, is noticeably dominant in our data. Naturalness is here associated with the purity of a product. Non-naturalness is associated with anything that taints the purity of a product. This may include products where things are added, such as additives or chemicals or products which are somehow manipulated during the production process. Purity-based naturalness equates a non-natural product with an artificial product. It is sometimes not easy, however, to decide if a product is pure or not, as one cannot detect the purity of a product just from its bare appearance. Deciding on the purity of a product therefore involves strategies such as reading labels, investigating the latest research and looking at test results or guidelines. It involves tracking down the history of the product.

Unlike with the familiarity dimension, an established relation to a product here is not a safety guarantee in itself. Rather, inherited toys from former generations might be rejected because there is a risk that they will contain unknown, harmful elements. So, where the familiarity dimension finds safety in the personal relation to the product through, for example, traditions, the purity dimension connects safety with suitable product labels, test outcomes, guidelines and new research. Parents applying purity-based naturalness may have a practice of buying only products with labels that are trusted. They may reject products if they cannot gather enough information to decide on their purity:

Jette: So, Peter had some old toys that he had inherited. Some things his mum had saved, some small animals and stuff like that. And I don’t like that the kids play with them because I think that they are filled with all kinds of different stuff. I don’t think we agree about this. But anyway […]

I: How do you disagree?

Jette: So, I guess Peter is a bit more relaxed about it, whereas I’m thinking: No way, there is probably all kinds of different stuff in those – chemicals that they have taken out [of toys produced today].

The purity dimension involves both a material and social component. The material component is – as described – a matter of the absence of artificial substances. The social component involves the absence of “bad intentions”. Bobby, a father with a son, explained it this way:

Interviewer: Why is something better because it is natural?

Bobby: Because this is how one is created – if there was a God, then this is how it was supposed to be, I guess. I can hardly answer that because it is so obvious to me. I can’t see why anyone could think they could do it better than nature itself. And there is this detail that nature does not have to earn money. Those who produce, for example, Lactocare [a supplement for kids with probiotics] have to.

In these remarks, Bobby ascribes nature a sanctified position. Nature is perfect as it is, as this is how God created it. Nature is inherently good. Further, nature is to be trusted because it does not have to make a profit – something which companies do have to do. Nature is described as if it were a person with agency and personal characteristics. Thus, purity here is a form of innocence. Nature is innocent, whereas companies have all kinds of commercial interests.

A sub-dimension of purity: “how it was originally”

The purity dimension includes a sub-dimension involving a comparative element. This means that parents do not only think about the purity of products and their constitutive elements but also measure the purity of the product per se in terms of whether the product complies with the nature of human beings. Rikke, a mother of two, explained that she has never used lotion for her children’s skin, as she considers that non-natural. When the interviewer asked her what she meant by “natural”, she introduced an evolutionary perspective:

Interviewer: What do you mean by natural?

Rikke: Well, well […] The natural thing is to do nothing. That is how it was originally. But today there are all these soap products, and you have to be careful because they can cause an imbalance in the natural fat balance in your skin.

Here, Rikke in effect introduces the primitive man and his behavior as a gold standard against which to measure the naturalness of products. The primitive man is the ideal, as he did nothing. He was not contaminated by artificial products. In the parental understanding, the newborn child shares some of the characteristics as the primitive man. Like the primitive man, newborn children are born in perfect balance with nature: pure and not yet contaminated by unnecessary products. Rikke applies an understanding of nature (here, the child) as something that was in perfect harmony until human beings (here, products that parents introduce) began to interfere and manipulate it. Thus, within this sub-dimension non-naturalness is the disruption or disturbance of (what is perceived to be) the natural development of babies.

The notion of “how it was originally” was also invoked when mothers explained why they breastfed their children, or why they were disappointed that they had to go through a C-section and miss out on a “natural” birth. It also appeared when a few of the parents explained why they had limited their children’s consumption of milk. Thus, Aske, a father of two daughters, described how he and (mainly) his partner had restricted their children’s consumption of milk in response to its perceived non-naturalness and the conflicting messages they had received about milk:

Aske: We don’t serve the children milk. Not to the big one either. She doesn’t get milk, except once in a while when there is milk added to a product. Instead she will have water, right. And she loves it. And we’re like, some recommend something, and some recommend something else[…]

Interviewer: But why have you decided not to give her milk then?

Aske: It’s the wife that has decided it. Something about the fact that cow milk is not natural for humans to drink. But we’re not fanatical about it and once in a while she does get a glass of milk.

So, national guidelines on milk consumption may be abandoned in favor of what parents consider natural. Further, it is worth noting that Aske refers to the children’s mother when explaining why they decided to abandon milk. The participating fathers similar to Aske would often refer to the mothers when explaining everyday consumption routines. Thus, although the fathers in these interviews are highly involved caregivers, they (still) seem to hold a secondary position when it comes to child-related consumption routines. The fathers were, however, supportive of the mothers’ decisions.

The purity dimension was drawn on most often by parents when they discussed issues of naturalness. It was dominant when the parents explained specific food consumption strategies, such as avoiding processed food, additives in food and products with added sugar, or said why they preferred to buy organic products. But it also dominated outside the food context, for example, when the parents argued that they prefer non-food products made from natural materials, such as shoes of leather or toys made from wood.

Culture

The third dimension introduces a cultural interpretation of naturalness. For example, some of the parents interviewed argued that they would never forbid their children from consuming products with added sugar, as such products are a huge part of our cultural traditions, and therefore to deny children access to sugar is not natural. Rikke, who (as we saw above) also drew on the purity dimension, explained:

Rikke: And I certainly don’t have a “zero sugar” policy because I think it is unnatural. I think it is to teach the kids something different from how the world looks like today. I think it would make it harder for them to control the sugar when they one fine day are confronted with it and have the opportunity to consume sugar.

The cultural dimension differs from the familiarity and purity because it ascribes cultural norms to naturalness. This dimension recognizes that humans do not by nature need to drink milk, eat junk food, use lotion or eat sugar, but acknowledges also that, in today’s culture, denying children these things would not be natural and would be more harmful than allowing them. Here, harm is not only a physical matter; it involves a social dimension too. The idea is that if one abandons sugar, there is a risk that the child might be socially different and excluded. In this dimension, naturalness refers to what is ordinary, usual or normal. Where the familiarity dimension relates naturalness to a personal relation to a product, the cultural dimension connects it with social norms and values. Where the purity-based naturalness finds safety in the story of the product, and what has been done to it, cultural naturalness is merely a question of normality. Consider a pear that is round instead of pear-shaped. From a cultural perspective on naturalness, this would be a rather unusual pear, and thus non-natural – a pear that we would avoid purchasing for our children. If we were looking at the pear’s purity, however, we would investigate the way it was grown, and if we found that that involved no pesticides and GM technologies, we might well consider it natural regardless of its shape. We may even conclude that the pear is more natural than a regular pear-shaped pear. The purity dimension values harmony with nature; the cultural dimension values compliance with social and cultural norms. This is not to overlook that it can be less than clear in some cases what harmony with nature actually means, and this is a question which calls for further research.

The moral value of naturalness

Naturalness is more than a guiding principle. It is a social norm against which parents measure their behavior. This means that when parents fail to act on the principle of naturalness, they may experience feelings such as guilt or worry, and that when they consume natural goods, they may experience increased feelings of pleasure, of enjoyment in good parenting. This is especially evident when parents talk about the food they prepare, or buy, for their children. Here, buying what are perceived as natural foods, and preparing dishes from raw ingredients, engenders feelings of good parenting.

The norm of naturalness is also evident when mothers talk about giving birth. Here, too, mothers strive to have what they describe as a natural birth. This includes the avoidance of medication such as epidurals and pain relievers. C-sections – interventions that are described as the very opposite of natural birth – are felt to be a failure. The few women in our sample who had been given acute C-sections following birthing complications expressed strongly negative feelings about the procedure. Interestingly, these women did not mention the negative physical side effects of being surgically operated upon at all. Rather, their stories revealed emotional side effects such as disappointment about not living up to their own expectations as natural mothers. One mother explained how it took her close to a year to process her disappointment about not being able to give birth naturally. She explained that, with the intervention, she missed out on the opportunity to give birth as a “real primeval woman” (her words). Naturalness, therefore, is not only an important consideration in decisions relating to consumption; it is also a matter of what feels right and wrong in a moral sense. It affects how women look back on their birth experiences and are decisive in determining whether they had what they would describe as a good, or a bad, experience. Most importantly, the naturalness ideal seems to influence the way these women think of themselves as women. Medical interventions such as C-sections lead them to question their female identity.

In this way, naturalness becomes a guiding principle of life itself. For example, it was important when the interviewees talked about decisive life choices, such as their choice of residence. Here, the parents referred to nature as an important factor in buying a house with a garden and moving out of the city. The argument was that a garden increases the chances of an active childhood, and that a childhood in close proximity to nature provides the child with the opportunity to follow the course of nature, and to see and study how things grow. In short, access to a garden increases feelings of good parenting, whereas raising a child in the city evokes worries about pollution and traffic, as well as a problematic lack of direct access to nature:

Tina: And then we live on Church Street. There’s a lot of traffic. And noise from the traffic and things like that. And I’m thinking a bit about this because we know by now that this level of noise affects your health. (.) And then also the pollution from cars. When we’re on holiday – in the countryside – then I’m thinking: Now these poor city kids will finally have some fresh air [laughing]. So, it is merely the air and the car pollution that I’m most concerned about. And the house that we will probably move to is only one mile away from here, so the air is not super clean there either. But it feels like it is, because there is this garden, right? So that was essential, that there was a garden, and that it was larger than a small stamp, so that they would be able to play properly and go outside and such like.

Here, Tina, a mother of two, explains that she worries about the effects of living in a street with heavy traffic. She explains that she and her husband are about to buy a house with a garden in the neighborhood. Interestingly, she is aware that the new house may have similar levels of pollution, but she stresses that the garden makes her feel differently about pollution. The garden, as a symbol of nature, eases Tina’s worries, although she is fully aware that this may be just a matter of self-deception. Nature can also be decisive when, for example, parents are choosing day-care for children. Some of the parents talked about how they preferred a preschool in the forest rather than an ordinary preschool[1].

Mette: So, this thing about being able to go out in the forests all the time and play with whatever one finds instead of with conventional toys. This somehow provides you with a […] natural robustness

Interviewer: A natural robustness? What does that imply?

Mette: Well, yes […] that is to have nature as your preschool. And not a moon car or a sand box and that kind of stuff. But it is to be curious and create your own day in some way. Because in an ordinary preschool it is already given what you should play with, but this is not the case in the forest. Here you find a dead squirrel one day and a pine cone and some feathers on another. And I simply believe that this provides you with another kind of creativity.

Other parents might have been alarmed at the bacteria in a dead animal, but to Mette, the squirrel represents an important opportunity of playful education because meetings with nature train a child’s imagination and creativity.