Complicating Childhood: Gender, Ethnicity, and “Disadvantage” within the New Zealand Children's Health Camps Movement

By the mid-20th century New Zealand's children's health camps movement had gained the status of a national icon, highlighting children's health and well-being in a campaign unrivalled, before the 1960s, by any equivalent place-time cause. The movement's long existence within a relatively small nation state with an increasingly vocal indigenous population makes it an ideal base from which to study challenges to the undifferentiated category of "the child." The success of the movement was based upon a highly unitary conception of childhood and an uncomplicated view of child health. The paper shows how at certain moments in the movement's development a blanket categorization of childhood was challenged, first by gender and later, and more substantially, by the ethnicity of health camp recruits. “Disadvantage" was a constant subtext, but its link with socio-economic status was downplayed in official discourses. Gender was highlighted in the 1920s and 1930s when girls' health needs were informed by (White) racial anxieties. Thereafter the physical and mental health needs of boys underwrote health camp recruitment and programs, even if this was not formally acknowledged. From the late 1980s, however, gender was subordinated to ethnicity. A growing focus on the Treaty of Waitangi issues and relationships of Maori to social services saw Maori children become visible in New Zealand's health camps as never before. With an acknowledgment of difference came competition for funds and an undermining of the national consensus about child health.