Western culture can be seen as permeated by risk-consciousness. In particular, parents are under scrutiny in their roles as risk managers. In this article, we address parental experiences of children more at risk than other children, children with food allergy, and the management of allergy risk in everyday life. Drawing on a notion of risk as 'situated' in local everyday life, we argue that a further exploration of parental understandings of child food allergy risk would benefit from an analysis of studies across different local contexts. In this article, we draw on a secondary qualitative cross-cultural analysis of interview data from several studies of parents in Sweden and Scotland through 2006-2010, which focused on parents' understandings of the nature of food allergy and the children's management of the allergy risk. We found some common themes in the different data sets. First, parents depicted food allergy as life-threatening, a 'death risk' lurking in the background, more or less constantly present in different everyday situations, amounting to an existential condition in parenting. Second, they talked about food allergy risk as a relational phenomenon, meaning that the risk emerged in the encounter between the young person's individual competence to manage allergy risk and the understandings of allergy risk in others - thus depending on contexts and interaction between several actors. Finally, the analysis showed that unpredictability and risk in constant flux are the prominent aspects of living with food allergy. We also discussed the ways risk and trust are related, as well as how the involvement of others can be seen as both a risk and a safeguard.

In the last decades we have seen a growing interest in research into children's own experiences and understandings of health and illness. This development, we would argue, is much stimulated by the sociology of childhood which has drawn our attention to how children as a social group are placed and perceived within the structure of society, and within inter-generational relations, as well as how children are social agents and co-constructors of their social world. Drawing on this tradition, we here address some cross-cutting themes that we think are important to further the study of child health: situating children within health policy, drawing attention to practices around children's health and well-being and a focus on children as health actors. The paper contributes to a critical analysis of child health policy and notions of child health and normality, pointing to theoretical and empirical research potential for the sociology of children's health and illness.

Food allergy is an illness that requires constant risk management in everyday life. To date, there is no cure or preventive treatment, and the only way to manage the condition is therefore careful avoidance of the offending foodstuff and treatment of reactions when they occur. This article draws on a socio-cultural approach to explore parents' understandings and management of child food allergy in the context of everyday life, as situated' risk. A focus group study was carried out with 31 parents of children diagnosed with food allergy at two children's hospitals. The analysis of the focus group material reveals how the management of allergy risk seems to permeate most aspects of everyday life as well as how the parents draw on a dominant norm of risk avoidance as well as a counter-discourse of calculated risk taking. The patterns of risk management found in this study are discussed in terms of how risk avoidance and risk taking are intertwined and balanced in the context of moral parenthood.