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One of the aspects that characterises neoliberal societies is the increasing attribution of individual responsibility. Citizens are required to commit themselves to adopting ‘appropriate’ lifestyles and to self-managing their health. Individual responsibility translates into a set of knowledge and techniques of self-governance, through which individuals learn and are expected to act in an increasingly autonomous way in order to prevent or mitigate health risks. This fostering of self-governance and individual responsibility affects both children and adults; in accordance with it, adults are required to transmit a sort of model of “pedagogy of responsibility” (Neyrand & Mekboul, 2014), through which children learn to acquire self-management of their health. This scenario becomes complicated if we take into consideration the two usual and contrasting representations of childhood in western societies: children as active subjects, or children as vulnerable subjects. Our work explores these contrasting representations through the narrations of adults and children of their experiences of Type 1 Diabetes.

This paper reports several findings of a survey on children aged 5–13¹ years focusing on their daily lives. The aim was to test the assumption, claimed in New Childhood Sociology, that children are a generational group so strictly dependent on adult society that they have little autonomy in their daily behaviour. Moreover, although they are a social group that is different from that of adults, they are so diversified internally that it seems more appropriate to speak of diversified childhoods (James, Jenks & Prout, 1998; James & Prout, 1990; Qvortrup, 1991; Hengst & Zeiher, 2004). Our first objective in this paper was therefore to improve the rather scarce knowledge of children's everyday lives in post-industrial Western societies and then to analyse to what extent these were connected with those of adults. Finally, we wished to detect the degree and patterns of differences in the children's lifestyles.