Ideal Mother Research Articles

The Long and Winding Road: An Autobiographic Study of an Elite Athlete Mother’s Journey to Winning Gold

Within sport psychology, researchers have explored elite athlete mothers’ experiences. More work is needed to understand the nuanced psychosocial aspects of their athletic journeys. Studying autobiographical narratives is useful toward understanding the psychosocial nuances of motherhood and athletics in sociocultural context. Within the present study we sought to extend this understanding through studying one elite athlete’s—British runner Jo Pavey—journey as an athlete mother within her autobiography This Mum Runs (26 chapters totaling 253 pages). Thematic narrative analysis of key chapters focusing on pregnancy and motherhood in relation to training and competition allowed for the identification of a central theme—discovery narrative–reconfiguring the performance narrative—along with two subthemes: go with the flow and best of both worlds. The subthemes are used to illustrate the navigation of tensions in relation to an athlete mother identity grounded in family relationships to facilitate training and competition goals, within a discovery narrative. Applied sport psychology recommendations are made using narrative theory in relation to key findings. Recommendations focused on athlete stories and narrative resources as concrete entry points to encourage compatible athlete mother identities and sport career engagement. This study adds to sport psychology work that has used autobiography as theoretical, analytical, and applied resources to expand understanding of marginalized and/or hard to access topics in elite sport. This is the first autobiographic study to focus on elite athlete mother identities, furthering understanding of nuanced identity negotiation and experiences over time.Lay Summary: Understanding of elite athlete mother's negotiation of identity and athletic career is expanded through studying published/public autobiographical narratives. A discovery narrative grounded in personal growth and family relationships facilitates strategies that facilitate training and competition goals.

A scoping review to determine themes that represent perceptions of self as mother (‘ideal mother’ vs ‘real mother’)

ABSTRACTBackground: Postnatal depression (PND) is a key cause of maternal morbidity, with current systems of initial recognition in the UK detecting only 50% of cases. In attempts to predict those potentially at risk, this review suggests a novel approach.Aim: Implementing the concept of ‘ideal mother’ versus ‘real mother’, and asking the woman to compare their ‘ideal self’ against ‘existent self’, the aim of this instrument development review was to determine themes from the literature that relate to women’s perceptions of self as a mother, and from this identification develop questions for inclusion within a proposed new measure entitled the Self-Image as Mother Scale (SIMS).Method: A scoping review of the literature was carried out to identify themes considered to affect perception of self as mother, and from this identification, evidence-based questions for inclusion in the SIMS were developed.Findings: Themes identified included (1) marital dissatisfaction, (2) inadequate partner support, (3) lack of family support, (4) socioeconomic status and associated poverty, (5) concern about infant, (6) antenatal/postnatal complications, (7) acceptance of infant gender, (8) history of mental health problems, (9) unplanned pregnancy.Conclusions: From this scoping review 18 questions were developed for inclusion in the SIMS, which will then be evaluated for psychometric properties, scale refinement and validation.

Parenting under Adversity: Birth Parents’ Accounts of Inequality and Adoption

This paper aims to highlight inequality in current adoption processes and procedures in England and Wales. Whilst inequality has been recognised in adoption research, the role of social structures is often neglected. Inequality within social structures plays a role in the process of the permanent removal of children to be adopted and is worthy of further attention. Birth parent voices can contribute to a wider understanding of adoption, but often remain hidden. Empirical research findings highlight how birth parents may find that their adverse experiences are exacerbated by the adoption process, the emotional impact causing existing problems to increase, and through the impact of the adoption process on birth parent’s socio-economic status. Findings also illustrate how birth parents’ experiences were influenced by ideals of motherhood and ideas about ‘risk’ to children. The paper contributes to the growing area of research which illuminates the intersection of poverty, deprivation and child protection services and the wider contemporaneous debate concerning adoption in England and Wales.

Motherhood in Wordsworth: A Psychoanalytic Study of his Poetics

By definition, the Romantic ego is a male; the creator of language which helps him to establish “rites of passage toward poetic creativity and toward masculine empowerment.”1 The outlet for a male quest of self – possession in Romantic poetry is women. For the Romantic poets , the “true woman was emotional, dependent and gentle –a born flower”2 and “the Ideal mother was expected to be strong , self- reliant , protective and efficient caretaker in relation to children and home.”4 With emphasis on the individual in Romantic literature and ideology, mothers are depicted as good when they are natural or unnaturally bad. In the Romantic period then, women’s maternal function equals the “foundation of her social identity and of her sexual desire.”5 Consequently, “convinced that within the individual and autonomous and forceful agent makes creation possible”, the Romantic poets “struggle to control that agent and manipulate its energy.”6
 In a number of William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850) poems, this creative agent who possesses the powers of creation and imagination becomes a female character who is also often a mother. Nonetheless, when critics examine mothers in Wordsworth’s poetry, they also explore the child/poet’s relationship. Events in Wordsworth’s life surely influenced his attention to mothers. From a psycho-analytic perspective this interest might be an unconscious desire to resurrect the spirit of his dead mother Ann Wordsworth who died when the poet was almost eight. Thus in his poetry, the mother is the counterpart of the genuine faculty of the imagination of the poet and has a strong and felt presence within the poet’s poetic system.
 In The Prelude, Wordsworth acknowledges his mother’s deep influence on him. He associates her death with the break within his own poetic development; a sign that the poet relies upon in his creative power .It is through her that the young poet came first in contact with the genial current of the natural world. Nevertheless, without his mother, the male child’s connection to nature not only stands, it grows stronger:

The Trap of Ideal Motherhood

The Trap of Ideal Motherhood

‘She will know that her mother’s doing something for her’: women with intellectual disabilities assuming the mother identity

This article explores the experiences of women with intellectual disabilities in becoming a mother. The presented findings are from a grounded theory research study with 19 women with intellectual disabilities from the Czech Republic. The findings are organised around external and internal factors affecting the women’s assumption of the mother identity, with the most prominent being poverty of the participating mothers, negative attitudes towards their motherhood, and a lack of preparation for motherhood. There is a need for systemic support for mothers with intellectual disabilities, starting in adolescence with sexual education, and continued throughout adulthood, including programmes focused on skills development.

Contemporary Knowledge Workers and the Boundaryless Work-Life Interface: Implications for the Human Resource Management of the Knowledge Workforce.

In the last decade, knowledge workers have seen tremendous change in ways of working and living, driven by proliferating mobile communication technologies, the rise of dual-income couples, shifting expectations of ideal motherhood and involved fatherhood, and the rise of flexible working arrangements. Drawing on 54 interviews with Australian knowledge workers in the information technology sector, we argue that the interface between work and life is now blurred and boundaryless for knowledge workers. By this, we mean that knowledge workers are empowered and enslaved by mobile devices that bring work into the home, and family into the workplace. Knowledge workers take advantage of flexible working to craft unique, personal arrangements to suit their work, family, personal and community pursuits. They choose where and when to work, often interweaving the work domain and the home–family domain multiple times per day. Teleworkers, for example, attain rapid boundary transitions rending the work–home boundary, thus making their experience of the work–life interface boundaryless.

Investigation into abandoned neonates admitted to Salt River Forensic Pathology Mortuary, Cape Town

The high rates of abandoned neonatal remains admitted to Salt River Mortuary (SRM), Cape Town, and the dearth of literature published in South Africa prompted a retrospective assessment of these cases to describe the profile and assess the scope of the post-mortem investigation of abandoned neonates, as well as determine the prosecution rate of abandoned live births. Demographic details, scene information and post-mortem findings were obtained from medico-legal case files concerning non-viable fetuses, stillbirths and concealment of birth cases admitted to SRM between 1 January 2012 and 31 December 2016 (n=249). Despite the majority of the cases being natural deaths, the cause of death frequently remained ‘undetermined’ in these cases, often due to the presence of decomposition. Histological analyses were only performed in a small fraction of undetermined cases. Furthermore, the hypothesis that the prosecution rate of abandoned live births is extremely low was supported by this study, with only one case prosecuted in the 5-year period. For the remainder of the cases, the court status was given as either ‘under investigation’ (47.8%) or ‘case closed’ (47.8%). In the majority of the instances, the case was closed due to the unknown identity of the biological mother; however, DNA analyses were not performed in all of these cases. Overall, the data highlighted the need for the development and implementation of standard protocols, and recommendations were made for conducting the medico-legal investigation of abandoned neonates in a South African setting.

La construcción discursiva de la identidad de madre/trabajadora en madres del grupo socioeconómico medio de Santiago de Chile.

Este artículo examina la manera en que un grupo de mujeres chilenas del estrato socioeconómico medio dinámicamente construyen sus identidades como madre. Los datos recolectados a través de entrevistas en profundidad se analizaron tomando en cuenta los aportes de los Estudios Críticos del Discurso y el Modelo de la Valoración. De acuerdo con los patrones de co-ocurrencia de significados valorativos, encontramos tres voces identitarias realizadas por estrategias valorativas particulares: la voz de la madre reflexiva y en proceso de construcción, la voz de madre y de mujer trabajadora en tensión y la voz de la madre optimista. El proceso reflexivo por medio del cual constantemente cuestionan sus roles conduce a estas madres a una tensión en su identidad de madre y de mujer trabajadora, concibiendo la maternidad y el trabajo como espacios de escasa congruencia. Si bien los recursos valorativos utilizados por estas madres demuestran que han internalizado una percepción dicotómica de sus identidades de madre y mujer trabajadora, ellas también cuestionan las demandas divergentes que la sociedad chilena le imponen a las mujeres, por lo que deciden simplificarse en la esfera laboral para poder dedicar tiempo y disfrutar de aquello que constituye su principal prioridad, esto es, estar con sus hijos.

Prototipe Ibu Ideal: Kajian Linguistik Kognitif

This study discusses the ideal mother prototype in Indonesian cognition. This study discusses about what is the ideal mother prototype variable that is most influential in the cognition of Indonesian people and how does the background influence of respondents to the ideal mother prototype. This study uses the prototype theory of Tomaszczyk (2007) in cognitive linguistic studies. This study used variables housewife/stay at home mom; parenting; and doing their own household work, such as sweeping, to measure mother ideality. The results indicated that the prototype variables of the most influential ideal mother were  parenting their own children; do their own household work; and  housewife/stay at home mom. Meanwhile, based on the gender background of the respondents, both male and female respondents considered "parenting" as the most influential variable. However, in the second rank, men consider the variable "housewife/stay at home mom" more influential than "doing their own household work ", while female respondents, on the contrary. Meanwhile, based on the background of the respondent's marriage, both respondents who have and have not married there is no difference, the variable "parenting" is the most influential variable, then "doing their own household work" and "housewife/stay at home mom".

Professional Instincts: Professional Mothering Rhetoric and the Revision of Maternal Labor

This article examines the nineteenth-century movement to professionalize motherhood by revising the rhetoric used to describe maternal expertise and training. On the surface, this revision appears to modernize maternal labor and articulate its value to a capitalist, democratic society. I argue that in practice, however, it demonstrates a double standard of professionalism that limits women’s social mobility while elevating the value of the maternal institution. To illustrate this argument, I analyze three articles that construct the rhetorical framework of professional mothering that emerged in the Progressive Era and demonstrate the continuity of their arguments with contemporary rhetoric regarding mothers and work. To this end, I offer suggestions for how we might better address the goals of professional mothering rhetoric in ways that disrupt traditional characterizations of motherhood, maternal labor, and professional identity.

“The ideal wife” as “the ideal mother”; some aspects of the Argentinian late eugenic thinking

This work explores some aspects of the eugenic paradigm as a hegemonic thinking in Argentina, its cultural penetration and survival. In this way, that biopolitics consolidation is explained from its immanent imbrication with prevailing ideologies of Liberal-Conservative characteristics. The article concentrates on the weak impact generated by the dissociation between sex, gender, genitality and procreation, which was reasserted since the Sexual Revolution of the Second Post-War period; and, at the same time, in the social root of a marriage concept as locus characterized by a monogamous and lifelong sexual entailment. Here, we hold that this place was conditioned by different influences, as the eugenic normalization of sexuality, which occupied an important site in this field.

Narrating Mother Identities From Prison

Incarcerated mothers face challenges to mothering in prison, including restricted opportunities to perform parenting tasks, ambiguous loss, and a compromised parenting identity. This study uses interviews with incarcerated mothers in the United States to explore how such women negotiate motherhood. All of the women grappled with how to care for their children from prison and projected futures that they hoped to experience as mothers. They varied in their active involvement as decision makers and in their intimacy with their children, but all were seen as renegotiating narrative identities. The study underscores the fact that social actors can be creative with self-narrative when they can be creative in few other ways.

The Types and Meanings of Maternal Heroes in the North Korean Songun (Military First) Era

This study analyzed the background, type, and meaning of the emergence of maternal heroes in the Songun period of North Korea. The North Korean authorities have introduced an ideal mother model and have continuously emphasized the maternal role of women. This prolonged emphasis became the first background for the mother hero to come out when the nation was in crisis in the Songun era. The second reason for the appearance of maternal heroes in the Songun era was the severe food shortages in the 1990s, which caused a rapid decrease of population as the number of infant mortality increased due to starvation and malnutrition. In addition, the low birthrate of women spread due to serious economic difficulties. The North Korean authorities have established the title of the maternal hero and actively promoted childbirth. The third is the collapse of various welfare systems including the state ration system. When the social security system that the North Korean socialist regime boasted about was not operating smoothly, the government forced women to take care of orphans and elderly people without families to depend on by accepting them as members of their families. The maternal heroes promoted based on these backgrounds in the Songun era can be sorted into four types. A hero’s mother who raised her child as a hero, a mother who gave birth to a lot of children, a mother who raised many children to become soldiers or soldiers’ wives, and a mother of a large socialist family, who adopted orphans to foster instead of leaving them for the state to raise. Creating a maternal hero system in this way, and forcing women to be like this in the Songun era, can be regarded as the North’s gender policy, which was to mobilize the female workforce according to the demands of society in that time. It seems that gender roles in North Korea are maintained through the hierarchical gender policy in which men are in charge of national security and women are responsible for daily life, such as reproduction and child care.

Baking Bittersweet: Mothers’ Dessert-Making Behind Bars

Food is a significant component of life; its preparation is gendered and associated with caregiving roles. For incarcerated women, food is especially salient. Inmate-created recipes can assist with asserting pro-social identities and responding to powerlessness. It is less certain if incarcerated mothers draw upon recipes to emphasize mothering identities. Therefore, this study uses focus groups at a jail and additionally analyzes contributed recipes to explore the way dessert-making behind bars affirms motherhood. Results suggest that dessert preparation aids in disrupting negative stereotypes, illuminates the fragility of incarcerated mothering, and highlights agentic practices. Implications for policy and research are included.

Juggling motherhood and sport: A qualitative study of the negotiation of competitive recreational athlete mother identities

ObjectivesQualitative research on physically active mothers has shown that recreational sport allows for personal, social and cultural barriers to be renegotiated in ways that facilitate well-being and sport participation. The purpose of this study was to extend this understanding by examining competitive recreational athlete mothers' negotiation of sport training and competition in relation to their identities. DesignA qualitative approach grounded in social constructionism and discursive psychology was used to theorize athlete mother identities as constructed within nuanced cultural discourses, with multiple meanings and effects (e.g., psychological, social, behavioural) on women's psychological, training and parental experiences. MethodAn interpretive thematic analysis (TA) was conducted on in-depth interviews with 7 North American recreational athlete mothers, who train to compete in national and/or international sport competitions. ResultsA central theme constructed multiple meanings of motherhood and athletic experiences: juggling motherhood and sport. The meanings of motherhood and sport were multiple and fluid depending on three sub-themes, which were used as strategies to negotiate identities as athletes and mothers: 1. adjustment of training and competition; 2. support as multifaceted and negotiated; and 3. reciprocity of motherhood and sport. These themes highlight the nuanced ways in which juggling motherhood and sport are negotiated in relation to socially constructed identities, in constraining and emancipative ways. ConclusionsThis study extends research on the social construction of cultural identities in sport psychology and work on athlete mother identities into competitive recreational athletics.

Lesbian, Bisexual and Queer Motherhood: Crafting Radical Narratives and Representing Social Change through Cultural Representations

This article examines how lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer (LGBQ) women negotiate mother-identity narratives through critical engagement with diverse media representations. The author draws on the reported experiences of LGBQ mothers living in Great Britain, collected in semi-structured, in-depth qualitative interviews during 2013 and 2014. The interview data is used to examine how queer and social-radical positions are articulated through, and to explore LGBQ women’s relationship to, the identity of mother and its attendant traditional gender role. The LGBQ women the author spoke with identified a range of representations drawn from sources including graphic novels, children’s books and television as significant in their negotiation of mother identities. The author argues that LGBQ women’s selection and usage of representations illustrates their deliberate, conscious and ideologically driven negotiations of cultural images, and indicates the way in which media is central in articulating mother identities. The author concludes by suggesting that traditional images of motherhood, and the existing vocabulary of mothering, are radically redeployed by women whose identities fall outside of the heteronorm. Further, it is demonstrated that the use of existing representations of motherhood to describe different non-heterosexual mother identities is a key way in which LGBQ women model social change and seek to circulate alternative, validated narratives of motherhood.

Introduction: Imagining Motherhood in the Twenty-First Century—Images, Representations, Constructions

This special issue of Women: A Cultural Review explores the diversity of maternal images proffered by various media formats, including cinema, literature and visual art, in the twenty-first century. The editors begin their introduction with an overview of recent research on maternal representation, then introduce the primary thematic concerns that feature in the included articles. They look at how mothers whose mothering experiences do not reflect conventional family models—particularly single mothers, LGBQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer/questioning) mothers and migrant mothers—have been either sidelined by or misrepresented in cultural and media depictions of motherhood, and how these depictions have begun to evolve in recent years. They additionally explore how the idealization of motherhood in mainstream culture casts women who choose not to have children in a negative light. Ultimately, they point to how the images, representations and constructions of motherhood analysed by the various contributors both reflect and contribute to the shaping of contemporary cultural meanings of motherhood.

A Review of the Importance of Maternal-fetal Attachment According to the Islamic Recommendations

Background & aim: Maternal-fetal attachment has an important effect on mother's identity as well as maternal and fetal health. Moreover, this concept is considered as a crucial issue for the improvement of children emotional development. Regarding the Islamic recommendations on maternal-fetal attachment and its correlation with maternal affection, this study was conducted to review the importance of maternal-fetal attachment according to the Islamic recommendations. Methods: This review was conducted on the religious texts, which covered the subject of interest and were published within 2000-2017. Various databases including Medline, PubMed, Google, IranMedex, SID, and Magiran as well as the websites of Muslim authorities (i.e., the section responding to religious questions) were searched. The searching was carried out using keywords as: “Islamic religious teachings”, “pregnant women and Fatwa of the Islamic jurists”, and “aspects of maternal fetal attachment in Islam”. Results: According to the results of the reviewed texts, the mutual readiness of mother and fetus leads to the improvement of their affection. The maternal factors affecting the maternal-neonatal attachment included personality traits, marriage, selection of partner, post-marriage issues, pregnancy, as well as physical and psychological characteristics. There were also some effective factors on the newborn’s innate readiness for the development of attachment, such as fetal appearance, family and social support, maternal nutrition during pregnancy, and neonatal mood. Conclusion: According to the Holy Quran versus and hadiths, maternal-fetal attachment and its promotion are affected by both maternal and fetal factors. Moreover, following the factors affecting attachment will lead to their role functioning. Therefore, it is intensively recommended to incorporate a glance of Islamic instruction into the pregnancy education to improve the maternal-fetal attachment.

Simulating Genetic Circuits in Bacterial Populations with Growth Heterogeneity

We computationally study genetic circuits in bacterial populations with heterogeneities in the growth rate. To that end, we present a stochastic simulation method for gene circuits in populations of cells and propose an efficient implementation that we call the “Next Family Method”. Within this approach, we implement different population setups, specifically Chemostat-type growth and growth in an ideal Mother Machine and show that the population structure and its statistics are different for the different setups whenever there is growth heterogeneity. Such dependence on the population setup is demonstrated, in the case of bistable systems with different growth rates in the stable states, to have distinctive signatures on quantities including the distributions of protein concentration and growth rates, and hysteresis curves. Applying this method to a bistable antibiotic resistance circuit, we find that as a result of the different statistics in different population setups, the estimated minimal inhibitory concentration of the antibiotic becomes dependent on the population setup in which it is measured.