Intensive Mothering Research Articles

Changing understandings and expectations of parental involvement in education

ABSTRACTParents, especially mothers, have been increasingly positioned as a central determinant of children’s educational outcomes. Analysing articles from a Canadian parenting magazine, this study explores and compares understandings of what it means to be an involved parent in a child’s education during two time periods: 1993–1995 and 2013–2015. Findings suggest that involved parenting with respect to children’s education is complex and intensive, occurring in both the home and the school. Over time the necessity of parental involvement became more taken-for-granted and the ideal parental role moved from one of providing direct assistance to children to one of creating the right environment for children to take self-responsibility; a shift that involved more emotion management on the part of mothers. These changes are analysed in the context of neoliberal understandings and intensive mothering with attention paid to class and gender implications.

Mothering Ideology and Work Involvement in Late Pregnancy: A Clustering Approach

The aim of this study was to identify cognitive acrobatics performed by French women during late pregnancy (n = 139) to reconcile intensive mothering ideology (IMI) and work involvement. A hierarchical cluster analysis (Ward method, squared Euclidian distance) was performed to define different patterns. Thus, four clusters were retained: (1) women devoted to IMI (27%), (2) women devoted to IMI and worried about the consequences of maternal work for children (13%), (3) women not devoted to IMI (35%), (4) women not devoted to IMI and disengaged from work (25%). They exhibited differences regarding socio-demographic and psychological variables. Mainly, women devoted to IMI and worried about the consequences of maternal work for children (Cluster 2) showed more depressive symptoms (38.9%) and preoccupied attachment. They were also planning to go back to work later (50%) and not to breastfeed (39%) even if they had a highly positive attitude about breastfeeding (67%). These results are discussed in terms of socio-psychological resources and requirements regarding perinatal adjustment. Considering women’s values and beliefs is crucial to understand better how mothering and employment demands are experienced.

Playing with class: Middle‐class intensive mothering and the consumption of children's toys in Vietnam

AbstractThis article explores the way in which Vietnamese mothers purchase, gift and share toys with their children. The study utilises a qualitative design comprising semi‐structured interviews with 10 Vietnamese middle‐class professional working mothers of children aged between 5 and 9. This research highlights the way in which toys defined as “good” by mothers need to fulfil a number of important practical and social functions: they act as an investment in the child's future, as a reward, and as a means for mothers to buy time for themselves. The findings illustrate how these functions are influenced by Confucian and Western discourses of intensive mothering, generating a localized style of middle‐class intensive mothering, characterized by what we have called the ideal of the triple excellent and intensive mother.

Urban homesteading and intensive mothering: (re) gendering care and environmental responsibility in Boston and Chicago

In this article, we explore how normative ideologies of good mothering are being reproduced and contested through urban homesteading, a sustainable lifestyle that emphasizes household self-provisioning. Urban homesteading practices may include gardening and urban agriculture, canning, and pickling, and a variety of do-it-yourself and craft projects. Based on qualitative research with 19 urban homesteading households with children in the Boston and Chicago Metropolitan areas, we argue that urban homesteading discourses and practices reflect and align with intensive mothering ideologies in the United States. Intensive mothering ideologies encourage a selfless devotion of physical, emotional, and mental energy to childrearing, and are often associated with individualized, privileged, and gendered subjectivities. We find these intensive mothering ideologies especially visible in the ways that mothers perceive and respond to environmental risk by adopting and enacting urban homesteading labors. We also note that the choice to respond to risk by homesteading is often, but not always, mediated and animated by economic, temporal, and social privilege. In this way, urban homesteading and surrounding discourses may inadvertently raise the bar of ‘good’ motherhood in ways that demand more of women and marginalize or burden mothers with less resources and privilege. However, rather than dismiss homesteading entirely on these grounds, we suggest that it may be possible to harvest impulses of care, connection, and collectivity associated with homesteading in ways that benefit rather than burden all mothers.

Pushing the limits of motherhood: Narratives of older women in rural Zimbabwe

ABSTRACTDrawing on narratives of rurally-based Zimbabwean older women, this article analyses experiences of motherhood in relation to the country’s shifting economic and socio-political landscapes. The narratives of these older women, who have nurtured their children and continue to do so way into (their children’s) adulthood, push scholars to grapple with questions of motherhood in respect of ‘intensive mothering’. Intensive mothering points at the exclusivity of motherhood which frames the responsibility to provide and care for the children during their formative years as virtually the mother’s. Older women in this article are second and third generation mothers whose narratives challenge constructions of motherhood which limit intensive mothering to the formative stages of children’s lifecycle. The narratives raise questions like ‘when does a woman cease to be a hands-on mother who vigorously provides for her adult children?’ Such questions are a way into existential and contextual realities of ageing in rural Zimbabwe. Contextual-based analyses explore the interaction between motherhood, socioeconomic and political change in Zimbabwe through language that assigns meaning to motherhood, ageing, and the state. Overall, the article offers the reader insight into how questions of motherhood, ageing, and the state might affect women located within equally volatile contexts across the globe.

Improvement of methods for receiving high quality grape saplings by in vitro method

The most important link of nursery garden is the production of the certified cuttings and saplings from super intensive mother plantation. The perspective trend in nursery gardening is growing saplings with closed root system [a container crop] on the artificial substratum and soil substitutes. It allows planting of green cuttings (grafts) and test-tube plants into open ground in any season. Taking into account of these circumstances there is necessity of improvement methods and adaptation ways of test-tube plants of grape to non-sterile conditions came into being.

Parenting agendas: An empirical study of intensive mothering and infant cognitive development

Intensive parenting debates reflect the critical importance of a child’s early years, and parents’ roles in determining later developmental outcomes. Mothers are usually assigned primary responsibility for facilitating their infants’ cognitive development through adequate and appropriate sensory stimulation. Drawing on Foucault’s technologies of the self, this article explores how new mothers shape their mothering practices in order to provide appropriately stimulating interactions. Using findings from 64 interviews (31 women were interviewed twice, 2 women were interviewed only once) three main positions are identified of how mothers function in relation to their infants’ development: mother as committed facilitator, creative provider and careful/caring monitor. The study considers the perceived normative nature of these positions and the impact they can have on middle-class women’s subjectivities as new mothers. This analysis of parental agendas and infant cognitive development suggests that a continued focus on the mother’s role within early infant development reflects and upholds ideologies of child-centred, intensive mothering, which risks precluding ‘alternative’ maternal subjectivities and promotes conservative feminine identities.

Pregnancy Without Women: Lessons from Childbirth Classes

In this article, we examine motherhood “scripts,” or cultural discourses, taught in prenatal classes in the US South. Our analysis revealed that these prenatal classes, all taught in the early 2000s, appear to have supported a model of “intensive mothering” that undermined women’s autonomy and power in pregnancy. In addition, the content and messaging of these classes appears to have contributed to a societal tendency to make pregnant women, especially poor women and women of color, invisible while privileging the fetus as a person rater than as a potential person.

The good, the bad and the ‘good enough’ mother on the UK parenting forum Mumsnet

The article investigates the conceptualisation of the good and bad mother from the point of view of users of the UK parenting website Mumsnet, which offers the opportunity to assess the dominant ideologies of motherhood at play in contemporary middle-class British society. The study uses Hays' (1998) discussion of the Intensive Mothering ideology and Johnston and Swanson's (2003) typology of contemporary mothering ideologies in analysing the mothers' discussions. It is argued that, on Mumsnet, mothers actively engage with, re-work and to a certain extent resist the good mother ideal. It is also suggested that the users of Mumsnet are very conscious of the role that the media plays in the construction of the ideals of motherhood and are also aware of how such ideals might change through time. Anonymous forums such as Mumsnet can offer a space for the reality of the maternal experience to be articulated in resistance to the ideology of the good mother.

The ‘Good’ Attached Mother: An Analysis of Postmaternal and Postracial Thinking in Birth and Breastfeeding Policy in Neoliberal Britain

ABSTRACTIn the last 20 years, a new parenting philosophy has garnered increasing attention and popularity. Coined by William Sears in the early 1980s, attachment parenting (AP) proposes that secure attachment between parent and child is necessary for optimal development and therefore ‘good’ parenting. Simultaneously, neoliberalism, a socio-political context defined by market logic, has emerged as the dominant global trend. In this article, I examine the correspondence between AP, and the broader ideology of intensive mothering it expresses, and the parenting-related policies advanced by the neoliberal state. Specifically, I focus on how birth and breastfeeding policy in Britain aligns with AP, contextualising the emergence of AP and its appearance in contemporary state policy as the result of two features of neoliberalism: postmaternal and post-racial thinking. I draw attention to the experiences of black mothers and, through this lens, reveal the raced, gendered and classed dimensions of ‘good’ parenting. In my examination of these policies, I argue that postmaternal and postracial thinking have enabled the emergence of AP, an approach that individualises child-rearing and relies upon an uncritical appropriation of the so-called traditional practices of racialised women.

Intensive Mothering on the Homefront: An Analysis of Army Mothers

ABSTRACTThis research includes interviews with 10 U.S. Army wives and mothers to examine mothering within the military context. Findings reveal what I label “military motherwork,” a mothering style similar to civilian mothering described in the marriage and family literature. Similar to civilian mothers, they feel more responsible for maintaining the household and taking care of their needs, both physically and emotionally, compared to their husbands. They also often engage in what Sharon Hays (1996) described as intensive mothering, in which parents use the majority of their resources and focus much of their time to improve their children’s lives. However, military motherwork is also unique in that mothers raise their children within the military institution and must adapt to deployment and all of the risks associated with combat. Intensive mothering within the civilian motherhood literature remains relevant to military mothers, as evidenced in interviews, but also modified to suit military lifestyles.

Only If You Are One of Us

Korean wild geese mothers make up a rapidly increasing but underexplored group of middle-class Asian migrant women who cross the national borders with their children for education. This essay discusses how Korean wild geese mothers strive to successfully perform intensive mothering and accomplish the educational goals for their children, while overcoming unexpected challenges in the host societies. For this essay, I primarily rely on interviews of 31 Korean wild geese mothers in United States. Canada, and South Korea. I corroborate the importance of the co-ethnic immigrant community as critical resources for migrant women. However, I also identify the special costs that these women have to pay for the legitimate access to their own ethnic community's resources and information. Demonstrating the ambivalent impacts of the Korean immigrant communities on wild geese mothers, this essay adds a more nuanced explanation to the Asian American Studies on the complex interplay between immigrant social networks and ...

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Welfare-to-Work Program Managers’ Expectations and Evaluations of Their Clients’ Mothering

Dominant ideologies about poverty in the USA draw on personal responsibility and beliefs that a ‘culture of poverty’ creates and reproduces inequality. As the primary recipients of welfare are single mothers, discourses surrounding welfare are also influenced by dominant ideologies about mothering, namely intensive mothering. Yet, given the centrality of resources to intensive mothering, mothers on welfare are often precluded from enacting this type of parenting. In this paper, I conduct a critical discourse analysis of 69 interviews with Ohio Works First (USA) program managers to examine how welfare program managers talk about and evaluate their clients’ mothering. My findings suggest three themes regarding expectations and evaluations of clients’ mothering: (a) enacting child-centered mothering, (b) breaking out of the ‘culture of poverty’ and (c) (mis)managing childcare.

Exploring the emotional geography of the leisure time physical activity space with mothers of young children

Many women experience the transition to motherhood as a disconnection from the embodied and emotional self due to the demands articulated through contemporary discourses of motherhood. Using a qualitative approach, this paper explores the everyday emotional geographies of leisure time physical activity (LTPA), the emotions experienced, the physical and metaphorical spaces created, and the connections to embodied selves of mothers with young children. The findings indicate that despite discourses of intensive mothering, immobilising emotions and overwhelming tiredness, some women not only created a space for LTPA in their busy lives but were able to create connections between body, space and emotions. These connections and the emotions evoked were largely associated with spaces outside of the home. Understanding how women define and use these spaces, and negotiate and transform the self, can allow us to explore the diversity of women’s experiences of physical activity and their concepts of LTPA as ‘personal space’.

Corporeal Commodification and Women’s Work

Private cord blood banking is the practice of paying to save cord blood for potential future use. Informed by the literature on corporeal commodification and feminist theories, this article analyses women’s work in banking cord blood. This article is based on in-depth interviews with 13 women who banked in a private bank in Canada. From learning about cord blood banking to collecting cord blood and transporting it to the private bank’s laboratory, women labour to ensure that cord blood is successfully banked. Private cord blood banking involves the overlap or insertion of commercial practices, and relations with clinical practices and relations that may cause tensions and confusion for women and clinical practitioners. Moreover, private banking reinforces and is reinforced by an ‘intensive mothering’ ideology. This article shows that corporeal commodification is not confined to a laboratory and the work of experts but extends into women’s everyday lives.

Everyday dramas of conscience: navigating identity through creative neutralisations

ABSTRACTThe paper seeks to recuperate autonomy within debates around identity as the discursive construction of self through exploring the ‘greening’ of intensive mothering discourse and the emergence of new subject positions and practices of accountability. It argues that facets of ideologies of ethical and sustainable consumption are inscribed within this discourse, authorising identity work and furnishing everyday provisioning routines with significance and urgency; and that related social practices that are marked for ‘greening’ diligence or negligence are not merely situated and productive, but transformative of mothering identities, roles and norms. We report the findings of a study of a group of professional working mothers as they negotiate competing and conflictual spaces of doing ‘green’ mothering. This opens an analytical window on the diversity of signifying practices that characterise how informants play with boundaries and ambiguity in creative ways, using images of responsible consumption and sustainable living to negotiate appeals to social well-being while authorising claims to ‘greening’ competence. Our interviews capture discursive events that rearticulate social messages, mixing them with brand appeals and media content that situate the invention of ‘new’ mothering with regard to flows of ‘greening’ discourse. Inventive appeals and related subject positions speak of a repertoire of strategic messaging practices, themselves consistent with a heightened reflexivity shaping content and presentation through practices we understand as modes of neutralisation – forms of self-governance and accountability that seek to generate resources of resilience that help reinforce green mothering identity claims made to self and others. Through socialising ‘sustainability’ in this way, we contribute to our understanding of the social surrogacy of brands and its problematics.

Intensive Mothering: The Cultural Contradictions of Modern Motherhood

Intensive Mothering: The Cultural Contradictions of Modern Motherhood

Militant Lactivism? Attachment Parenting and Intensive Motherhood in the UK and France, C. Faircloth

Militant Lactivism? Attachment Parenting and Intensive Motherhood in the UK and France, C. Faircloth

Book Review: Militant Lactivism?: Attachment Parenting and Intensive Motherhood in the UK and France (Fertility, Reproduction & Sexuality)

Book Review: Militant Lactivism?: Attachment Parenting and Intensive Motherhood in the UK and France (Fertility, Reproduction & Sexuality)

Faircloth, Charlotte. Militant lactivism? Attachment parenting and intensive motherhood in the UK and France. xi, 266 pp., illus., tables, bibliogr. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. £60.00 (cloth)

Faircloth, Charlotte. Militant lactivism? Attachment parenting and intensive motherhood in the UK and France. xi, 266 pp., illus., tables, bibliogr. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. £60.00 (cloth)