Responsible Motherhood Research Articles

Dialogic voices in talk about drinking and pregnancy

Alcohol use during pregnancy poses a significant risk of fetal alcohol syndrome. This study presents the interpretive findings of the formative research phase of a funded grant to develop a community‐based public health media campaign on the topic of drinking during pregnancy. In the initial wave of data collection, 50 rural women were recruited from four Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) clinics in southeastern Iowa to participate in semi‐structured interviews. In the second wave, 10 additional WIC clients were interviewed for member‐checking purposes. Findings revealed two competing discourses that organized these women's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors surrounding drinking and pregnancy: the discourse of individualism and the discourse of responsible motherhood. These two discourses offer opposing normative guidelines for talk among their close female relatives and friends. The implications of these findings for designing a community‐based media campaign are discussed.

O ser-com o filho com deficiência mental: alguns desvelamentos

A compreensão do cuidar do filho com deficiência mental se faz relevante diante da importância das relações estabelecidas entre pais e filhos para a saúde mental da criança. Nesta investigação foi usado o referencial teórico-metodológico da fenomenologia, que se propõe a desocultar facetas de um fenômeno que se encontram obscuras. Onze casais e duas mães com filhos com deficiência mental foram entrevistados, tendo-se a seguinte questão norteadora: "como vem sendo cuidar de seu filho?". Os relatos foram analisados segundo a busca das convergências e foi possível compreender que, para os pais investigados, há uma dificuldade de conceber o ser-com-deficiência, e o conhecimento experiencial é relevante para encontrar meios de favorecer o seu desenvolvimento; o apego ao filho é vivido como possibilidade de reconhecimento da diversidade humana. Os pais se mostraram participantes no cuidado, embora com atitudes ainda permeadas por concepções de que essa responsabilidade caberia à mãe.

WOMEN AND HEALTH: POWER, TECHNOLOGY, INEQUALITY, AND CONFLICT IN A GENDERED WORLD

WOMEN AND HEALTH: POWER, TECHNOLOGY, INEQUALITY, AND CONFLICT IN A GENDERED WORLD

The Value of Life and the Cost of Living – Damages for Wrongful Birth (Staple Inn Reading 2001)

ABSTRACTThe lecture begins by outlining the differences in lifetime earnings between men and women, and between women with different levels of skill and with different numbers of children. It continues with a discussion on wrongful conception and wrongful birth, and the legal implications when damages are sought when children are born who were not meant to have been born. Many examples of claims for damages brought before the courts, over a period of time, are used to illustrate various aspects of this. Cases concerning both healthy and disabled children are discussed, and the changes that occur for all women who have given birth and the mother's responsibility of care are considered.

Priscilla Wakefield as a writer of children's educational books

In the final decades of the eighteenth century, a small group of women were particularly prominent as writers of educational books for women. Priscilla Wakefield was one of them. Many like Mary Wollstonecraft stressed the central role of motherhood and a mother's responsibility for educating her children. “ Her knowledge of their minds, her taste, her judgement, her affections, her superintending intelligence”, wrote the Edgeworths, “will be of inestimable value to her children”. If she had “any skill in any accomplishment she was, more particularly where daughters were concerned, “the best person to instruct them”. The publication of Rousseau's Emile in 1762 not only served to reinforce a new notion of childhood but provoked a number of women to write books on girls' education challenging the idea that an education based on “ ornamental accomplishments” was essential if a girl was to marry successfully. Among them were Catharine Macaulay, Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Day care for ill children: an employed mother's dilemma.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the process that employed mothers used to make child care decisions for children who became ill while enrolled in day care and the factors that influenced those decisions. Responding to an investigator-developed interview schedule, 20 married, employed mothers of preschoolers in day care each described a recent experience when her child was ill on a work day, her feelings, advantages and disadvantages of available options, preferences, job characteristics, and demographics. Inductive analysis of narrative data revealed themes of anxiety and decisional conflict between work and motherhood responsibilities and limited care options. These mothers usually cared for their sick children, sometimes sharing the duty with another caregiver. Data were categorized by actually selected and usually selected modes of care: mother; mother and father; mother and grandparent; mother and sitter; and mother and day care center. Influencing factors included: certainty and severity of illness, relative advantages and disadvantages of available options, job flexibility, and availability of paid leave. A model describing the decision-making process is proposed. While further research is needed, this model provides some guidance for nursing practice with families who face this dilemma and for evaluation of workplace policies.

Factors affecting teachers' attitudes and practice of family life education in Nigeria.

Questionnaires completed by 700 secondary school teachers in Nigeria's Lagos, Kaduna, and Cross-River States revealed a generally positive attitude toward family life education. 53.56% of respondents were female and 31.5%% were or had been married. Their average age was 28.3 years. One third of the teachers were not parents, and only 15.5% had children as old as their students. The teachers expressed agreement with the importance of school-based sex education (71.6%), the potential for family planning to improve health (82.9%), concern with rapid population growth (68.7%), and awareness that teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are major social problems in Nigeria (84.7% and 74.9%, respectively). Most identified ages 10-14 years as the ideal time to talk to children about sex. Half considered it the mother's responsibility to provide sex education, and most felt it is easier to talk to a female child. 45% of teachers agreed that contraceptive services should be available to adolescents. The factors associated with a positive attitude toward family life education were female sex, single marital status, Christian religion, and teaching in a coeducational school.

Knowledge is Power—Unitarians, gender and education in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

ABSTRACT This article attempts to show the importance of education to gender equality in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in particular, the relevance of the progressive views and practice of the Unitarians whose attitudes affected women generally both through their educational endeavours, especially in higher education, and through their pioneering efforts on women's rights. There were a number of limitations, however, to the Unitarians’ contribution, not least their paternalistic attitudes to the working class coupled with their genuine upholding of the status and responsibility of motherhood which led them to restrict working‐class women's role in practice even whilst promoting for them a better and wider education. Nevertheless, Unitarians made an outstanding early contribution to gender equality by seeking to provide women with the education which would enable them to develop their full potential and prove their equality. [1] This article is based on an unpublished Ph.D. thesis...

Postpartum sleep patterns of mother-baby pairs

This study of mother-baby sleep patterns used an exploratory descriptive approach. The subjects were a sample of convenience of nine first time mothers and their baby. Data were collected by means of unstructured non-directive interviews and the Nursing Child Assessment Sleep Activity Record (NCASAR) during the second to fourth postpartum weeks. The findings showed that most of the mothers obtained as many hours of sleep in the postpartum period as they did prior to pregnancy. However, this sleep was subject to many interruptions. All of the subjects felt less rested and complained of tiredness which they ascribed to meeting the needs of their baby rather than with actual reduction in the number of sleep hours. The mothers described tiredness in two ways, physical and emotional. Support from partner and others was critical to the mothers in assisting them to adapt to and cope with the responsibilities of motherhood. The findings of this study confirmed the unpredictable nature of baby sleep-wake cycles during the early postpartum period.

Attitude toward motherhood: Gender, generational, and religious comparisons

Attitudes toward mothering and motherhood are examined within a sample representative of college-educated young adults and their mothers. Factor structures are compared based upon response to the 40-item Motherhood Inventory. Two factors are indicated for males: a “chauvinism” factor describing women as appropriately serving and providing for men and children, and a factor that represents acceptance of contraceptive choice for women. For younger women, the theme of reproductive freedom includes autonomy in choice of motherhood as well as personal fulfillment; a second factor describes traditional rewards and responsibilities of motherhood. For older women, a single dominant factor represents a highly conventionalized definition of women's familial roles. On a scale of acceptance of reproductive freedom (the single common dimension observed for all groups), men score lower than women and Catholics score lower than non-Catholics.

Mother's Responsibility

Journal Article Mother's Responsibility Get access Tamar Cohen Tamar Cohen West Hartford, Connecticut Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Work, Volume 27, Issue 2, March 1982, Page 203, https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/27.2.203 Published: 01 March 1982

WHAT WILL BE THE END OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC IF AMERICAN WOMEN REFUSE TO BECOME MOTHERS?-AS VIEWED IN 1912

The editorial1 below appeared in the April 1912 issue of Pediatrics (N.Y.). Both the florid style in which it is written and the sentiments it expresses will seem antediluvian to most modern readers. The majority of American women of today look upon maternity as undignified and a menace to a wife's liberty. They consider it an unwelcome invocation of duty and responsibility. So strong is this unhealthy sentiment prevalent in the rural districts, as well as in the Metropolitan centers that the gynecologist is eagerly sought and urged to do an operation which makes maternity impossible. If conception has occurred then these women seek a physician, devoid of moral obligation, and urge him to perform an operation which will rid her of the responsibility of motherhood. The individual women is autocrat of her own decisions, but when she takes the vows of the marriage law, however broad or simple its words, there goes with this vow an injunction of motherhood. The woman who unites herself in marriage to a man and then refuses to be mother of his children unless there are moral, physical or hereditary laws-which cannot in justice to the unborn be propogated in the human race, has obtained a husband, a man to pay her bills, and to support and protect her through the subterfuge and methods of a common cheat. The man and woman unwilling to be father and mother to children are both unworthy of a place in Society and should not marry. Let their taints, whether of blood, or body or morals die with their own soul's death.

Psychoses of childbearing.

It is natural to assume that because a psychosis occurs during the process of childbearing the two events are therefore necessarily associated, but the evidence is conflicting and the relationship between them has not been established with certainty. In fact no immediate dramatic cause has yet been demonstrated that would account for such mental breakdowns, and it would be surprising if it had, for the great majority of psychoses not related to maternity show no simple sequence of cause and effect.Yet it would be wrong to dismiss without further examination an occasion so important in the life of the mother as childbirth as of no aetiological consequence. In the types of psychosis under consideration the clinical onset had often been a sudden and disturbing event, just at that particular time in the patient's life when she was confronted with the responsibility of motherhood. Further examination of the patient's history however often revealed previous evidence of emotional disturbance, or of instability in other members of her family.