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As the COVID-19 pandemic swept America in 2020, schools closed and families shifted to children learning online from home. This labor was dominantly covered by mothers, many of whom still had careers to maintain. A 2020 New York Times article reporting on the homeschooling shift concluded with the polarizing declaration that while women did most of the labor associated with homeschooling, men did not perceive the gender imbalance. Guided by a critical feminist lens, the authors examined the comments posted in the article's comment section to unpack the discourse. Western society places pressure on women to flawlessly perform motherhood and other tasks simultaneously; as such, the COVID-19 pandemic provided a context rich for further subjugation and subordination of pink-collar work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the following study, displaced Puerto Rican mothers and I created and explored a learning space – culture circles – that engaged participants in a critical cycle of problem posing, dialogue, and problem solving in relation to their experiences in the receiving Pennsylvania community. Using a qualitative, ethnographic approach, the study drew from Critical Pedagogy (CP), raciolinguistics, and a Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) framework to inform data collection and analysis. Individual interviews, culture circle meeting recordings, field notes, and digital artefacts created by four focal participants help illustrate how these mothers navigate the US school system and the wider receiving community in southern Pennsylvania. Moreover, the data reflect how racism in this context is based predominantly on families' language practices. Despite mothers facing significant challenges due to race/ethnicity, language, class, and gender, this study highlights the conversations that displaced Puerto Rican mothers engaged in regarding the impact racism had in their everyday lives. Furthermore, the space we created allowed participants to share and model their accumulated linguistic, social, and resistant capital for their children's academic success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perspectives of parents themselves should be central in framing services delivered to families experiencing homelessness. We explored the strengths and positive features of mother–child relationships and insight into mothers' views of the impact of living in shelters. We conducted qualitative coding of the Five‐Minute Speech Sample (FMSS) of 41 mothers of young children. Results revealed a wide variety of strategies that mothers used to promote their children's resilient functioning. This included focusing on their children's strengths, providing unconditional love and engaging in positive activities together. Mothers also voiced varied approaches to parenting, including many positive practices. Mothers' FMSS included ways that living in the shelter had a negative impact on their child's functioning, and they reported negative changes in their relationship with their child since moving into the shelter. Finally, mothers discussed ways in which living in the shelter had influenced their parenting styles and approaches to discipline. We discuss implications of the findings for supporting families residing in shelters, and we provide recommendations for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the experiences of Mexican American mothers who, confronted with the troubled emotions and behaviors of their adolescent children, felt compelled to seek help from mental health clinicians. Their experience is situated in the context of both psychiatrization, or the tendency to treat social problems as mental illness, and the landscape of contemporary mothering in the U.S., where maternal determinism, mother-blame, and the demand for intensive parenting hold sway. In this context, the moral crisis of mental health care-seeking for their children forces mothers to reconcile multiple competing stakes as they navigate the overlapping, and sometimes conflicting, moral-cultural worlds constituted by family and community, as well as mental health care providers. At the same time, it allows them an opportunity to creatively "reenvision" their ways of being mothers and persons. Their stories and struggles shed new light on contemporary conversations about psychiatrization, everyday morality, and mothering., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

This study explored how low-income documented and undocumented Latina immigrant mothers negotiate motherhood and adapt to life in new cultural and structural contexts. Grounded in ecocultural theory, we analyzed data from 21 in-depth interviews with Latina immigrant mothers to surface how their experiences of motherhood in the United States were shaped by their country of origin experiences and their situatedness in the United States. We documented emergent tensions related to their immigration context, often driven by changes in their legal status as they crossed borders, changes in family and community supports, and differing cultural expectations of their gendered roles as caregivers and family members. These tensions forced mothers to renegotiate and adjust their perceptions, identities, and roles as women, mothers, partners, and members of larger, often transnational kin and community networks. Implications of these tensions and identity and role shifts in the context of immigrant family life in the United States are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do differences in experiences of motherhood (e.g., number of children, age at first child, and relationship type) by race/ethnicity and social class mean that attitudes toward motherhood also vary by social location? We examine attitudes toward being a mother among black, Hispanic, Asian, and white women of higher and lower socioeconomic status (SES, as measured by education). Results using the National Survey of Fertility Barriers (N = 4,796) indicate that, despite fertility differences, attitudes toward being a mother differ little between groups. White and Asian women have higher positive attitudes toward being a mother than black and Hispanic women. Only black women appear to distinguish between having and raising children; surprisingly, lower educated Hispanic women are less likely to think that they would be a mother, see motherhood as fulfilling, and think that it is important to have and to raise children compared with higher educated, white women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes the case that social workers and social welfare advocates need to be aware of pregnancy discrimination law to better advocate for individual clients and for changes in the existing law. It is one piece of gender discrimination and inequity. This article reviews the current law around the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, including the recent holding in Young v. UPS and other relevant case law. It also reviews recent changes made by the Affordable Care Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act as well as related state laws designed to address pregnancy discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Competing cultural and gender expectations, especially aligned around paid and family work, make the contemporary experience of mothering difficult. The goal of this study is to illuminate, through the use of a feminist perspective, how families handle demands of paid and family work, along with the gendered nature of mothering, when mothers travel for work. Eighty-two mothers, fathers, and children from 22 U.S. families, in which mothers' jobs required frequent overnight travel, were interviewed to assess how they constructed mothering. The qualitative analysis addressed two categories: (1) the importance of the mother as a breadwinner for the family and (2) family work tasks. From these categories, a theme that travel enabled independence, both for the mother and the family members, emerged. These findings indicate that some work demands may challenge traditional notions of work and family, requiring families to reconstruct their lived experience and the meaning they ascribe to parenting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most frontline child welfare workers are female, as are most adult clients. The authors posit that caseworkers who are themselves mothers bring valuable perspectives and expertise to their work; however, their experience and wisdom as mothers is essentially invisible within the profession or at least within the professional literature. This mixed-methods study investigated how the experience of being a mother affects caseworkers’ relationships with client–mothers as well as whether they perceive the child welfare system valuing their unique perspective. Twenty-four participants from diverse positions within the child welfare field completed an interview protocol. Participants overwhelmingly responded that their parenting was informed by their work with families, that their experiences and wisdom as mothers was largely ignored by their agencies, and that their employers’ practices were often not family-friendly. There was variance in participants’ beliefs about whether the client–mothers experienced bias or empowerment within the system. Half of participants identified as feminist. Maternal ambivalence appeared not to be an area of shared experience between workers and clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how poverty and social inequality become institutionalized and embodied through food practices. Using qualitative data collected from four cities in the United States, this paper focuses on how low-income mothers make sense of family food provisioning in the age of intensive mothering expectations. The findings show that while low-income mothers aspire to provide their children high-quality diets in ways that are similar to their higher-income counterparts, poor mothers have to recalibrate their desired food choices according to the constraints of poverty. Findings from this paper further our understanding of how poverty shapes food behaviors and have practical implications for those working to improve the health of low-income populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim This paper aims to explore women's experiences with healthcare providers to ascertain ways health care may be improved for women disrupted in their mothering. Background Women can find it difficult to relinquish care even when they are acutely unwell requiring hospitalization. Despite mothering being a priority for women, many healthcare professionals do not understand the importance of continuing to mother during maternal illness. Design This research used a qualitative methodology drawing on principles of feminism and storytelling. Methods Women's stories were collected through face-to-face interviews, email and via the telephone. The twenty-seven women who participated were from either Australia or the USA, had between one and six children and identified themselves as having been disrupted in their mothering by illness. Data were collected in 2011 and were analysed thematically. Findings The majority of participants had been hospitalized at some point in time for acute illness. A subset of participants reported feeling judged by nurses and that their efforts to continue to mother their newborn children despite their illness were misunderstood and not facilitated. Conclusion Findings from this study suggest that women are more likely to remember times that health professionals failed to understand the primacy that mothering held for them or facilitate their efforts to continue to mother despite illness. Nurses and midwives should regularly reflect on their personal values in regard to mothering, validate women's attempts to mother to the best of their ability during illness and find ways to support and empower women in their mothering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigated attitudes and stereotypes about what feminist women, primarily from the United States, believed about a number of practices associated with attachment parenting which is theorized to be both feminist and non-feminist. The goals of this study were to determine whether feminists endorsed attachment parenting and whether stereotypes of feminists' beliefs corresponded to actual feminists' attitudes. Women were recruited online, primarily through blogs, to complete an online survey about feminism and mothering. Four hundred and thirty one women comprised the sample for the current investigation and included heterosexual-identified feminist mothers ( n = 147), feminist non-mothers ( n = 75), non-feminist mothers ( n = 143), and non-feminist non-mothers ( n = 66). Participants were asked to rate their own attitudes towards specific practices associated with attachment parenting and to indicate their perceptions of the beliefs of the typical feminist. Results indicated that feminists were more supportive of attachment parenting practices than were non-feminists. Non-feminists, particularly mothers, held misperceptions about the typical feminist, seeing them as largely uninterested in the time-intensive and hands-on practices associated with attachment parenting. Feminist mothers also held stereotypes about feminists and saw themselves as somewhat atypical feminists who were more interested in attachment parenting than they thought was typical of feminists. Our data indicated that feminists did endorse attachment parenting and that stereotypes of feminists related to attachment parenting are untrue. Furthermore, the role of feminism in the identity of feminist mothers and whether attachment parenting is truly a feminist way to parent are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The admission of an infant to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) can produce significant stress for mothers and may contribute to a difficult transition following discharge. Past research has primarily focused on Caucasian women. Mexican-Americans are the fastest growing ethnic population in the U.S. with the highest fertility rate; therefore, the purpose of this grounded theory study was to gain a better understanding of the NICU experience for Mexican-American mothers. Methods: Fifteen women were recruited and data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Results: A theoretical model, taking care of my baby, was developed. The mothers' experiences began with the unexpected event of having an infant admitted to the NICU and played out in a context that fluctuated between being supportive (making meaningful connections) or inhibitive (struggling to mother). The women developed strategies to help them take care of their babies during the NICU stay: balancing responsibilities, leaving part of me with my baby, and watching over. The process concluded in one of two ways: bringing my baby home or losing my baby. Conclusion: These findings offer insight for neonatal nurses who provide care for Mexican-American NICU mothers and may help inform their practice. Further research is needed with this growing population to ensure supportive nursing care and influence positive outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from a year-long narrative inquiry, involving six American women elementary school teachers, suggests that teachers’ conceptions of caring are primarily shaped by their biographies. Despite teachers’ claims that they knew their students well, their conceptions of caring were relatively fixed across contexts rather than malleable to differing students’ realities. Here, I raise questions about the interplay of mothering and deficit discourses as they serve to legitimize and perpetuate single-loop caring. Implications for teaching, teacher education and care theory are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This special issue demonstrates the value of close examinations of mothering as actually practiced by particular mothers in particular circumstances. The articles in this issue analyze instances of mothering in Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, China, and the United States and are followed by commentary from leaders in the field about what might be learned by attending to such everyday practices. These ethnographic studies extend lines of research within psychological anthropology that have focused on mothers as socializers, by drawing on contemporary developments, including those concerned with schema theory, psychodynamic and intersubjective processes, the interpenetrations of political-economies and domestic relations, feminist perspectives, and questions of agency in the lives of women and children. This examination of projects, processes, and practices of mothering affords insights into a range of related questions concerning human nature, processes of enculturation and socialization, individual agency and lived worlds, cultural patterning and change. [mothering, practice, child socialization, cross-cultural child development, psychological anthropology] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on videotaped family interactional data, I consider Martha Wolfenstein's psychoanalytically informed conception of 'fun morality' in the context of contemporary U.S. maternal-child relations. I highlight how U.S. middle-class mothers and children craft imaginative interludes that cultivate valued aspects of personhood and relationality. Cooperative, prosocial behaviors are modeled and elicited alongside individualized self-expression to constitute coexisting values in U.S. middle-class life. Analysis contributes to discussion of situated engagement in moral life by delineating how mothers take up preferred cultural models of mothering as they simultaneously mentor children's moral experiences, behaviors, and worldviews amid circumstances of daily life. [mothering, morality, children, play, family, United States] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite upbringings influenced by modern feminism, many women choose to identify with new communities in the modern religious revivalist movement in the United States who claim to represent and embrace the patriarchal values against which their mothers and grandmothers fought. Because women's mothering is determinative to the family, it is therefore central to transforming larger social structures. This literature review is taken from a study which employed a qualitative design incorporating thematic analysis of interviews to explore how women's attitudes about being a mother and mothering change when they change religious communities from liberal paradigms to fundamentalist, enclavist belief systems. This has implicit relevance to the field of transpersonal psychology, which could incorporate the spiritual experiences of an often-ignored group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, I argue that pregnant women confront a “double-bind” in complying with medical directives to report pregnancy symptoms: the combination of the routinization of prenatal care, understandings of fetal subjectivity, and the cultural discourse of maternal sacrifice create a situation in which women are at risk of failing as either as good patients, good mothers, or both. Longitudinal, in-depth interviews were conducted with 64 pregnant women in the New York metropolitan area. I found that health care providers make women’s embodied experiences a priority of surveillance, connecting symptoms to fetal well-being and emphasizing timely reporting of these symptoms to medical authorities. I found that women generally accepted this connection between symptoms and fetus, but were often perplexed as to which symptoms they needed to communicate to their providers when time constraints on routine prenatal appointments limited women’s ability to comply fully. Women also reported cultural pressures to “suffer nobly” the symptoms of pregnancy, no matter how uncomfortable. As a result, women found themselves with considerable responsibility for identifying problems in their pregnancies, with no clear way to adhere to the multiple and sometimes opposing mandates for managing symptoms they encountered. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The risks of untreated postpartum depression (PPD) in the United States are higher among low-income ethnic minority mothers. However, research has not adequately investigated barriers to formal help seeking for PPD symptoms among this vulnerable population. We used convenience and purposive sampling strategies to recruit mothers experiencing past-year (the year prior to interview) PPD symptoms (n = 14), community key informants (n = 11), and service providers (n = 12) to participate in focus groups and individual interviews. A grounded theory analysis of these nested perspectives revealed individual, community, and provider-level barriers operating at various stages of the help-seeking process: thinking about symptoms, seeking advice, and rejecting formal care. Although mothers overwhelmingly recommended "talking it out" for other mothers with PPD, an array of attitudinal and instrumental barriers led mothers to choose self-help practices in lieu of formal mental health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural influences might exert more influence on HIV-positive women's reproductive choices than HIV-related conditions. In this article we report on grounded theory research on how women with HIV made reproductive decisions during a time of transition from HIV as potentially fatal to mothers and newborns to its current status as an often controllable chronic illness. Eighty HIV-positive women of childbearing age in three United States cities were interviewed, and the interviews were analyzed using grounded theory techniques. The core concept of the findings was that women's decisions were based on their judgment of the relative weight of positive aspects of motherhood versus the often negative pressures of social and public opinion. These findings have relevance for future research as well as for program development and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American parents of children adopted from China frequently consume Chinese cultural objects for display in their homes. While parents defend this consumption for display as an effort to validate their children’s ethno-cultural origins, they also reveal how it signifies and solidifies their own identifications with Chinese culture. As part of a larger research project examining China adoptive parents’ evolving “Chinese” identities, this paper asks: Which parents “become ‘Chinese’” through the consumption and display of Chinese cultural objects, and why? To answer this question, I conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 91 Americans in the China adoption process and ethnographic fieldwork at two different field-sites: Families with Children from China (FCC) Chinese cultural celebrations and Chinese culture camps organized by/for China adoptive families. Focusing on the emergent and personal meanings that parents give to Chinese cultural objects, I demonstrate how these meanings both structure parents’ consumption and yield a display differential. In doing so, I reveal that white European-American parents and mothers are most likely to engage in this consumption and display, thereby amending the three types of ethno-cultural identity consumption represented in the literature. Specifically, I expose the central role of race in ethno-cultural identity consumption; demonstrate that the collective category of reference for ethno-cultural identity consumption is not always an ethnic category (in this case, such consumption refers to a gendered category); and illustrate the ways in which global ethno-cultural identity consumption both appeals to and satisfies distinctly local constructs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on interviews with twenty-five mostly white, educated, work-force experienced and class-privileged mothers, this paper explores how these women construct the lactating body as a carefully managed site and breast-feeding as a project—a task to be researched, planned, implemented, and assessed, with reliance on expert knowledge, professional advice, and consumption. The framing of breast-feeding as a project contrasts with the emphases on pleasure, embodied subjectivity, relationality, and empowerment that characterizes much of the recent breast-feeding literature across the humanities and social sciences. I argue that the project frame sheds light on the amount of work and self-discipline involved in compliance with broader middle-class mothering standards set in the consumerist, technological, medicalized, and professionalized contexts that shape parenting in late capitalist America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African American women are the most rapidly growing group of people in the United States diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. The purpose of this study was to explore experiences of self-care and mothering among African American women with HI V/AIDS. It is important to recognize how culture affects illness management, childrearing, and daily living to design culturally appropriate nursing interventions for African American women. Critical ethnography was used to study 10 African American mothers from the rural Southeast who were HIV positive and mothered children who were HIV positive. Domains derived from the research were disabling relationships, strong mothering, and redefining self-care. The cultural theme was creating a life of meaning. African American mothers with HIV/AIDS in the rural Southeast used culturally specific self-care and mothering strategies reflective of cultural traditions. This study acknowledges strengths of African American women and generates theory that will enhance nursing care to this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To describe maternal caregiving and related strategies used by first-time mothers of young infants with complex health conditions (CHC) in the first 6 months after discharge., Design: Grounded theory., Setting: Data were collected in participants' homes in the Northeast United States., Participants: Eight first-time mothers of infants age 6 months or younger with CHC., Methods: Purposive and theoretical sampling were used. Semistructured interviews were completed at 2-month intervals, beginning 2 weeks after their infants' discharge. Analysis of 28 interviews was done with the constant comparative method., Results: A grounded theory of maternal caregiving was conceptualized from the data. This time-and-experience-mediated process involved three phases of increasing confidence and expertise, developing in the context of decision-making responsibility. Related maternal strategies included appraising, normalizing, organizing, assessing, practicing, validating, experimenting, nurturing, and negotiating. Mothering became predictable and integrated in everyday life by about 6 months after the infant's discharge home., Conclusion: Findings can help clinicians and researchers better understand what happens over time as new mothers care for infants with CHC. Exploration of these patterns in a more diverse group of mothers of children with CHC can support the development of targeted interventions for this specialized population., (© 2014 AWHONN, the Association of Women's Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses.)