The Impossibility of "Natural Parenting" for Modern Mothers: On Social Structure and the Formation of Habit
Year: 2001
Type: article
Abstract: Becoming a mother in contemporary western society is often to find oneself deciding upon a plethora of competing childrearing techniques. Caring for a baby is always an act of culture but in modern societies, it is to experts that we turn for guidance and advice (see for example, DeLoache and Gottleib, 2000). Broadly speaking, in the modern west, baby and childcare has been split between a rational-efficiency model (for example, four hourly feeds, the rise of domestic hygiene, bottle feeding, developmental psychology and so on) and a romantic model which seeks to dissolve authority and efficiency in favour of a "natural, " more bonded style of care (for example, long-term unregulated breast feeding, the family bed, permissive parenting and so on). This article will explore the renewed emphasis by our "baby-experts " on the second, more romantic model of care, or, what the well known pediatrician WilLiam Sears aptly terms, "immersion mothering " (1982: 181), in the latter part of the twentieth century. I will first address the paradoxes that emerge when experts call this style of caregiving "natural " or "traditional " before I move into some of the dilemmas that result for late-modern women when they attempt to enact "immersion mothering. " My contention is that the high personal sacrifice, isolation, and immobility required by such intensive caregiving is antithetical to successful participation in a modern differentiated society. The ascendancy of childrearing practices which stress primary maternal availability and care, therefore, sit in awkward relation to the (often opposing) bodily experiences and self-identities of most western people, including, of course, new mothers. Indeed, Sharon Hays suggest that "intensive mothering" is in "cultural contradiction " with the dominant ethos of self-interest in modernised market societies. (Hays, 1996) In broad agreement with this statement, this article will explore firther how and why contemporary mothers Journal oftbe Association for Research on Mothering 1 75
DOI: 10.25071/f7kx3x89
Author: Petra Büskens
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1513926550