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In recent decades, the world has lurched from one crisis to the next: financial collapse, the COVID-19 pandemic, social unrest over police brutality and sexual assault scandals, apocalyptic wildfires and floods, the growing threat of irreversible climate change. But in many corners of the world, existing protections for the people most vulnerable to these crises seem to have been rolled back instead of fortified.
Recently, a group of Canadian researchers found that mothers feel pressured to pick up the slack—the message they receive from popular media, social media, and political discourse is that the solutions to these problems lie in mothers’ individual parenting choices rather than in structural and institutional solutions. The researchers, from Concordia University, conducted four interviews each with 33 first-time mothers in Montreal and Toronto over a two-year period to better understand how they were managing the transition to motherhood. Mothers, they found, feel their responsibilities extend well beyond caregiving and nurturing their children in this era of crisis.
Some of the measures the mothers took to try to address large intractable societal problems ranged from teaching their children about diversity, to foregoing air travel, resisting gender norms, choosing the right diapers, and following plant-based diets. The mothers the researchers interviewed were all cis-gendered women from a range of educational, economic, and national backgrounds, while more than 40 percent identified as belonging to communities of color. The interviews were conducted from the final trimester of pregnancy through the first 18 months postpartum. The researchers published their results in the Journal of Gender Studies.
I spoke with study author Stephanie Paterson, a political science professor at Concordia, about the pressures mothers are facing today, how they’re coping, and what we risk if we continue to expect mothers to solve societal ills.
You write that you were partially motivated to do this study by the question of what constitutes a “good mother” in a moment of crisis and uncertainty. How would you answer that question now?
It’s important to point out that we wanted to understand what society determines is a good mother. In various pockets of literature and in popular media, we find that the good mother is one that invests crazy amounts of time in her family, in her children, in organizational work, and who takes on a managerial role for all things in the family. Children are often depicted as a kind of investment, not necessarily in a monetary sense, but in terms of the need to invest time and effort into sculpting and molding them and making sure that they’re productive citizens. So that’s a big responsibility.
Was there a time in recent history where the expectations of mothers were more realistic?
Ideas of good mothers vary by time and space. For example, previous generations might not have been subject to intensive mothering in the same ways that contemporary mothers are, but they were also expected to stay at home and raise their kids—even though we know that lots of peoples’ experiences deviated from this aspiration. And I think it’s telling that even the countries that rank highest in terms of gender equality, like Iceland and Sweden, women do considerably more unpaid care work than men. This suggests that gender norms are persistent and powerful in shaping expectations of mothers, even in the face of policy regimes that aim for gender equality.
You introduce the concept of “maternal responsibilization.” Can you describe briefly what that means?
Yes, it’s an academic term that comes from post-structuralist thought, particularly the work of Michel Foucault. In very simple terms, it looks at the ways that folks just kind of pick up duties or responsibilities where governments lack them. So we didn’t coin the term, but it was certainly an apt conceptual framing for what we saw—that in the wake of policy frameworks that do very little to actually address collective problems, it was really the mothers in our study who were filling these gaps. We could see this, too, in advice to mothers: “How do you talk to your child about racism?” “How do you talk to your child about financial precarity?” “How do you talk to your child about climate justice and climate change?” There are all these new mom blogs and mothers groups that target moms to really focus on how they parent to ensure that their children carry these values forward. That’s not a bad thing. It’s just a lot for a mom.
With this study, you were looking at a very specific time in a mother’s life.
Our study was about how folks navigate first-time parenthood. Because the relationship for women with the state totally changes once you become a mom. There’s this idea that you’re perpetually possibly pregnant. So young girls and young women are always crafted toward maternity. We really wanted to know what happens when you go from not having children to having children. All of our participants were cis women. Not all of them were in hetero relationships, but they were all cis women. But our interviews were quite open-ended, and we didn’t ask any questions about the current political context. And yet, almost all of the moms mentioned it.
And that surprised you.
That’s what really struck us. We were coding our data, we’re doing this data analysis, we’re in Canada, and we’re hearing about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. We’re hearing about unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. We’re hearing about Brexit, all of these things. That was even before the pandemic hit. And in the Canadian context, there was a major media personality who was tried for sexual assault and found not guilty. So there was all of this “MeToo” Canadian stuff happening as well. We didn’t ask questions around that, and yet our participants explained how all of these things were impacting their parenting.
Read more: “Parenthood, the Great Moral Gamble”
If we continue like this, placing such profound burdens on mothers, what are the risks to mothers, to children, and to society at large?
I’ve read a bit about increasing mental-health issues among parents, due to intensifying expectations, but this really isn’t my area of expertise. But if this is the case, then we can reasonably assume that mothers will experience more stress, anxiety, and burnout, which can also feed into general health issues and their capacity to care—both for themselves and for others. In addition, we might expect to see demographic change, with the trend continuing toward smaller families and fewer children.
In the study, the mothers of color, including Indigenous mothers, articulated very specific concerns about their children’s safety and futures. What differences did you see across race and class lines?
For the moms of color and Indigenous moms, it was really about safety, while at the same time working to dismantle racist and colonial structures. And for the white parents, it was, “How do I teach my child to not do these things?” We saw similar things with respect to the mothers who were raising children who were assigned female. There was a sense of threat: “How do I protect my female child from sexual assault, while also empowering her to love her body?”
I noticed in the study, one mother said she wanted to raise her daughter to call out bullshit instead of going along. How did these mothers navigate the tension between protecting their children and preparing them to confront difficult realities?
It was very much around instilling in their children—whether they’re female, whether they’re Black, whether they’re Indigenous—the belief that they’re not the problem. Giving them the confidence and the tools to speak out, to push back, the self-confidence in knowing that they have nothing to feel bad about. It wasn’t about altering their behavior to keep them safe. It was more about giving them the confidence and the skills to navigate situations and to speak out against them.
You write in the study that motherhood has been ground zero for addressing societal problems since the 19th century. Why the 19th century, and why has it stuck?
Activists in some of the earliest social reform movements of the 1820s and 1850s in the United States and Britain typically targeted mothers because they were the central figures in the household, and I think that’s stuck because mothers remain that. It’s bound up in gender norms and who’s doing the care work.
In past periods of crisis would you say that the same weight has fallen on mothers, or is this new?
Literature from previous economic crises or periods of economic restructuring suggest that typically mothers have altered their behavior to adjust to those changes. So it might require more at-home care or self-provisioning within households. What I think is different about where we are now is that there is this seemingly perpetual crisis, a normalization of crisis discourse.
Was there anything else that surprised you about the conversations on day-to-day parenting?
It wasn’t really a surprise, because we’re all familiar with the literature on fatherhood and family dynamics, but there was a lot of diversity around partner support in these kinds of activities. Not everybody mentioned their partner, but for those who did, there was quite a variance. Some folks mentioned that they made these decisions around parenting in this particular way with the full support and in collaboration with their partners. Others mentioned, I won’t say hostility, but pushback, or maybe a lack of understanding. So some women were undertaking these practices without the full support of their partners.
What practical measures can societies take to protect mothers? What would policy support actually look like?
There’s no silver bullet, but there are different models of family support that we can think about. Family policy in Canada and the U.S. follows what we call an individual responsibility model. Especially in the province of Quebec, we have a pretty robust social policy regime, so we veer more toward a social democratic government than a liberal democratic one. But you still see elements of this idea that families or children are individual responsibilities, right? We can think about policies that trouble that a little bit: affordable and accessible childcare, legal protections for mothers in the workplace, parental leave. One of the things that we’ve seen from Quebec and Sweden, who have exclusive non-transferable leaves for the other parent, is that the parents, usually the dads who take that leave, also participate more in care and work in the home throughout the duration of the child’s young years. Those kinds of things can redistribute the care work a little bit more equally.
What needs to shift on a cultural level for those policy changes to happen?
We’re talking about major social change. So rethinking how we talk about and teach gender. Showcasing different kinds of families and family forms in educational curricula. We’re talking about very widespread change. There are glimmers of hope, but that kind of systemic change is still a long way off.
I think also changing the way we do policy, focusing on care work and what that entails when we’re designing not just family policy, but social policy, education policy, health policy—that will change how we see the world and expose the amount of care that it takes to build and sustain communities and who’s doing that work.
Part of this story is also the global shift to the right, the normalization of far-right politics, the reassertion of these very retrograde ideas around gender and family, and the very hostile attempts, not just in the U.S., but in Canada and in parts of Europe, to re-institutionalize a very particular family form. And to remove longstanding gains for women and for people of color. It’s quite astounding. All of that provided more sense of threat for the moms that were participating in the study that added to this sense of emergency. Things like, “The ground is slipping away from us, how do we stop this from happening?”
Do you have any plans for follow-ups? What questions do you most want to answer next?
We still have a treasure trove of data that we haven’t published yet. But we’ve talked about, at some point in the future, building on this work to look at not just moms, but moms and their partners. We could only kind of glean how the other parents were reacting from what the study mothers were telling us, and most of them were dads. So it would be great to have a subsequent study that looks at mothers and their partners, because this is a negotiation, even if that negotiating work falls on moms. It would be interesting to see those dynamics play out and to hear more directly from the other parent.
Are you a mom?
Yes.
Did the study change your view of your own mothering at all?
It didn’t change my view. What it made me realize is that I’ve fallen victim to the same things that those moms have. I’m a very proud feminist mom. My partner is male, and he and I had very intense conversations around how we were going to parent our boy. Again, this isn’t bad. We should all care about the society we live in. But it’s this fact that it gets internalized and it becomes the responsibility of moms to raise good kids, to solve social problems. I could see myself in so many of these interviews. It was really eye-opening for a number of reasons, because it really revealed the extent to which moms are at the forefront of sociopolitical change. 
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Lead image: Christin Lola / Shutterstock
