Conceptualizing motherhood in a context of inequality and vulnerability: Experiences of being a mother after a troubled upbringing

Abstract

Applying qualitative data from a 30‐year longitudinal study, this article examines how 15 women coming from vulnerable families reflect on themselves as mothers. Three analytical themes were identified: (a) current and past expectations, (b) having someone to lean on as a mother and (c) experiences with child welfare services. The findings exemplify how these women’s histories are woven together with contemporary discursive understandings about motherhood, and how often conflicting emotions from their own childhoods affect their self-representations as mothers. Attention is paid to the phenomena of motherhood, which is understood as inaccessible solely through language and is thus examined through the lens of psychosocial theories. The findings apply to both theoretical and practical social work, conceptualizing the complexities of motherhood.

Keywords

Child welfare mothering psychosocial

Introduction

The aim of this article is to explore how 15 Norwegian women, in a context of inequality and vulnerability, negotiate the multifaceted position of motherhood, all having had a troubled upbringing themselves. According to Alizade (2018), motherhood is transmitted from generation to generation, and thus consists of unconscious childhood wishes, expectations and hopes of what mothers should be like, and how mothers should behave towards their children. Mothering is furthermore an activity and an identity, and is also understood and evaluated in relation to shifting, politicized notions of childhood and ‘children’s needs’ (Gillies, 2006; Lawler, 2002; Phoenix and Woollett, 1991). Mothers from different sociocultural backgrounds may experience motherhood differently, having dissimilar understandings of what motherhood means. At the same time, certain commonalities within the diverse experiences of motherhood exist when mothers live in the moreover same society, contemporaneously, as motherhood is socially constructed through contemporary discourses (Elvin-Nowak and Thomsson, 2001; Glenn, 2016). Nonetheless, mothers relate in different ways to the societal expectations around what constitutes ‘good’ mothering, due to their individual childhood histories that shape their understandings of motherhood (Thomson et al., 2012; Woodward, 2016). This article draws on qualitative in-depth interviews with 15 women, following a 30-year longitudinal study of individuals growing up in vulnerable families in Norway (Helgeland, 2005, 2010; Herland, 2017, 2018; Herland et al., 2015; Herland and Helgeland, 2017).

Current Western conceptualizations about ‘good’ mothering encourages mothers to mother their children intensively and selflessly, responding to their children’s wants and needs (Alizade, 2018; Bemiller, 2010). Hays (1996) conceptualized the normative understanding of good motherhood as ‘intensive mothering’, i.e. an expert-guided and child-centred approach to motherhood. This understanding of motherhood was created through a White, middle-class, heterosexual lens, limiting society’s ability to see the diversity of women’s lives (Arendell, 2000; Bemiller, 2010). According to Pedersen (2012), mothers are expected not only to put their children’s needs above their own, but also to provide a level of nurturing and a series of developmentally supportive activities, which often becomes all-consuming. Several researchers have emphasized the difficulty of living up to high expectations regarding motherhood (Arendell, 2000; Gillies, 2006; Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, 1998; Stern, 2018). Others have argued that mothers who do not live up to the intensive mothering ideal are often labelled as ‘bad’ or ‘not very good’ mothers (Bemiller, 2010; Gillies, 2006; Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, 1998; Stern, 2018).

Some studies have focused on the experiences of mothers involved with the child welfare system (Hughes et al., 2016; Sykes, 2011; Wells and Marcenko, 2011); studying these ‘child welfare mothers’ provides much-needed insight into the lived experiences of mothers who are frequently the focus of public concern and intervention, yet whose voices and experiences are often overlooked. Mothers’ experiences of their interactions with social services, and their perspectives on mothering and of themselves as mothers, represent important topics, but there is a dearth of research focusing on these elements. This article thus seeks to bring critical attention to social work practice with mothers who engage with social services: in particular, to the inclusion of marginalized voices and experiences in social work research.

According to Gillies (2006), parenting is not accepted as simply an interpersonal bond characterized by love and care. Instead, it has been re-framed in this century as a job requiring specific skills and expertise. Moreover, contemporary Western society’ concept of motherhood is increasingly being understood as inaccessible solely though language, as it also consists of embodied feelings from the mother’s own childhood which may instinctively shape their activities as well as their identities as mothers (Moen et al., 1997; Smith and Self, 1980). Such an understanding of motherhood is particularly important for social workers, who need to consider, in-depth, the complexities of motherhood, especially with regards to mothers who themselves had a difficult childhood. As a social worker’s professional, normative view of motherhood might create prejudice or bias and thus impact their practice, a reflective practice is essential – one that entails an analytical awareness around normativity with regards to class, gender and culture.

Following Gillies’ (2006) work on marginalized motherhood, this article sheds light on how mothers from troubled backgrounds make sense of their lives as mothers: how they position themselves within different discourses and in a context of inequality and vulnerability, and how they resist and survive social marginalization through their self-representations. As children, each of these women had experiences with child welfare services; as mothers, several have had encounters with the child welfare services once more. As such, this article is a contribution to the field of social work and child welfare, as it captures the voices of the mothers themselves, highlighting the contextual variations around ‘good’ motherhood. To achieve this aim, this article explores how 15 mothers, each having grown up within a context of vulnerability, negotiate the complexities of motherhood.

Theorizing motherhood: A psychosocial approach

This empirical article relies on psychosocial theories to help explain the findings. Psychosocial theories are well-suited to the analysis of data from longitudinal projects, since they involve looking closely at these mothers’ biographical projects within in a wider social process (Thomson et al., 2010, 2012; Woodward, 2016). As psychosocial theories cut across sociology, psychology and social psychology, they enable interdisciplinary theorizing about the interrelationships between the emotional and the social within sociocultural, discursive and psychological contexts (Hollway and Jefferson, 2012).

A psychosocial approach represents a pragmatic way of thinking about affect as a basis for social research that unites the individual with the social (Thomson et al., 2012). This approach might be used, for example, to explore how mothers relate to the phenomenon of motherhood through their individual, inner psychological processes, in combination with societal expectations regarding motherhood – such as discursive expectations around what mothers should (or should not) do in a certain cultural context. A psychosocial approach thus enables the researcher to capture the complexities of motherhood, with its many layers: for instance, opening a window into the inner emotional battles that are part of the experienced life of contemporary motherhood (Roseneil, 2006). Psychosocial research is thus concerned with both participants and cultural understandings (Hollway and Jefferson, 2005, 2012; Thomson et al., 2012).

Psychosocial research that focuses on the ‘emotional undertones’ in qualitative interviews can capture significant information that can generate insight into the phenomena being studied (Thomson et al., 2012; Woodward, 2016). However, this theoretical angle requires an analytical awareness that entails attending both to the participants and oneself as a researcher, concerning the epistemological challenges around the researcher’s ability to come ‘near enough’ to other people’s stories (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000, 2012). This is a delicate analytical task, in which one must read between the lines to capture the ‘emotional displays’ in addition to the spoken words. The methodological considerations will be elaborated further in the next section.

Theorizing motherhood from a psychosocial angle involves recognizing the complex interpersonal and emotional experiences inextricably linked with the meaning‐making around available discursive representations of ‘good’ motherhood (Hollway, 2007). The psychosocial approach supports the idea that personal subjectivity exists but is ‘inscribed’ within a social‐cultural domain (Frosh et al., 2003).

Methodology

The study

This paper is based on a 30-year longitudinal study of a group of 85 participants – 54 men and 31 women – who as adolescents had severe adjustment problems (Helgeland, 2005, 2010; Herland, 2017, 2018; Herland et al., 2015: Herland and Helgeland, 2017). All the participants engaged in antisocial behaviours, such as truancy, criminality, prostitution, drug abuse and vagabonding, due to challenging home environments. The families were thus defined as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘troubled’. The participants were recruited through their participation in a state-initiated child welfare programme (from 1981 to 1985), which was set up to investigate alternatives to imprisonment for adolescents involved in such antisocial behaviour as truancy, criminality, prostitution and drug abuse. The project, called ‘An Alternative to Imprisonment’, was an outcome of the Norwegian government’s desire to increase the minimum age for imprisonment from 14 to 15 years old. Instead of going to prison, the adolescents were enrolled in various welfare initiatives.

All 85 of the participants were recruited for the longitudinal study and interviewed at 4 ages: the first interview occurred at age 14 or 15 (T1), the second at age 20 (T2), the third at age 30 (T3) and the fourth around the age of 40 (T4). The first interviews (T1) were conducted through the child welfare programme ‘Buskerud Project’, when the participants were 15 years old. The following interviews (T2–T4) were only part of the longitudinal research study and no longer a part of the welfare programme. The study was approved by the ethical board in Norway at each interview phase. After the state-initiated child welfare programme had ended, the project leader was granted access to the names of the participants for further contact. For the purpose of this article, 15 interviews out of the total of 31 women interviewed through T4 were selected: the remaining 16 either could not be reached or were not mothers. Though the mothers who shared their stories in this study offer insight into their own lived experiences regarding motherhood, their voices are not representative of all young women who come from vulnerable families.

Qualitative in-depth interviews with the participants

This article draws on qualitative in‐depth interviews with mothers in their 40s. Some lived with their children, whereas others saw them every other week or sporadically. Some had children who had been removed by child welfare services. Their children ranged from three-year-olds to teenagers. While some of the women worked, others lived on social welfare benefits. A few were involved with drug and alcohol use.

The interviews were conducted in the participants’ homes. They were asked questions about being a mother, following a semi-structured interview guide that allowed the participant to speak freely about the concept of motherhood. Each interview lasted approximately two hours, and was audio‐recorded and transcribed shortly afterwards. The quotes presented in this article were then translated from Norwegian into English. All the women’s names are pseudonyms.

Analytical strategies

In the preliminary analysis, the interview data were organized according to broad themes regarding mothering. Later, the data were systematized such that, in each interview, small narratives were brought together as parts of a narrative whole. After several readings and discussions about the empirical data in small research groups, the focus became the women’s reflections on being mothers, their upbringing and family and their family relationship. As in any methodology centred around self-reflections, it must also be acknowledged that they represent one part of a larger story. Thus, by looking closely at the mothers’ stories and attending to their emotional responses and their relational histories, traces of cultural discourses could be identified (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000; Thomson et al., 2010, 2012). This entailed reading between the lines and exploring the said and the unsaid – the affective processes that occurred over the course of each interview. It also meant that the emotions of the mothers, as I became aware of them during the interviews, helped focus my investigation and were then used in my analysis. Here, it is important to note that the ethical complexity of this kind of research requires that I, as the researcher, take full responsibility for any methodological issues that arose and all insights generated. The next section presents these insights, or findings, using excerpts from the mothers’ reflections as well as their emotional displays when talking about their children and about being mothers.

Findings

The theoretical and analytical focus of the study was centred on how the participants experienced and perceived themselves as mothers. By using psychological/psychoanalytic and discursive perspectives in the analysis of the interview data, I aimed to bring together the abovementioned perspectives, with an additional focus on ‘affect’: in their interviews, the mothers’ feelings and affect were particularly evident, and were communicated both explicitly and ‘between the lines’.

The three analytical themes discussed below explain how the participants present themselves within the multifaceted position of motherhood. The themes represent three analytical layers: (1) the importance of current and past expectations, reflecting how the participants drew on current and past expectations regarding motherhood – e.g. the current discursive notion of what motherhood should entail, and their embodied experiences growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in vulnerable families; (2) having someone to lean on, reflecting how the women’s experiences as mothers depended on their positions – e.g. having someone to lean on versus bearing the responsibility for their children alone; and (3) the encounter with child welfare services, reflecting how experiences with child welfare services seemed to affect many of the mothers’ views of themselves as mothers. These themes thus emphasize the mother’s expectations, their views about support with regards to motherhood, and their understandings of child welfare services involvement.

The importance of current and past expectations

All the women in this study took pride in being mothers. Their reflections included their everyday lives with their children and their past and current expectations about motherhood, as well as the emotions related to their pasts that arose when they talked about being mothers. Lisa, who had grown up in an abusive environment and was now a mother of three children aged 6, 8 and 12 years, presented herself as a loving mother in the interview. However, she also emphasized how she was neglected as a child and did not have an affectionate relationship with her parents. While she related this with sadness in her voice, the way in which she talked about her children replicated the ideal of a loving, warm mother who valued physical closeness with her children. Thus, although she had not been given affectionate care from her parents, she drew on this discursive expectation in her own mothering, which had an element of sadness to it:

My son is very cuddly, he wants to give me hugs and, you know, smell his mom … My children also have their wounds, but I have always been honest and spoken frankly. I have given all my children the same. I have always let them make their own decisions … being there for them, showing them love ( … ). With my youngest son – well that is a sore spot. We are very close, but many bad things have happened. We developed a strong bond of love between us, but he has also experienced many hurtful things.

In the above, Lisa seems to embody the affectionate mother, in keeping with the ideal of a mother who loves her children unconditionally. However, she also discloses that her son ‘has experienced hurtful things’; when she mentions this, she reflects on her past: ‘I have never had a mother or a father that supported me ( … ). They might as well have never existed. It is painful knowing that my own mother and father would not have me’.

Here, Lisa expresses the difficulties she faced growing up, and these appear to be painful to her. Like many of the other mothers in this study, she draws on her childhood when she reflects on being a mother herself, emphasizing what she did not have. In the first quote, she appears to value a warm relationship with her children, emphasizing closeness and love – again, in accordance with the contemporary discursive ideal – but at the same time, she admits that ‘bad things had happened’. As she talked about these events in the interview, there was melancholy in her voice and in her facial expressions. As with many of the women interviewed, Lisa’s account reveals conflicting feelings related to motherhood. The way she talked about her own childhood and her relationship with her own mother seems to remind her of what she herself did not have, the lack she experienced when she was growing up. Moreover, this relates to how she struggles to meet the discursive ideal of a ‘good’ mother: although she might echo certain mothering behaviours passed on from her own mother, she also seeks to meet current cultural expectations around mothering, and so must somehow balance the two.

However, in contrast to Lisa, Anne – a mother of two children aged 8 and 14 years – said she had failed as a mother, and had not lived up to cultural expectations around what constitutes ‘good’ mothering. Anne had been beaten regularly during her childhood, by parents who could not provide adequate care to their children. In the following quote, Anne presents herself as though she has nearly given up on being a dedicated or ‘intensive’ mother instead of a ‘failing’ one:

Oh, what have I done to my daughter? I have failed as a mother. It is awful to think about. Many times my daughter thought I was dying, because I was so drugged … I have hurt my baby so much [crying].

Anne seems to know what is expected of her as a mother when she says she has ‘failed as a mother’. Here, she is actively positioning herself outside the ‘good’ mothering discourse. Anne’s crying whilst talking about being a mother possibly reflects the challenge of meeting the mothering ideal when she herself has come from a dysfunctional home. In the interview, when Anne talked about how her parents ‘failed’ to provide for her as a child, she appeared both sad and angry, and linked this experience to her reflections regarding her own motherhood. Again in contrast to Lisa, Anne draws more on her past experiences when reflecting on herself as a mother, rather than emphasizing current cultural expectations – although she appears to be aware of the current cultural ideal, in saying that her parents did not meet it. The connection between the two, the inner and the outer perceptions, seems to play an active part in constituting being a mother.

For 15 of the mothers interviewed, child welfare services had been involved when they were young. June, for example, now a mother of two children aged 7 and 11 years had experienced physical abuse by her stepfather. Her mother did not shelter her from his abuse, and June was often left at home by herself. She drew on this experience when she reflected on being a mother, focusing specifically on her relationship with her own mother:

… [I]t is good to have a mother, you know, but she does not mean that much to me. She self-contradicts herself in terms of being a mother. I think I am bitter. Thinking about my past, I am bitter because my mother did not put me first. Because she did not … I can see that she struggled herself, but I cannot accept that. ( … ) [A]bout being mother … I am incredibly controlling. I have a need for control that is almost, it is almost too much. Especially with the oldest.

Here, June presents herself as a ‘controlling mother’, which arguably reflects one end of the continuum of the intensive mothering ideal, in which one is perhaps over-protective of her children in order to keep them safe. June also describes feeling bitter towards her own mother, for prioritizing her own needs over June’s and staying with June’s abusive stepfather, instead of providing care in accordance with today’s child-centred discursive ideal. In this way, June expresses anger at her mother for not putting June’s needs first and thus not meeting the contemporary intensive mothering ideal. For June, trying to live up to this ideal herself whilst having been brought up in a time when expectations were different triggered strong, complex emotions. These came across in the interview, when she reflected on herself as a mother.

Having someone to lean on for support

In contemporary discourse, particularly with regards to childrearing in a Scandinavian cultural context, having someone with whom to share the responsibility of parenting – such as a partner or family member – is considered to be of value for most women. However, for women who come from vulnerable families, relations with family members can be fragile. Elisabeth – a mother of four children aged 4, 8, 10 and 15 years who came from one of the most financially well-off families in the longitudinal study’s original sample – talked about the importance of being able to lean on her husband. In this way, she presents herself as a mother who could rely on her children’s father:

My husband pays the bills, watches out for all of us and lets me do my things. I can go home, sit on his lap and cry if I am upset. If I say ‘I cannot handle this anymore, you have to take over’, he says, ‘Okay, I will’. ( … ) During every one of my pregnancies, he looked after the other children.

In the above quote Elisabeth describes how she can lean on her husband when she needs to, such as when she was pregnant and found it overwhelming to have her other children around her. Elisabeth’s father had been there for her when she was young and was a part of her upbringing, even though her parents were divorced. Here, Elisabeth appears to be drawing on a contemporary mothering discourse that involves the father as a co-caregiver, one who shares the responsibility of parenting. Elisabeth can depend on her husband, and he is a father who plays an active role in his children’s lives. From her emotional-filled tone, she appears to emphasize the importance of sharing the parenting role with another. It should be noted that Elisabeth stands out somewhat in the sample, as she came from a home with more financial resources, had role models while she was growing up, and did not experience the same kind of neglect as the other mothers in the study. This could have impacted Elisabeth’s views on being a mother. However, she is open about her own struggles as a mother, and as she reflects on these, she connects them to her own childhood, which in turn seems to have shaped her self-representations of being a mother:

I had a lot of feelings about the [her parents’] divorce … like I thought she [her mother] had failed my brother and me. That she lived in her own world and was busy with herself. But I stopped feeling like that … when I had children myself, you look at it like okay … I have my own life.

Here, Elisabeth reflects on her own negative emotions related to her parent’s divorce. However, the way in which she is presenting herself indicates that she has dealt with it and put those feelings aside, especially with regards to being a mother. In the interview, Elisabeth had passion in her voice when she stated that she desired a stable family, that she would never leave her husband and that, unlike her mother, she believed in struggling together as a couple, no matter what. Elisabeth had a mother who was devoted to her throughout her childhood, and this appears to be the norm she brings into her self-presentation as a mother.

Other women in the study dealt with their pasts differently, had different emotions connected to them, and treated their emotions differently in the interviews. While they did not speak explicitly about the negative emotions triggered by being neglected as children, these responses were traceable through their facial expressions – e.g. sadness, disappointment, bitterness or anger – when they spoke about childhood issues. They brought these feelings into their motherhood narratives, and conflicting feelings from their past appeared to play an active part in shaping their reflections on and experiences of ‘good’ mothering in the present. Sara, another single mother of two children aged 9 and 13 years, reflected on her position as a mother in connection to her past, and became emotionally triggered in the interview as she spoke about this:

The more she [her daughter] is prepared … I have been really hard towards her. Maybe harder than most. There has been no ‘dear mother’. While the boy [her son] has been spared. He does not know how I grew up. He doesn’t know anything about my background. He doesn’t know anything about anything. He just thinks Mom is Mom.

In her interview, Sara’s reflections about herself as a single mother included an affective, emotional response, highlighting an unspoken inner ‘self-dialogue’ about mothering and how she views herself as a mother and her own mothering.

For most of the mothers in this study, not having someone with whom to share the responsibilities of the ideal of intensive mothering appeared to shape their views of themselves: unlike Elisabeth, many did not have a partner to rely on. Nina, for example, was a single mother of a teenage daughter aged 13 years. Nina wanted to teach her daughter to be self-reliant, just as Nina had been forced to be when she was growing up – not dissimilar to Sara’s approach to mothering. In the interview, Nina described how she had distanced herself from her daughter, which she acknowledged is not quite in keeping with the intensive mothering ideal:

You have to do it yourself. I have always taught my children that there is no one to help you on the outside. You have to do it yourself. So T (daughter) has somehow got a pretty tough childhood. I’ve been rough on her, because I’ve never known how long I will be around. T has very little family around her. And if I go away, she is all alone. And the more she is prepared for that, the better it is for her. I’ve been crazy. Perhaps harder than most mothers … There has been no ‘Oh dear mother’ …

Nina is presenting herself here as a ‘tough’ mother, saying that she has taught her daughter to be independent and to not rely on her as a mother. The contemporary discursive ideal, in which the mother always tries to understand the child, recognize the underlying reasons for the child’s behaviour, and not blame the child is thus not an ideal in which Nina appears to be invested. Being a ‘tough’ mother instead, one who gives her daughter ‘tough love’, is in keeping with how she herself grew up. Nina had an especially difficult background, compared to the other mothers interviewed: her parents were heavy drug users and neglected her, nor did they listen to her or provide her with a warm, loving environment. Although Nina is aware of what is expected of her with regards to contemporary cultural expectations about ‘good’ mothering, it appears that she believes that being ‘tough’ is the best way to care for her daughter – further reflecting how women’s approaches to mothering can be complex and multifaceted, rooted in their own backgrounds. These in turn can trigger conflicting emotions (such as resentment and grief) when mothers reflect on their childhoods, in the past, and on their children, in the present.

The variety of empirical data presented under this analytical theme illustrates the range of ways in which mothers negotiate the discursive ideals regarding motherhood in connection to their own childhood history. Most of the mothers have to ‘do it’ themselves and navigate the ways in which the past interferes in the present in myriad ways, affecting their reflections, wishes, views and practices as mothers.

Understanding child welfare services involvement

As with most mothers, though all of the mothers in this study wanted the best for their children, they experienced challenges. Some struggled more than others. For some, the demands of meeting societal expectations around being a ‘good’ mother became too challenging. They often struggled with conflicting emotions that were triggered by stressful circumstances, such as in interactions with their children.

Ten out of the 15 mothers interviewed had been in contact with child welfare services regarding their children. Sofia, a mother of two children aged 5 and 9 years, came from a home where drugs, alcohol and an abusive environment were prevalent. She reflected on being a mother in relation to her contact with child welfare services in this way:

I fully trust the child welfare services. I contacted them regarding my daughter back then. I have had good help from them. And then I also have my history with the child welfare services when I was a child myself. I also asked for help then, because I could not stand my situation back then.

Sofia’s quote illustrates how she has used her own experiences with the system as a lens through which to understand her challenges as a mother. She experienced the help she received while growing up as positive. In viewing child welfare services as a source of support, she seems to recognize that she cannot meet the high cultural expectations regarding childrearing by herself, and that receiving help is necessary. Here, she appears to draw on her own experiences as a child, with needs that had not been met by her parents, to understand her daughter’s needs – and that she cannot meet those needs alone.

All of the mothers interviewed had received help from child welfare services when they were children. They ones who did, however, appear to have valued this assistance, and seemed know when to ask for help when they were struggling or, moreover, unable to live up to the ideal of the ‘good’ mother. Theresa, for example, a mother of one child aged 11 years, explained how she had struggled and asked child welfare services for help:

I lost control over my finances right after my daughter was born because I bought a house for us … I did not open my mail or talk to anyone. My daughter was sick and I was struggling myself. I did not have anyone, and my relationship with my foster parents was turbulent … so then I called child welfare services.

In the above quote, Theresa describes how she had lost control over the situation with her daughter, as she did not have family to help her, and asked for help in order to meet her daughter’s needs. As reflected in the previous analytical theme, this lack of support was a common thread in many of these interviews; as with Theresa and Sofia, several mothers described needing and being given support from child welfare services because they could not find it elsewhere. These stories thus provide insight into how some mothers who struggle to ‘make ends meet’ experience involvement from child welfare services as a necessary and significant form of support, perhaps building on their own experiences of receiving help as children. In these stories, however, there appear to be mixed emotions – of relief, but also of disappointment. These mothers appear to be drawing on the discursive ideals of intensive mothering and child-centred care: on the one hand, disappointed that they could not manage on their own, while on the other, relieved that they had a place to turn for support.

However, not all of the women experienced the involvement of child welfare services as a positive. A number felt stigmatized and judged as mothers by the child welfare services. Lilly, a mother of two who as a child was often left at home alone while her parents were doing drugs, explained:

Okay, you have to manage yourself. That is what I have taught my kids. There is no one there to help you. So she [her daughter] has had a pretty rough childhood. I was very tough as a mother … and then there is my youngest son. He was taken from me by the child welfare services. It has been a very, very, very hurtful case over very, very many years. They [child welfare services] have done many awful things to me. Because of who I have been.

Here, Lilly expresses her feelings regarding the involvement of child welfare services with sadness and resentment in her voice, saying that they became involved because of ‘who she was’ – in this way acknowledging that she was not living up to the standard of what being a ‘good’ mother entails, in terms of both the discursive ideal and Norwegian legislation. Further, in saying that this happened because of ‘who she is’, this appears to be essential to how she perceives herself as a mother: both in terms of how she was treated as a child and how she relates to the cultural expectations about ‘good’ mothering that she has placed upon herself.

In the interviews, the 15 mothers who participated in the study all reflected on themselves as mothers in terms of cultural contemporary discursive ideals, and with heightened emotions. Their past experiences with and their internalized, normative expectations around motherhood appear to have influenced not just their own self-conceptions, but the feelings that arose when they talked about mothering and motherhood.

Concluding discussion

The findings in this article illustrate how women with troubled upbringings talk about and reflect on being mothers and position themselves within – and sometimes outside – the current cultural discourses around what constitutes ‘good’ motherhood. The ways in which these discourses were enacted by the mothers in the study also appear to be affected by aspects of and relationships from their upbringing. The three analytical themes presented in the paper are linked, providing insight into how the mothers reflect on past and present cultural expectations around what constitutes ‘good’ mothering’, how they view having support and how they understand the involvement of child welfare services.

In the current cultural discourse on parenting, the mother is understood as bearing the primary responsibility for a child’s care, and is accountable for all aspects of a child’s development (Alizade, 2018; Hays, 1996; Phoenix and Woollett, 1991); indeed, it is primarily the mother whom for example the kindergarten, child welfare services or health institutions contact regarding a child (Saraceno, 1994). The mothers in this study appeared to draw on these discourses in their interviews – indeed, while the father’s role has in recent years become increasingly included in the Western parenting ‘ideal’ (Craig, 2006; Herland et al., 2015; Stevens, 2015), many of the mothers in this study experienced limited or no support from their children’s fathers. Feminist researchers have critiqued the boundaries of ‘appropriate’ mothering, arguing that being a mother is only one part of a woman’s life, yet these expectations are relatively all-consuming and thus most mothers struggle from time to time (Arendell, 2000; Hollway, 2007). This relates to the second analytical theme, which reflects how the presence or lack of support impacted the women in this study – regarding both their mothering experiences and their reflections on being mothers.

According to the discursive ideal, a mother should be concerned with her children’s needs, put her own needs aside and try to understand their behaviour (Elvin-Nowak and Thomsson, 2001). For most women, it can be difficult to meet this ideal because of the different demands in their lives, such as work, romantic relationships and lifestyle choices. One’s culture, class and familial background – i.e. one’s experiences with one’s family while growing up – represent additional challenges with regards to the discursive ideal (Gillies, 2006). Moreover, underlying feelings from their pasts might affect mothers’ reflections around mothering and motherhood (Hollway and Featherstone, 1997; Woodward, 2016). Thus, while many women might wish to practise motherhood in accordance with the discursive ideal, it can be challenging to do so. Indeed, findings revealed that the women in this study struggled to balance the discursive ideal with their specific mothering realities in their own self-representations of motherhood.

Findings further indicate that mothers who were not cared for in accordance with the discursive ideal when they were children can experience emotional triggers like pain, bitterness, sadness and anger in their adulthood. These emotions were prominent in the women’s interviews, and in their reflections on their own motherhood their childhoods sometimes challenged their confidence as caregivers. Being a mother within a context of inequality and vulnerability whilst comparing oneself to the discursive mothering ideal sometimes activated additional self-judgements. At times, the mothers in this study did not appear to recognize that their emotions were triggered when they reflected on their motherhood; at other times, however, they reflected upon current and past experiences and expectations and the feelings related to these experiences. These feelings often seemed to collide with the discursive mothering ideal, further reflecting the complexity of the lived experience of motherhood and mothering.

This article explores the ways in which mothers coming from a troubled background view their lives with their children, how they position themselves within the contemporary discourse on ‘good’ mothers, and how they experienced encounters with child welfare services within this context. As mentioned earlier, the conceptualization of ‘good’ motherhood, defined by the literature as ‘intensive mothering’, reflects a position that is expert-guided and child-centred (Bemiller, 2010; Hays, 1996; Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, 1998). This ideal is understood as a ‘mantra’ in a child welfare context, at least in Norway, and the caseworkers in child welfare services are affected by these dominant views – along with their own experiences both as mothers and with their own mothers whilst growing up. Further, Norwegian legislation around childrearing might also affect the caseworkers’ ‘moral compass’ regarding their normative view of what they think is valued by society as ‘good’ mothering. As such, their perspective might not include the various ways of mothering and forms of motherhood that do exist, nor the fact that mothers from vulnerable families might have a different starting point and outlook on motherhood. Moreover, that the exhausting, all-consuming motherhood ideal is especially challenging to meet without support from partners or family (Alizade, 2018), which the mothers in this study often lacked.

This study relied on psychosocial theories that integrate psychodynamic and discursive thinking to explore how the mothers’ relations with their own parents when they were growing up shapes their parenting in the present: in other words, to understand the ways in which they are affected by a past that actively influences their parenting practices in the present (Woodward, 2016). In addition, these theories help to illuminate the ways in which the mothers in this study are invested in enacting contemporary mothering ideals that are somewhat different from those of the 1970s and 1980s, when they were children. Following psycho-social theories, these mothers’ parenting approaches are inextricably linked to their pasts, to their emotions and to different normative discourses. Exploring the mother’s emotions as they emerged through their reflections on being mothers proved essential for investigating their experiences of motherhood. Findings from this study are relevant to the field of social work, and may help enhance understanding around the ways in which a lack of support and care in one’s own childhood may be repeated in one’s own parenting years later.

Conjointly, the inner and the outer perspectives appear to affect the mothers’ views about themselves as mothers. This knowledge is thus an important contribution to the field of child welfare, as it shows how mothers negotiate the multi-layered phenomena of motherhood with a self-effacing awareness (Hollway and Jefferson, 2012; Thomson et al., 2012). Given the fact that each mother has an individual history that affects how she adjusts to cultural expectations around ‘good’ mothering, the findings in this article illuminate how these 15 women were trying their best to be ‘good’ mothers, despite having limited family support and occasional child welfare services involvement.

To conclude, the findings illustrate how these mothers negotiated the discursive ideal regarding ‘good’ mothering, specifically with regards to their motherhood, their pasts and their feelings about their ‘broken’ childhoods and having grown up in vulnerable families. It was at times challenging for them to negotiate enacting the intensive mothering ideal whilst also experiencing child welfare services involvement, as such involvement is often viewed as an indication that they have not managed motherhood adequately (Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, 1998). However, how they viewed themselves as mothers indicates that they, too, held high expectations for themselves, and many were able to manage the manifold task of motherhood in accordance with the discursive ideal, despite their own troubled childhood. For the mothers who wanted to break away from their childhood experiences, changing their approach towards their own children – as compared to their mothers’ approach when they were children – was key. However, the past still remains active emotionally, in their reflections on motherhood, mothering and themselves as mothers.

There is always a need to problematize motherhood from diverse perspectives, groups and disciplines because conceptualizations of motherhood must fit into the shifting, continuously changing landscapes of history, culture, politics and practices. While the concept of motherhood has been studied from many different angles, this article represents a unique contribution with its longitudinal angle, illustrating how women’s experiences of mothering and motherhood are shaped by cultural contexts and discourses, and the interpersonal processes that come into play.

Limitations

Some of the women from the original sample who may have had children were unable to be reached, which represents a limitation of the study. While this is unfortunate, it can be argued that the 15 interviews used in this qualitative, in-depth exploration were sufficient for the study’s objective: namely, to focus on a small sample in order to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of motherhood.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publicationof this article.

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