I interviewed Tina Miller, Professor of Sociology at Oxford Brookes University. Her
work explores transitions to motherhood and fatherhood and constructions of gender and identity. She has a book coming out very soon about experiences of first time mothers and you might also want to check out her BBC analysis episode: What’s changing about childbirth?
I started by asking a question that Prof Miller poses herself in her book:
Has there ever been a more challenging time to be a mother?
I think mothering has always been tough. Unrecognised. Invisible.
But currently we have this sort of coming together of a whole range of circumstances which make it a particularly challenging time to be a mother.
Part of the context is that ‘working motherhood’ is much more typical now. More women are in education for longer. Women are serious economic actors who often want to continue their careers and very often their households need two incomes coming in.
But we have also seen an intensification of ideas about how we should raise children.
The idea that you feed and clothe your child and protect them as best you can and love them is really quite out of date. Now that's not enough.
Now you need to be at the sensory group for your three-week old baby and doing skin-to-skin and baby massage and plenty of tummy time and so on. There's a whole range of other activities that have come into play around what I would call ‘project child’ and I think mums feel they should be engaging with them to demonstrate that they are mothering appropriately or worthy of that terrible label: “good mother”.
I think generally women are set up to fail currently in a whole range of ways.
We have a society that doesn’t take caring seriously and doesn’t support families to care for older and younger generations.
There’s intense focus and pressure on early child development.
Although we are offered more choices for birth than twenty years ago we’re much more likely to have a birth that involves surgery or intervention.
Coming from smaller families we tend to have less experience of caring for younger siblings before we have our own first child and on top of all of that our mothering is closely surveilled and compared to curated social media feeds of airbrushed motherhood.
In your book you explore ideas about ‘balancing’ childcare and work commitments. What does your study find?
I have carried out the same study twenty years apart. I did in-depth interviews with women during their pregnancy and first year of motherhood and in my new book I compare what has changed between the studies.
In my more recent study, around month seven of pregnancy the women are making plans about birth, maternity leave, and returning to their careers. We talk about how they will share care of the baby. They are going to balance being a mum and being at work, continuing with a career. They are thinking about what it will be like to be a mother and how they will balance work and family life.
It all seems possible.
It all seems plausible.
In the interview when the baby is around eight weeks old they are generally not too sure what’s going on and by the final interview around nine-ten months after birth the whole idea of balance disappears from the data.
It turns out, of course, that it has been an illusion.
When you actually start looking at putting plans in place to balance family life and a career and all those things that matter we realise that actually we don't live in a society where that's going to be possible.
We have extremely high childcare costs and that’s certainly a huge factor but something else changes in those first nine-ten months of parenting. The person who is there most often finds ways of becoming more and more proficient at doing the caring.
That isn't necessarily instinctive, which a lot of the women hoped it might be. It is practise. So when it comes to someone else (like the father) looking after the baby independently there’s generally a lot of debriefing that takes place because the baby and their routine is changing as they rapidly grow. It’s very easy to see how you fall into being the expert on the baby, reinforcing the idea of the mother as the primary carer. I call it falling back into gender. But there’s a whole lot of research that shows that men are fully proficient carers (suggestions for further reading below).
Even if men have the best of intentions and couples have the best of plans to have more egalitarian arrangements, they can be so hard to hang on to in the structures that we have.
Are there any reasons for optimism?
When I finished the first book I thought the problem was solved. I thought: we know what we need to do. We need to give women permission to talk about the difficult aspects of mothering.
Those difficult aspects are the normal aspects of mothering. In fact, I think it's probably abnormal to be sailing through everything.
That doesn't mean that people don't don't love their babies. These feelings can coexist.
You can love your baby beyond words and still think that the institution of motherhood needs to be dismantled.
When women have permission to talk about these things we challenge the myth of motherhood. The myth of motherhood is that it’s natural. Natural, we think, means easy. The language around women being natural mothers or natural carers really devalues everything. The learnt behaviours, the practise, the effort, the hard-won wisdom.
I thought I had got the answers and that things would change so I’m disappointed with how little has changed. But there are some positive signs.
I think now we are seeing a mobilisation of individuals and groups, like this one and lots of others, challenging different aspects of the motherhood myth and how the institution of motherhood has come to operate. All these groups and people are piecing together the jigsaw and this collective effort makes me feel optimistic.
*Interested in exploring some of the research about men and caring? Check out:
Chapter 2 'Caring Landscapes and Gendered Practices' in Miller, T. (2017) Making Sense of Parenthood, Cambridge University Press
BBC Radio 4 'Analysis: Why do we assume women care?'
The work of Anna Machin
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