I’m interested in mothering—as a cultural phenomenon, as an influence on child health, and as a risk factor for depression and anxiety. I’m carrying out a randomized controlled trial on child feeding among South Asian immigrant mothers in the New York area. As we move forward with this study, larger issues of motherhood, and how we define it, are becoming more and more salient. Our team is realizing that problems in child feeding have a lot to do with how motherhood is defined and the obligations that are imposed on South Asian moms.
More on the clinical trial some other time. In the meantime, I have been looking into what other people are writing about mothering in the US. In the 1940s and 50s—mothers were often blamed for society’s problems. Smothering, hostile, envious, indulgent…mothers were even blamed for schizophrenia and other severe mental disorders. Despite the advances in women’s equality over the past forty years, some things never change. The twenty first century is is a difficult time to be a Mom. Standards for childrearing are incredibly high. Today’s mothers are not only expected to provide top quality physical care for their children, to love and nurture them, but also to make a huge investment in children’s cognitive, emotional, and play lives.
Read this super review by Judith Warner to get a sense of the major ant-feminist themes in a lot of our modern assumption about parenting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/books/review/the-conflict-and-the-new-feminist-agenda.html?pagewanted=all
