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Feminist scholars have been critical of the expectations placed upon mothers to accomplish a perfect version of motherhood, but have often failed to interrogate the values about normalcy and disability imbedded in modern mothering ideologies. Mothers with disabilities are well positioned to expose the underlying beliefs about normalcy with which all mothers must contend. Drawing from interviews and focus groups conducted with mothers who have physical and sensory disabilities, I explore Deaf/disabled women's experiences negotiating the scientific motherhood regime. Illuminating a paradox, I argue these women are labeled \"risky mothers\" under scientific motherhood, which prizes the management of risk and the prevention of disability. Yet, these mothers are simultaneously rendered invisible by inaccessible and inflexible medical practices, and by a consumer market of expert advice which prescribes that mothers inhabit a typical body. These women's experiences illuminate the normalcy project as a central tenet of scientific motherhood.

Although contemporary socio-cultural changes dramatically increased fathers' involvement in childrearing, little is known about the brain basis of human fatherhood, its comparability with the maternal brain, and its sensitivity to caregiving experiences. We measured parental brain response to infant stimuli using functional MRI, oxytocin, and parenting behavior in three groups of parents (n = 89) raising their firstborn infant: heterosexual primary-caregiving mothers (PC-Mothers), heterosexual secondary-caregiving fathers (SC-Fathers), and primary-caregiving homosexual fathers (PC-Fathers) rearing infants without maternal involvement. Results revealed that parenting implemented a global “parental caregiving” neural network, mainly consistent across parents, which integrated functioning of two systems: the emotional processing network including subcortical and paralimbic structures associated with vigilance, salience, reward, and motivation, and mentalizing network involving frontopolar-medial-prefrontal and temporo-parietal circuits implicated in social understanding and cognitive empathy. These networks work in concert to imbue infant care with emotional salience, attune with the infant state, and plan adequate parenting. PC-Mothers showed greater activation in emotion processing structures, correlated with oxytocin and parent-infant synchrony, whereas SC-Fathers displayed greater activation in cortical circuits, associated with oxytocin and parenting. PC-Fathers exhibited high amygdala activation similar to PC-Mothers, alongside high activation of superior temporal sulcus (STS) comparable to SC-Fathers, and functional connectivity between amygdala and STS. Among all fathers, time spent in direct childcare was linked with the degree of amygdala-STS connectivity. Findings underscore the common neural basis of maternal and paternal care, chart brain–hormone–behavior pathways that support parenthood, and specify mechanisms of brain malleability with caregiving experiences in human fathers.

Punitive and disciplinary forms of governance disproportionately target low-income Black Americans for surveillance and punishment, and research finds far-reaching consequences of such criminalization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 46 low-income Black mothers of adolescents in urban neighborhoods, this article advances understanding of the long reach of criminalization by examining the intersection of two related areas of inquiry: the criminalization of Black youth and the institutional scrutiny and punitive treatment of Black mothers. Findings demonstrate that poor Black mothers calibrate their parenting strategies not only to fears that their children will be criminalized by mainstream institutions and the police, but also to concerns that they themselves will be criminalized as bad mothers who could lose their parenting rights. We develop the concept of “family criminalization” to explain the intertwining of Black mothers’ and children’s vulnerability to institutional surveillance and punishment. We argue that to fully grasp the causes and consequences of mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on Black youth and adults, sociologists must be attuned to family dynamics and linkages as important to how criminalization unfolds in the lives of Black Americans.

In this piece, I reflect on the current model of motherhood that prevails in Western countries, often termed 'intensive mothering'. I will briefly trace the history of this approach, focusing in particular on how theory from developmental psychology has, to some extent, functioned to reinforce it by foregrounding the mother–child dyad and emphasizing the importance of maternal practices for children's developmental outcomes. I will then consider the particular implications of this cultural approach to motherhood for women's experiences of motherhood and maternal wellbeing. Finally, I reiterate that we need to continue to challenge this western-centric model of motherhood, which risks both isolating and overburdening women, by highlighting the ways in which both women and children benefit from wider social support systems, yet also by making it permissible for women to access social support without compromising a 'good mother' identity. This article is part of the theme issue 'Multidisciplinary perspectives on social support and maternal–child health'.

This article explores mothers’ narratives of ‘prepping’ behaviours. Prepping involves the management of stockpiled household items in anticipation of marketplace disruption. In this article, we use anticipated food shortages following the UK’s exit from the EU (‘Brexit’) as our context. Drawing on interview data, we highlight how mothers embed prepping into their ongoing pursuit of intensive motherhood, bound in the highly gendered practice of feeding the family. While adhering to elements of intensive motherhood ideology (their actions are labour intensive/child centred), participants reveal a hidden element to their practice. We introduce the notion of ‘survivalist intensive motherhood’ to understand their actions. Survivalist intensive motherhood departs from earlier intensive motherhood studies due to the largely invisible nature of preparations and the trade-offs made to feed the family during resource scarcity.

Depressed parents may negatively influence the well-being and outcomes of their children. However, prior research has mostly addressed mother's depression and early childhood outcomes, whereas fathers and adolescents have been largely ignored in the literature. Using data from the sixth grade and age 15 waves of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, this study addresses similarities and differences in the influence of paternal and maternal depression on adolescent behavior. Results from structural equation models showed that paternal depression had direct effects on both internalizing and externalizing behaviors, whereas maternal depression did not. Maternal depression worked through parenting behaviors, whereas paternal depression did not. These results highlight the importance of understanding depression through a gender-specific lens, highlight the paternal role in the family system, and underscore the importance of better depression screening and help-seeking interventions for fathers.

Purpose As migration of family members becomes an omnipresent phenomenon, the conventional norm of having a family and living under the same roof together is far from normal for many households. It produces transnational practices and multisite lifestyle configurations. This study aims to explore the implication of maternal absence as a result of transnational labour migration on the left-behind child in the context of transnational labour migration from Ethiopia. Design/methodology/approach It focusses on the perspective of those who stayed behind. The ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in two rural villages – Bulebullo and Bokekesa – of Worebabbo district in Northern Ethiopia. It involved in-depth interviews with children and their caregivers supported by interviews and group discussions with members of the community, local officials and traditional leaders. Findings Transnational mothering and other mothering emerge as new practices of mothering in the rural villages due to maternal absence have interrelated implications and meanings for the left-behind child. However, the rigidity of sending societies’ norms related to mothering and gendered labour dynamics exacerbated the negative implications of maternal absence on left-behind children. The absence of the fathers’ effort to redefine mothering or fathering by providing childcare is part of the equation in the relationship between maternal absence and left-behind children. Originality/value The findings of this study refute the notion that labels mother’s out-migration as “abandoning children”, “disrupting families” and “acts of selfishness”.

Environmental chemicals (e.g., lead, pesticides, flame retardants) accumulate in all human bodies and have the potential to affect the health of men and women, adults, and children. This article advances “precautionary consumption”—the effort to mediate personal exposure to environmental chemicals through vigilant consumption—as a new empirical site for understanding the intersections between maternal embodiment and contemporary motherhood as a consumer project. Using in-depth interviews, I explore how a group of 25 mothers employ precautionary consumption to mediate their children’s exposure to chemicals found in food, consumer products, and the home. Most of the mothers in the study situate their children’s chemical “burdens” within their own bodies and undertake the labor of precautionary consumption as part of a larger and commodity-based motherhood project. In actively expanding the sphere of responsible motherhood to include managing children’s body burdens, these mothers navigate multiple and overlapping contexts that hold women accountable for children’s futures and value the agency of the proactive consumer. Yet, as the sphere of responsible mothering expands, women without financial resources, time, and family stability are pushed to the margins of normative motherhood.

Neoliberal cultural frames of individual choice inform mothers accounts of why they refuse state-mandated vaccines for their children. Using interviews with 25 mothers who reject recommended vaccines, this article examines the gendered discourse of vaccine refusal. First, I show how mothers, seeing themselves as experts on their children, weigh perceived risks of infection against those of vaccines and dismiss claims that vaccines are necessary. Second, I explicate how mothers see their own intensive mothering practices—particularly around feeding, nutrition, and natural living—as an alternate and superior means of supporting their children's immunity. Third, I show how they attempt to control risk through management of social exposure, as they envision disease risk to lie in \"foreign\" bodies outside their networks, and, therefore, individually manageable. Finally, I examine how these mothers focus solely on their own children by evaluating—and often rejecting—assertions that their choices undermine community health, while ignoring how their children benefit from the immunity of others. By analyzing the gendered discourse of vaccines, this article identifies how women's insistence on individual maternal choice as evidence of commitment to their children draws on and replicates structural inequality in ways that remain invisible, but affect others.

Recent research argues that the use of information and communication technology (ICT) has created a new channel through which transnational mothers can fulfill their maternal duties from afar. However, the literature pays little attention to the diversity of mothering practices via telecommunication. To fill this gap, our qualitative research on Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong elaborates on the complexity and diversity of transnational mothering via mobile communication by demonstrating three patterns for the performance of maternal duties: intensive, collaborative, and passive mothering. We argue that transnational mothering via telecommunication is shaped by the intersection of mothers' agency, children's responses, and substitute caregivers' role in child care.