Manufacturing 'bad Mothers'
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Total Pages | : 0 |
Release | : 1995 |
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Total Pages | : 0 |
Release | : 1995 |
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Author | : Karen Swift |
Publisher | : University of Toronto Press |
Total Pages | : |
Release | : 1995-04-27 |
Genre | : Social Science |
ISBN | : 1442631597 |
Child neglect has been characterized over the past century as a problem of deficient care of children by mothers. A complex and punitive child welfare system has emerged, based on a view that the children of these mothers require legally sanctioned rescue by those better suited to care for them. Karen Swift challenges both the accepted view of child neglect and the present official response to it. Beginning from a critical theoretical perspective, she argues that our usual perceptions of neglect hide and distort important social realities. This distorted perception only serves to reproduce the conditions of poverty, marginalization, and violence in which these families live. The current child welfare system, far from rescuing neglected children, helps instead to ensure the continuation of their problems, and the outcome is especially dramatic and damaging in Aboriginal communities. Swift explores the historical, organizational, and professional dimensions within which child neglect becomes a visible social reality. Also examined are relations of class, race, and gender embedded in our usual understanding of child neglect. The discussion shows how these relations are continually reproduced through ordinary, everyday work practices of social workers and others who deal with mothers accused of child neglect. The 'good parent' model, through which help and authority are apparently merged, continually indicates that the mothers are unworthy of help. Their own experience disappears as they are faced with procedures designed to examine their present suitability for the job of parenting. The same procedures produce children as actually being helped through the exertion of state authority over their parents – but most of the help provided children is theoretical, and some of it is quite damaging. Swift also looks at both current and alternative notions of helping families. Finally, she argues that each of us can help to transform oppressive social realities.
Author | : Karen Swift |
Publisher | : University of Toronto Press |
Total Pages | : 236 |
Release | : 1995-01-01 |
Genre | : Social Science |
ISBN | : 9780802074355 |
A complex and punitive child welfare system has emerged, based on a view that the children of mothers providing deficient childcare require legally sanctioned rescue by those better suited to care for them. Karen Swift challenges both the accepted view of child neglect and the present official response to it.
Author | : Hughes Michelle Miller |
Publisher | : Demeter Press |
Total Pages | : 362 |
Release | : 2017-03-01 |
Genre | : Social Science |
ISBN | : 1772581100 |
While the image or construct of the “good mother” has been the focus of many research projects, the “bad mother,” as a discursive construct, and also mothers who do “bad” things as complicated, agentic social actors, have been quite neglected, despite the prevalence of the image of the bad mother across late modern societies. The few researchers who address this powerful social image point out that bad mothers are culturally identified by what they do, yet they are also socially recognized by who they are. Mothers become potentially bad when they behave or express opinions that diverge from, or challenge, social or gender norms, or when they deviate from mainstream, white, middle class, heterosexual, nondisabled normativity. When suspected of being bad mothers, women are surveilled, and may be disciplined, punished or otherwise excluded, by various official agents (i.e. legal, medical and welfare institutions), as well as by their relatives, friends and communities. Too often, women are judged and punished without clear evidence that they are neglecting or abusing their children. Frequently they are blamed for the marginal sociocultural context in which they are mothering. This anthology presents empirical, theoretical and creative works that address the construct of the bad mother and the lived realities of mothers labeled as bad. Throughout the volume, the editors consider voices and acts of resistance to bad mother constructions, demonstrating that mothers, across time and across domains, have individually and collectively taken a stand against this destructive label.
Author | : Jackie Krasas |
Publisher | : Cornell University Press |
Total Pages | : 229 |
Release | : 2021-04-15 |
Genre | : Social Science |
ISBN | : 1501754319 |
Jackie Krasas traces the trajectories of mothers who have lost or ceded custody to an ex-partner. She argues that these noncustodial mothers' experiences should be understood within a greater web of gendered social institutions such as employment, education, health care, and legal systems that shapes the meanings of contemporary motherhood in the United States. If motherhood means "being there," then noncustodial mothers, through their absence, are seen as nonmothers. They are anti-mothers to be reviled. At the very least, these mothers serve as cautionary tales. Still a Mother questions the existence of an objective method for determining custody of children and challenges the "best-interests standard" through a feminist, reproductive justice lens. The stories of noncustodial mothers that Krasas relates shed light on marriage and divorce, caregiving, gender violence, and family court. Unfortunately, much of the contemporary discussion of child custody determination is dominated either by gender-neutral discussions, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, by the idea that fathers are severely disadvantaged in custody disputes. As a result, the idea that mothers always receive custody has taken on the status of common sense. If this was true, as Krasas affirms, there would be no book to write.
Author | : Veronica Strong-Boag |
Publisher | : Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press |
Total Pages | : 318 |
Release | : 2011-09-28 |
Genre | : Family & Relationships |
ISBN | : 1554587980 |
Fostering Nation? Canada Confronts Its History of Childhood Disadvantage explores the missteps and the promise of a century and more of child protection efforts by Canadians and their governments. It is the first volume to offer a comprehensive history of what life has meant for North America’s most disadvantaged Aboriginal and newcomer girls and boys. Gender, class, race, and (dis)ability are always important factors that bear on youngsters’ access to resources. State fostering initiatives occur as part of a broad continuum of arrangements, from social assistance for original families to kin care and institutions. Birth and foster parents of disadvantaged youngsters are rarely in full control. Children most distant from the mainstream ideals of their day suffer, and that suffering is likely to continue into their own experience of parenthood. That trajectory is never inevitable, however. Both resilience and resistance have shaped Canadians’ engagement with foster children in a society dominated by capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal power. Fostering Nation? breaks much new ground for those interested in social welfare, history, and the family. It offers the first comprehensive perspective on Canada’s provision for marginalized youngsters from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Its examination of kin care, institutions, state policies, birth parents, foster parents, and foster youngsters provides ample reminder that children’s welfare cannot be divorced from that of their parents and communities, and reinforces what it means when women bear disproportionate responsibility for caregiving.
Author | : Molly Ladd-Taylor |
Publisher | : NYU Press |
Total Pages | : 421 |
Release | : 1998 |
Genre | : Social Science |
ISBN | : 0814751199 |
There really are women who are less than good mothers. However, during the past quarter century, the definition of bad mother has changed with changing lifestyles and changes to the family structure. Mothers today are blamed for a host of problems. Drawing together the work of prominent scholars and journalists, and individual cases, BAD MOTHERS marks an important contribution to the literature on motherhood.
Author | : Andrea O′Reilly |
Publisher | : SAGE Publications |
Total Pages | : 1521 |
Release | : 2010-04-06 |
Genre | : Social Science |
ISBN | : 1452266298 |
In the last decade the topic of motherhood has emerged as a distinct and established field of scholarly inquiry. A cursory review of motherhood research reveals that hundreds of scholarly articles have been published on almost every motherhood theme imaginable. The first ever on the topic, this Encyclopedia of Motherhood helps to both demarcate motherhood as a scholarly field and an academic discipline and to direct its future development. With more than 700 entries, these three volumes provide information on the central terms, concepts, topics, issues, themes, debates, theories, and texts of this new discipline. Further, the encyclopedia examines the topic of motherhood in various contexts such as history and geography and by academic discipline. Key Features Provides an overview of the topic of motherhood in many and diverse disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and philosophy Examines the meaning and experience of motherhood in many time periods from classic civilizations to present day Includes an entry for all the influential theorists of maternal scholarship from the pioneering theories to the more recent writings Covers issues and events of our current times including entries on the mommy blog, the motherhood memoir, terrorism, reproductive technologies, HIV/AIDS, and LGBT families Explores geographical, cultural, and ethnic diversity with an entry for almost every country in the world as well as entries on lesbian, immigrant, adoptive, single, nonresidential, young, poor mothers and mothers with disabilities Key Themes History of Motherhood Issues in Motherhood Motherhood and Family Motherhood and Health Motherhood and Society Motherhood Around the World Motherhood in the United States Motherhood Studies Prominent Mothers In human society, few institutions are as important as motherhood, and this unique encyclopedia captures the interdisciplinary foundation of the subject in one convenient reference. The scope of the Encyclopedia of Motherhood is focused on providing a comprehensive resource to understanding the complexities of motherhood for academic and public libraries, written by scholars and institutional experts in the social and behavioral sciences.
Author | : |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 276 |
Release | : 2015 |
Genre | : |
ISBN | : |
In Canada, under the guise of austerity measures, the state is increasingly distancing itself from the responsibility of helping families raise their children (Vandenbeld Giles 2012; Walmsley and Tessier 2015). This distancing is evident in Canada's provincial legal-judicial child welfare systems, where the focus on protective child services significantly outweighs preventative programming and family support. A tenant of neoliberalism, a focus on individual responsibility is evident in the increasing concern that parents are risk factors in their children's lives (Brown 2006; Romagnoli and Wall 2012). This ideology is apparent in the constructed "bad" mother label applied to mothers involved with Canadian child welfare, where 89% of involved caregivers are biological mothers (CIS 2008:40). Focusing specifically on the Ontario child welfare system, this case study examines how manufactured ideologies of the "bad" mother become synonymous with marginalized mothers. Using the theoretical lens of Pierre Bourdieu and the material-feminist work of Angela McRobbie, the institution, practices, and policies of Ontario child welfare are discussed as both class and racially biased. Further, prescriptive ideologies of intensive mothering, a concept coined by sociologist Sharon Hays, are found intertwined with notions of "good" mothering and normalized within the intersecting fields of mothering and child welfare. The landscape of "bad" mothers involved with child welfare is discussed surrounding the non-essentialist categories of monstrous mothers, the incarcerated mother, and the mother next door - the vague category where marginalization and disadvantaged social positioning serves as an invitation for increased scrutiny and gaze from the state (Appell 1998; Reich 2005; Swift and Callahan 2009; Swift and Parada 2004). This thesis challenges assumptions and stereotypes held about mothers involved with child welfare by highlighting the marginalized contexts in which they navigate life for both themselves and their children including experienced poverty, racism, colonialization, substance abuse, and domestic violence. Moreover, a specific analysis of language constructions and reforms to Part III of the Child and Family Services Act made in 2000, reveal how such changes are manufactured more so for the protection of the state and its governing agencies, than they are for the protection of children and their families.
Author | : Tamar Hager |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 0 |
Release | : 2017 |
Genre | : Childbirth |
ISBN | : 9781772581034 |
While the image or construct of the "good mother" has been the focus of many research projects, the "bad mother," as a discursive construct, and also mothers who do "bad" things as complicated, agentic social actors, have been quite neglected, despite the prevalence of the image of the bad mother across late modern societies. The few researchers who address this powerful social image point out that bad mothers are culturally identified by what they do, yet they are also socially recognized by who they are. Mothers become potentially bad when they behave or express opinions that diverge from, or challenge, social or gender norms, or when they deviate from mainstream, white, middle class, heterosexual, nondisabled normativity. When suspected of being bad mothers, women are surveilled, and may be disciplined, punished or otherwise excluded, by various official agents (i.e. legal, medical and welfare institutions), as well as by their relatives, friends and communities. Too often, women are judged and punished without clear evidence that they are neglecting or abusing their children. Frequently they are blamed for the marginal sociocultural context in which they are mothering. This anthology presents empirical, theoretical and creative works that address the construct of the bad mother and the lived realities of mothers labeled as bad. Throughout the volume, the editors consider voices and acts of resistance to bad mother constructions, demonstrating that mothers, across time and across domains, have individually and collectively taken a stand against this destructive label.