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Writer's pictureAriel Moy

Cultural Messages and Expectations About Mothering

Updated: Apr 30, 2021

When I first began researching holding, I looked up ‘mother holding child’ on the internet, I particularly wanted to see what images appeared. The first thing I noticed was the overwhelmingly white, brightly lit colour scheme, I realised that the photos were most commonly of mothers and babies and that they all appeared to be in states of serenity or joy. As I kept scrolling, looking for something a little more honest, I found some contemplative images and the odd silhouette of mothers walking with older children.

Photos from wix.com


I soon realised that many of these were stock photos that would ideally suit an advertiser’s brief. If you’re selling baby wipes or formula, baby carriers or parenting advice, you’re also selling a feeling. These bright, happy images were conveying messages, not just about a particular product but about the way mothers should be with their children: peaceful, in control, blissfully happy. Naturally, the message is that if you buy these products, you’ll receive these feelings too.


While feeling in control and calm may be an ideal state in early or later parenthood, it is perhaps a tad unrealistic. The mother/child relationship is constantly about adapting to change and how and when we hold changes with that. Feeling in control is earned, it comes with successful adaptation to the latest change for both mother and child. What worked when my son was an infant is different to what worked when he was a toddler or what works now that he’s a teen.


These images don’t just serve advertisers however, they also reveal cultural ideals around motherhood and holding imagery seems stuck in a child’s infancy. Our ideas, ways of behaving and interacting, our expectations and our hopes are deeply shaped by the culture we are raised in, so much so that cultural prescriptions are often invisible to us. We rarely notice the culture we live in and the expectations embedded in it unless something changes for us or we find ourselves travelling to a different cultural space.


Photo from wix.com

One of the biggest changes in our lives is having children and the changes keep coming. Many of the ways we live in the world, the cultural messages and expectations we took for granted, are experienced in a radically different light. We now notice the cultural messages we receive about what it is to be a good mother, how we and our children are supposed to behave, how we are supposed to look and even how we’re supposed to feel. Our culture has an awful lot to say about mothering. As written in the Australian Financial Review:


“Women feel they have to grow the bacon, cook the bacon, look sexy while they serve the bacon and make sure the bacon is free-range, organic and nitrate free, as well as bring it home.” (Helen Hawkes quoting Janella Purcell, August 31, 2016).


Different cultural ideals about motherhood can limit or expand the experiences of mothering that are available to us. When mothers, for example, experience post-natal depression or anxiety they are most certainly not meeting our cultural expectations around

mothering. How then do these mothers (myself included) feel okay as a parent or trust their mothering abilities? Surrounded by bright, joyous and totally ‘together’ mums we cannot help but feel lacking.


It is both challenging and freeing to notice that our cultural ideals around good mothering are quite changeable. Not so long ago, mothers were told to leave their babies to cry themselves to sleep; we were told not to hold our children too often or they would become dependent on it. One of the participants in my inquiry had so many competing voices in her head telling her what she should think, do and feel that it caused her significant pain and distress and undermined her confidence as a parent.


One of the benefits of social media and the internet is the increasing availability of different approaches to mothering and different ways of experiencing motherhood. To an extent, we can start to pick and choose what works for ourselves and our children (though we can also risk information overload and social push back if we go with something other than what appears normal in our social circle). What these many voices and their accompanying imagery do tell us is that mothering is experienced and enacted in many different ways.


Each of these styles of mothering also provide a particular worldview. For example, if a mothering style tells you to avoid picking up a crying infant, it’s also telling you something about how emotions should be controlled rather than expressed. If another mothering style tells you that you must hold onto your infant whenever they are awake, and maintain physical closeness and touch at all times, then that approach places the utmost value on the physical relationship between mother and child but also prescribes an unrelenting responsiveness and intense focus on the child.


Given the sheer number, complexity and associated judgments attached to mothering models, parenting can seem harder than ever. What might have been considered the norm or preferable in your mother’s generation may not work now. As Shari L. Thurer (in Andrea O’Reilly’s Maternal Theory: Essential Readings, 2007) writes:


“The good mother is reinvented as each age or society defines her anew, in its own terms, according to its own mythology."


Even if you feel as a mother that you ‘just do you’ you’re still participating in a culture with conflicting ideals around motherhood. Every decision can be fraught – to work or stay at home or both, to breastfeed or not, to ‘helicopter’, ‘snowplow’ or ‘free range’ parent. In the face of all of this expectation and confusion where does holding fit in?


I recognise that like every other parent out there I’ve been born into a particular culture and have absorbed through my city, my neighbourhood, my upbringing and my friendship circles particular ways of mothering. Because of my post-natal anxiety and then my research I chose to examine what assumptions and values structure my mothering and in particular, how I hold my child. What I have come to in terms of holding is this:


There are mothering models that emphasise or de-emphasise holding, there was even an approach in the 1980s that forced holding on children, particularly children on the autism spectrum, to devastating effect (google Holding Therapy, popularised by Dr Martha Welch). The benefits I suggest in relationship with holding are the result of mutually consenting affectionate touch, holding does not follow a regime of frequency or intensity or a particular kind when your child reaches a particular age. It is never, ever forced, it is about what works for the relationship and about becoming aware of that relationship in the moment of holding and reflecting upon it later.


Holding my infant son gave me rare and treasured moments of peace in an otherwise anxiety loaded existence. Still, I was worried that I’d teach him to rely on being held to go to sleep and so didn’t hold him quite as often as I wanted to. Like another one of my participants, I look back at that time and think, why didn’t I just do what I wanted? That said, this kind of frequent holding might cause distress or frustration for other mothers and/or their children, and so I’d say, find other ways of connecting with and holding your child that work for both of you.


We can hold our children physically but also emotionally and psychologically, the one common denominator in each kind of holding is a quality of love built upon a shared history of love. At different times, a quick hug might work for you both, a gentle touch, a rough and tumble playing together, or sitting side by side while you read together or watch TV. With a history of holding we can send out a virtual hug with texted words or images.


Holding is a way of staying connected, reinforcing, developing and celebrating your relationship with your child and there is no fixed way of doing that; it certainly isn’t limited to your child’s infancy and doesn’t require bright light and happiness no matter what cultural messages you’re being sent. Holding is yours, it is unique to the relationship you share with your child, it changes as your relationship changes and at every stage, it can reinforce that relationship and remind you both why all the rest of the parenting-and-being-a-child-drama is worth it.

This post is written by Dr Ariel Moy. She is passionate about developing mother/child relationships, is an academic teacher and supervisor at The MIECAT Institute and a Professional member of ANZACATA.


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