Mothers' experiences with intensive parenting and brain development discourse

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2010.02.019Get rights and content

Synopsis

The trend toward increasingly intensive mothering was accelerated in the 1990s with a focus in child-rearing advice on maximizing children's brain development through ample and appropriate stimulation in the early years. Based on in-depth semi-structured interviews this study examines Canadian mothers' experiences with this advice, and the implications of this for cultural understandings of motherhood and childhood. Mothers in this study did practice intensive mothering aimed at increasing childhood intelligence and accomplishment. Neo-liberal constructions of proper parenthood that emphasize parental responsibility, parental control, risk, and competition interacted with, and affected, mothers' experiences in this regard, as did gender roles and expectations. The processes through which this unfolded are described. Consequences for mothers included increased stress, exhaustion, anxiety and guilt. However, it was in part, the negative consequences of intensive parenting that also prompted many mothers to begin to challenge the exclusively child-centered nature of this advice.

Introduction

Child-rearing in Western industrialized countries has become an increasingly intensive task over the course of the twentieth century as mothers in particular have become responsible for more and more aspects of children's behavior and outcomes (Hays, 1996, Blum, 1999, Fox, 2001, Fox, 2006, Weiss, 1978, Lynch, 2005, Lareau, 2002, Lareau, 2003, Lupton and Schmied, 2002, Wall, 2001). Recent developments in child-rearing advice that build on what is being termed “new brain research” further emphasize the importance of intensive parenting in order to optimize child brain development (Nadesan, 2002, Quirke, 2006, Pitt, 2002, Wall, 2004). Looking at this development as an extension of the intensification of parenting, and one which is intertwined with a neo-liberal rationality that emphasizes individual responsibility, self-management, risk, and control, this paper outlines an analysis of qualitative interviews with Canadian mothers of pre-school children, where mothers' experiences with this advice and the social expectations of good motherhood that accompany it are examined. Drawing on previous qualitative analyses of mothers' experiences and discursive analyses of intensive mothering and brain development discourse, this study explores the experiences of mothers as they negotiate expert advice and social expectations that emphasize ample and appropriate parental stimulation of children in the early years in order to maximize later brain potential and future success. Explored in the interviews are the ways in which mothers are interpreting and responding to the new imperatives and the impact that these social understandings have on their experience as mothers.

Following a brief examination of related literature, a description of methods, and an outline of the type of intensive mothering that most of the women in this study undertook, the processes through which mothers came to embrace, and take responsibility for, this type of parenting behavior are examined. Also noted are some of the ways in which the mothers here were beginning to challenge the opposition of children's needs to their own needs. The consequences of this type of intensive parenting for mothers and for children, and its implications for social understandings of childhood and motherhood are also taken up in the findings and conclusions of the paper.

During the first half of the twentieth century in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., child-rearing advice drew primarily on medical expertise and emphasized mothers' responsibility for children's physical health and good habits. (Arnup, 1994, Ehrenreich and English, 1978, Weiss, 1978). Following World War II a growth in developmental psychology helped to shift child-rearing advice in many Western countries to emphasize additional maternal responsibilities for children's emotional and psychological well-being. The work of John Bowlby, 1952, Bowlby, 1958, Bowlby, 1969 on maternal deprivation and attachment was particularly germane to this shift and to the increasing intensification of motherhood that resulted. Bowlby's work lent scientific credibility to the notion that continuous and solicitous maternal attention in the early years of a child's life was crucial to the healthy emotional and psychological development of children (Eyer, 1992, Ehrenreich and English, 1978). Although Bowlby's work and the theories that emerged from it have been the subject of numerous critiques, both scientific and feminist, many of the assumptions associated with attachment theory have become part of the taken-for-granted expert and cultural knowledge that surrounds child-rearing (Eyer, 1992, Belsky and Cassidy, 1994).

Post World-War II child-rearing advice, then, as Weiss (1978) points out, was notably more child-centered than the advice that preceded it, with mothers' needs and wants becoming firmly buried beneath the child's. Good mothering required anticipating and adapting to children's needs, and greater amounts of maternal time and energy spent ensuring that children's needs were satisfied. Hays (1996) contends that motherhood continued to intensify throughout the twentieth century such that by the mid-1990s good middle-class mothering required an unprecedented amount of time, energy, and financial resources to meet an expanding list of children's needs.

The early 1990s saw a new shift in child-rearing advice that had the effect of further increasing the cultural importance of intensive parenting. This shift focused on the importance of secure attachment and ample stimulation in the early (pre-school) years, not only for children's emotional and psychological health, but more importantly for children's optimal brain development and future intellectual potential. Over the 1990s and into the current decade government agencies, non-profit foundations, and child-rearing experts undertook to educate parents and the public in general about the importance of spending ample, one-on-one quality time with children in order to stimulate brain development and future brain potential (Nadesan, 2002, Pitt, 2002, Wall, 2004). These materials differ from previous child-rearing advice on cognitive development by drawing on what is commonly referred to as “new brain research” in the field of neurology to focus in particular on the architecture of the brain and the ways in which parents and caregivers can enhance this to affect children's intellectual potential.

The claims being made in the advice literature that has resulted, while presented as fact, have been the subject of some scientific debate. Several authors suggest, among other things, that there is in fact little evidence in the field of neurology to support the claim that ‘extra enrichment’, over and above what children in average North American homes would normally experience in everyday life, has any beneficial effect on future intelligence or success (Gopnik et al., 1999, Bruer, 1999, Bruner, 2000, Harris, 1998).

Despite scientific critiques however, the brain development advice itself borrows from the language and authority of neuroscience to frame children's brains as technologically complex machines that need the correct inputs in order to attain maximum efficiency at a later time as is evident in an excerpt from the widely distributed pamphlet, The First Years Last Forever: I am Your Child:

... neurons will grow and connect with other neurons in the system... These systems, activated by repeated experiences, provide the foundation for the brain's organization and functioning throughout life. The absence of appropriate activation results in the lack of development or the disappearance of these connections (Reiner Foundation, 1997).

Parents and caregivers are cast as the engineers and programmers charged with the task of making the correct inputs, and the potential consequences of neglecting to give children what they need in this regard are portrayed as dire (Wall, 2004). This is well-illustrated in the following excerpts from parental education literature that has been widely distributed in Canada and the U.S. to parents of infants and preschoolers:

... young children are deeply affected by their early experiences. Their relationships with parents... (the things) they experience, the challenges they meet—these don't just influence their moods. These experiences actually affect the way children's brains become wired (Reiner Foundation, 1997).

Will a child lie and vegetate or blossom intellectually? Well, that depends on the seeds we plant during the first five years of a child's life. Simple things like talking, singing and reading to a child from the day of birth will have a lasting impact on her potential. Intelligence doesn't grow on trees, but it certainly grows on love and supportive stimulation (Invest in Kids, 2001).

The same themes began appearing widely in other types of popular media in the 1990s as well. The February 19th 1996 cover story of Newsweek, for instance, was entitled Your Child's Brain. These types of messages are now very much taken-for-granted and underlie much of the advice in parenting magazines, and books, as well as the marketing of children's toys, products, and services (Quirke, 2006, Nadesan, 2002, Lynch, 2005).1

The intensive parenting and brain development focus in child-rearing advice draws on and contributes to a number of other discursive regimes in contemporary society. In particular, it is bound up with a neo-liberal rationality which emphasizes individual responsibility and self-management over the social support of families (Wall, 2004). Accompanying a focus on managing risk and promoting individual responsibility is also a cultural preoccupation with planning and control of the many aspects of one's life in order to ensure future success. This is what Beck-Gernsheim (1996) refers to when she talks about “life as a planning project.” In an age of intensive, and child-centered parenting, the imperative for parents to plan for, control, and manage the lives of their children to optimize their future chances, in Blum (1999) words to ‘maximize’ children, is also pronounced (Beck-Gernsheim, 1996: 142–44). The institutional practices that have grown up around prenatal education and planning, the promises made in the marketing of educational toys, and the promotion of lessons, and various types of cultural enrichment all contribute to a cultural understanding that parents (and especially mothers) have a duty, and the ability, to control and shape the lives of their children to a very fine degree.

The assumption that parents can control child outcomes and shape the future intellect and personality of their children is the focus of increasing debate in psychological research (Harris, 1998, Caplan, 2009). Judith Harris (1998), for instance, offers a methodological critique of research in developmental psychology that is based on what she calls “the nurture assumption.” She provides evidence to suggest that this assumption — that parents’ behavior does shape the person their child becomes — is, for the most part, erroneous. As Caplan (2009: B5) in a review of this and similar research notes, “parents today are making large ‘investments’ in their children that are unlikely to pay off.” The extent to which the mothers in this study accepted the assumption of parental control will be explored in the findings section of this paper.

The implications of the current cultural emphasis on intensive parenting, childhood intelligence, and parental planning, for both children and mothers, have been examined in several recent studies, many of which have focused on middle and upper-class parenting strategies for school-aged, as well as pre-school children (Lareau, 2002, Chin, 2000, Caputo, 2007). Caputo (2007), for instance, in her study of performances of motherhood and childhood in a private school setting, notes that current intensive mothering ideology positions children as vulnerable, passive, and lacking in agency, and good mothers, in relation to this, as those who take on the task of developing the potential in their children. Related to this is a relative loss of freedom and autonomy for children raised in a culture that views them as increasingly vulnerable (Rosier and Kinney, 2005, Rosier, 2009).

Lareau, 2002, Lareau, 2003 work also speaks to some of the other consequences of cultural understandings of vulnerable children. In her analysis of child-rearing practices among black and white families of different social classes she noted that middle-class families tended to approach child-rearing with a strategy that she termed ‘concerted cultivation’. This involved extensive enrolment of children in organized and structured activities, and intensive parental involvement aimed at cultivating language and reasoning skills in children. Children in these families, she observed, while tending to develop an emerging sense of entitlement and self-confidence that no doubt would serve them well in later life, had more difficulty entertaining themselves, were often time-stressed, and maintained weaker social ties with their neighborhood community and extended family than did children in working class families.

The view of childhood embedded in brain development discourse is certainly one of children as highly malleable, as parental projects full of potential, but potential that can only be activated with appropriate and intensive parental inputs. Children's current happiness is also emphasized less in this discourse than is their future potential for success (Nadesan, 2002, Caputo, 2007, Chin, 2000). While the child-rearing discourse of the mid to late 20th century emphasized the importance of happy, well-adjusted children, current happiness becomes less important as an end in itself in the brain development material. Rather it is desirable only in so far as it contributes to potential success, and coincides with parental behavior that promotes brain development. At the same time childhood intelligence has become elevated as an important virtue (over and above happiness) and manifestations of it are more likely to be seen as evidence of good parenting.

The focus on intelligence in brain development discourse is linked to an implicit endorsement of competition in this regard between children and between parents. As Nadesan (2002) notes, if developmental psychology in the first half of the twentieth century was about normalizing childhood and measuring children against those norms (Rose, 1991) the brain development turn in the 1990s accelerated a trend in parental desires to have children who exceed the norm intellectually. The competitive pressures affecting both mothers and children in this regard have been illustrated in recent studies (Caputo, 2007, Blackford, 2004), and, as will be discussed below, are echoed here.

Finally, it should be noted that the discourse of intensive parenting and brain development, and the expectations and practices that surround it, are reflective of middle-class values and require the social capital and financial resources that come with higher levels of education and income (Fox, 2006, Pitt, 2002, Nadesan, 2002, Lareau, 2002). As Lareau (2002) observed in her study, parental child-rearing logic and opportunities varied significantly between working and middle-class families, and it was the middle-class families who engaged in what she termed the “concerted cultivation” of their children. Similarly, Fox (2006) found that many mothers of infants who were forced to cut their maternity leaves short and return to work for financial reasons mothered less than intensively. These findings become pertinent when interpreting results here, given that the mothers interviewed for this study, as described below, were for the most part middle-class.

Section snippets

Method

Fourteen mothers of preschoolers (children aged 5 years and younger) in Southern Ontario were interviewed for this study from January to July of 2004. Interviews were semi-structured with mainly open-ended questions and were 1 to 2 h in length. Mothers were recruited through local day care centers and snowball sampling. They were asked in the interviews to describe a typical week-day and a typical weekend day as they spent it with their children. They were also asked about the activities their

Intensity and intelligence

All of the mothers interviewed were familiar with the messages promoted in the early years brain development literature. They had read them in books and magazines, seen them on TV, seen the pamphlets in daycare, and seen the messages incorporated into advertisements. For these mothers the brain development discourse had always been in the background during their child-rearing years and was part of their taken-for-granted understanding of good parenting. It was difficult, then, for many to

Conclusion

This study provides insight into some of the ways in which middle-class mothers experience the discourse that surrounds brain development and the escalation of intensive parenting expectations that it entails. It highlights the ways in which women's needs continue to be constructed in opposition to children's needs and elucidates some of ways in which interactions with neo-liberal constructions of good parenting and gender relations can play out in everyday life for mothers. Most of the mothers

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers of the paper for their valuable and thoughtful comments and suggestions. I also gratefully acknowledge the financial support for this research provided by a grant from the Wilfrid Laurier University.

References (47)

  • Deborah Lupton et al.

    ‘The right way of doing it all’: First-time Australian mothers' decisions about paid employment

    Women's Studies International Forum

    (2002)
  • Katherine Arnup

    Education for motherhood: Advice for mothers in twentieth-century Canada

    (1994)
  • Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim

    Life as a planning project

  • Jay Belsky et al.

    Attachment: Theory and evidence

  • Holly Blackford

    Playground panopticism: Ring-around-the-children, a pocketful of women

    Childhood

    (2004)
  • John Bowlby

    Maternal care and mental health

    (1952)
  • John Bowlby

    The nature of the child's tie to his other

    International Journal of Psycho-Analysis

    (1958)
  • John Bowlby

    Attachment

    (1969)
  • Linda Blum

    At the breast: Ideologies of breastfeeding and motherhood in the contemporary United States

    (1999)
  • John T. Bruer

    The myth of the first three years

    (1999)
  • Jerome Bruner

    Tot thought

    New York Review of Books

    (2000)
  • Bryan Caplan

    Good news and bad news on parenting

    The Chronicle Review

    (2009)
  • Virginia Caputo

    She's from a ‘good family’: Performing childhood and motherhood in a Canadian private school setting

    Childhood

    (2007)
  • Pam Carter

    Feminism, breasts and breast-feeding

    (1995)
  • Tiffani Chin

    Sixth grade madness: Parental emotion work in the private high school application process

    Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

    (2000)
  • Lyn Craig

    Does father care mean fathers share? A comparison of how mothers and fathers in intact families spend time with their children

    Gender & Society

    (2006)
  • Barbara Ehrenreich et al.

    For her own good: 150 years of the expert's advice to women

    (1978)
  • Diane Eyer

    Mother–infant bonding: A scientific fiction

    (1992)
  • Charlotte Faircloth

    Mothering as identity-work: Long-term breastfeeding and intensive motherhood

    Anthropology News

    (2009)
  • Alison Gopnik et al.

    The scientist in the crib

    (1999)
  • Bonnie Fox

    The formative years: How parenthood creates gender

    Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology

    (2001)
  • Bonnie Fox

    Motherhood as a class act: The many ways in which ‘intensive mothering’ is entangled with social class

  • Sharon Hays

    The cultural contradictions of motherhood

    (1996)
  • Cited by (182)

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text