Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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1824 research outputs found
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“Good” Mothers, “Risky” Mothers, and Children’s Health
Full text linkWithin a North American context, promoting and maintaining individual health and wellness have become a central focus and social expectation over the last several decades. Various systems and institutions that comprise a mother’s social network—including family, friends, school, social media, healthcare and social services, food, and recreation spaces—all produce daily health messages that encourage the surveillance and practice of healthy lifestyle behaviours. Health promotion directed at families within these spaces often target and question everyday mothering practices, such as food preparation, physical activity, screen time, sleep, mental health, and overall parenting. This article seeks to examine the dominant biomedical discourses that have constructed categories of “good” and “risky” mothering practices within the area of child health. Weaving together my individual experience and knowledge as a Canadian paediatric healthcare social worker and mother, I will draw on feminist poststructuralism and maternal theory to explore how everyday mothering practices are often compared to ideal and normative mothering discourses that position mothers as individually responsible and blamed for their children’s health outcomes. The article also explores the tool of self-reflexivity, which can offer social workers and service providers working alongside mothers the opportunity to consider new ways they might resist and challenge the truths and assumptions of so-called “good”mothering across social systems and reimagine new systems of support for children, mothers, and families
Examining Self and Finding a Healing Path: Internalized Racism and Intersectionality of a Thai Mother-Scholar
Full text linkWhen President Trump called COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,” media outlets picked up the term and spread it like wildfire. Many Asian Americans experienced both verbal and physical abuse and an unprecedented rate of discrimination towards them in places that used to be more inclusive. A sixty-seven-year-old Asian woman got brutally attacked in New York City for just being Asian—an incident that revealed to Asian people that the United States (US) no longer welcomed them. These anti-Asian hate crimes combined with postpartum depression (PPD) made me emotionally ill. Desperate for uplift, I took on expressive writing as a therapeutic tool to cope with the childbirth trauma, oppression, and racism I experienced. Through rounds of thematic analysis, I used four different themes to restory the critical events: 1) my earlier racial identity: colourism in Thai and American cultures; 2) (denied) access to spaces: immigrating while Asian; 3) being silenced during labour; and 4) baby love leads to (Asian) self-love. This article examines the role of internalized racism and racial inequity that a Thai mother-scholar experiences while immigrating, settling, and giving birth in the US. 
Black Mothering in the Diaspora: Empowerment in the Caribbean Cradle and Resistance in the Canadian Crucible
Full text linkMothering is personal; mothering is cultural; mothering is political. This article explores Black mothering, motherhood, and motherwork within social institutions of health and education. The experiences of Black mothers are the backdrop against which the paper investigates empowered mothers and their negotiations. It posits that the notion of empowered mothering has existed always within Black, African-descended communities. Empowered mothering breeds resistance, and so it has been passed down for generations. In this article which features the ethnocultural impact of race on mothering, I employ the lens of critical race theory and I investigate mothering through Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality concept. Intersecting sites of oppression, such as class and gender, emerge in my analysis of the phenomenon of empowered Black mothering. In this article, I reference the work of scholars such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, Crenshaw, Erica Beatson, and Delores Mullings as I unpack how empowered Black Caribbean diasporic mothers perform acts of resistance. This article is an extension of a recent presentation delivered at the International Association of Maternal Action and Scholarship (IAMAS) 2021 conference
Who Cooks What, How, and for Whom? Gender, Racial, Ethnic, and Class Politics of Food in Asian Global Households
Full text linkThis article explores how the seemingly mundane practices of food preparation and consumption can become intersectional sites of gender, racial, ethnic and class politics in the contexts of global migration and household labour. It develops the idea of a “familial gastropolitics” (Vallianatos) by focusing on the experiences of Japanese mothers who have relocated to Hong Kong and Singapore and chosen to outsource housework to a female migrant domestic worker typically from a Southeast Asian country. How do these mothers reconcile their new role supervising a maid in a foreign environment with a traditional Japanese value system that ties notions of motherhood to the preparation of family meals? Analyses of original interview data as well as mom blog entries suggest, first, that many research participants adhere to the ideologies of Japanese motherhood by assigning to the maids only basic preparations before cooking (such as cutting up the ingredients) and the cleaning afterwards, both of which they still micro-manage. Disturbingly, several par-ticipants cited racial, ethnic, and class stereotypes of “them, foreign maids,” who could never acquire the cooking skills and knowledge of “us, Japanese madams,” when they described their experiences. The women seemingly drew on such stereotypes to sustain an ideal of Japanese foodways, such as obento (boxed lunch) making and other practices rooted in Japanese cultural nationalism and gender ideology. Simul-taneously, there was a shared understanding among them that managing the family’s foodways and running the household smoothly were the women’s job, freeing their husbands of household responsibilities and reinforcing the third-shift labour of the mothers. The analyses reveal that gendered divisions of labour are sustained in complex ways in tandem with global disparities and cultural nationalism in the most private sphere—home. 
“Do You Want to Be My Mother?” A Personal, Professional, and Spiritual Inquiry into the Life of a Social Worker, Practitioner, Academic, and Mother
Full text linkDrawing on findings from in-depth interviews utilizing a narrative approach, this article considers the experiences of one woman, Ksenija Napan, who is both a mother and a social worker engaging in social work education and practice. Throughout the interviews, Ksenija reflected on the reciprocal, interactive, and deeply transformative relationship of being a mother, a social worker, and a researcher in the field of social work education. The interviews explored how mothering can transform social workers as professionals and how being a social worker affects motherhood. Ksenija also considered her social work practice as an academic across two diverse countries: Croatia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. The positionality of the paper is that the narrative approach has much to offer social work particularly by highlighting the stories that ordinary people tell. The paper argues that personal narratives illustrate the social role of stories and also provide insights into understanding the interactions that occur in the cultural contexts of both private and public spaces
Challenge Perfectionism: An Interwoven Autoethnographic Discussion of Motherhood
Full text linkThis autoethnography investigates the intersection of motherhood and social work with my experience as a South Asian woman. Rarely do accounts of motherhood from racialized women offer a space to respond to the pressure to be perfect. Motherhood and mothering literature has increasingly incorporated the use of stories, voices, and experiences. Using narrative inquiry, I make sense of my memories with my children, particularly as a social worker in practice. I compare these stories to concepts of perfectionism and motherhood layered with South Asian cultural norms. Using this method enables me to analyze interpersonal tensions and social issues as I explore the complexity of feminist concepts and challenge perfectionism.Mommy, why is it so hard to grow up? Even if I try my best, I’m scared I won’t know enough.My dear daughter, nobody is perfect.Is it okay to fail?Only if you fail perfectly
Three Mothers in Academia: Looking Inwards, Taking Stock, and Moving Forward
Full text linkGrounded in relational cultural theory (RCT) as an approach for developing women’s sense of self and maintaining connections with one another and with all women across racial, ethnic, and age divides, three mothers in the academy come together to restory our experiences of being and becoming mothers while navigating the higher educational landscape. We focus on critical incidents (Farrell) to create our collective autoethnography. Critical incidents are events that are unplanned and unanticipated and allow one to think about “what happened, why it happened and what else could have been done to reach their goals” (Farrell 3). Sharing our experiences means prioritizing the stories that are often overlooked in higher education institutions, where whiteness and male superiority abound. Specifically, we focus on what it means to navigate institutional expectations, given the mothering norms and responsibilities facing women of colour, who already exist on the margins. Coming together across racial, ethnic, and age divides in the academy led us to disclose specific events that challenged our professional and mothering responsibilities. Although we differ in terms of ethnicity, age, as well as academic and marital status, we still discussed the challenging nature of balancing home and academic lives both before and during the pandemic. We conclude with implications that focus on specific strategies for ourselves as well as others in the academy to support and nurture the development of mothers in academia