Motherhood, Absence and Transition

When Adult Children Leave Home

Trish Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138260313
• eBook ISBN: 9781317093992
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The vast majority of academic texts on motherhood have focused on women's experiences of the early years of mothering, while texts covering the topic of home-leaving have tended to privilege the young person's experience. Combining lively empirical material with an illuminating social-theoretical framework, Trish Green's book addresses the much neglected area of the mother's experience of separation from her child at the time of their home-leaving. The book makes clear how the mother's experience of separation is silenced, first by the socio-cultural constructions of motherhood per se, second by the privileging of the child's transition to adulthood, and third by a neglect of the relational dimension of this particular life-course transition. In doing so the book makes an important contribution to debates on ageing, identity and the life-course, and will be of great interest to sociologists with various academic interests.

Chapter 1
Becoming and Being a Mother

Introduction

Although ways into motherhood are increasing in their diversity (Sawicki, 1991; Sistare, 1994; Stanworth, 1987; Teman, 2009) and are no longer predominantly attached to heterosexual coupledom, at the time my research participants gave birth their individual transition was more clearly framed, and between the years 1979-89 1 each participant produced at least one biological child within a heterosexual married relationship. 2 Elly Teman (2009: 50) comments that pregnancy is ‘a bodily site upon which identity-work is undertaken’, thus the visibility of the pregnant body provided clear outward signs of a changing social status for each of my participants. The delivered baby is the embodied proof of a completed transition to the identity ‘mother’, dependent as this is on the presence of a ‘child’. 3 As Janet Draper (2001: 23) notes, pregnancy and labour provide ‘the framework of women’s transition to motherhood [whilst] social process[es] structure this transition’.

Transitional experiences are part of everyone’s life course and the transition to motherhood and early mothering experiences are a well documented and ongoing foci of research (Bailey, 1999; Brown, Lumley, Small and Astbury, 1994; Gatrell, 2005; Miller, 1998, 2005, 2007; Oakley, 1976, 1979, 1980, 1981a; Richardson, 1993; Rogan, Shmied, Barclay, Everitt and Wyllie, 1997; Wallbank, 2001). My intention in the book is to highlight a particular time during the life course of women whose children are about to embark on independent living away from the family home. I identify leaving home as an event that provides a sociocultural marker of the achievement of an adult identity for the child, butthe work presented here hinges on how mothers perceive and then experience this event in their lives.

In her research with parents and children, Pat Allatt (1996: 130) adopts a life course approach because ‘whilst individual biography is a process of change and becoming, in diverse ways we remain children, held throughout life, willingly or reluctantly, in the web of parent-child relations’. In representations of mothers and children, however, the two are encapsulated within a particular time-frame based upon the categories ‘mother’ and ‘child’: the child is perceived as dependent whereas the mother, as adult, is not. Childhood is, then, related to age so that it becomes difficult to call an adult ‘child’, although clearly, as Allatt intimates, we are all someone’s children. Mothers and their children thus remain opposites in relation to age and social positioning.

Within a western context then, the particular parameters in which the concepts of mother and child are set, and within which women rear their children to adulthood, involve a socially accepted and expected transition in which the child, once deemed able to meet her/his own needs, separates from the mother and the home. What I shall argue here is that the emerging adulthood of the child, which is part of the individual ‘process of change and becoming’ that Allatt identifies, can have a profound effect on a woman’s identity as ‘mother’. The chapters that follow highlight how the shifting identity of the mother is intricately connected to the life course trajectory of the child. It is the latter which can cause significant disruption to the former at particular moments in time.

Christina Hughes (2002: 139) argues that the concept of transition suggests ‘sporadic and short-term’ shifts from one phase of life to another ‘bounded by extensive periods of stability’. It is not my intention to apply this to the transition to motherhood, nor to women’s experiences of mothering. Indeed, Fisher noted that the mature women ‘returners’ to education she interviewed ‘would conclude that they have been psychologically “in transit” almost all their adult lives’ (1989, cited in Hughes, 2002: 140; see also Knowles, Nieuwenhuis and Smit, 2009, for a discussion on women’s attempts at combining motherhood with professional workplace identities). My argument is rather that motherhood and mothering have attendant historical and sociocultural scripts that provide the context within which the individual practices of mothering take place and that these contribute to understandings not only of how mothering should be done, but also of what ‘mother’ and ‘child’ mean.

Motherhood and mothering are thus ‘culturally, socially, historically and politically patterned and shaped’ (Miller, 2005: 138). In a western context, representations of motherhood and images of mother and child emanate from a range of sources in political, academic and popular arenas. These images are evident in childcare manuals and magazines aimed at mothers (and fathers, see Sunderland 2006). Thus, once they are mothers, women are able, and I would argue compelled, to shape their motherhood with reference to, and measure their performance of mothering against, these readily available images and representations (Kaplan, 1992; Marshall, 1991; Richardson, 1993; Sunderland, 2006; Woodward, 1997). Moreover, the mother of TV advertising, from 1980s Katie Oxo 4 to the modern day Vodafone mum, whom I shall introduce in Chapter 5, is a constant presence on our screens. These representations create a tension between the ‘real’ and the ‘ideal’ that mothers constantly juggle as they rear their children.

Childhood is also ‘shaped by the politics and policies through which the conceptual category and social identity of “child” is given material form in everyday life’ (Hockey and James, 2001: 15). During the early years of my interviewees’ childrearing, the image of the ‘totally child-centred mother’ (Urwin, 1985: 166) permeated the ways in which women believed they should respond to childrearing. The mother was held, and as such held herself, responsible for the constant daily care of her offspring in order to ensure their future wellbeing (Jaggar, 1983; Steedman, 1985; Urwin, 1985; Walkderdine and Lucey, 1989). In these circumstances, as Allison Jaggar (1983: 313) observes, a mother might have felt ‘that a single word or action, let alone any of her habitual failings, may damage the child for life’. Such uncertainty, the idea that the mother is culpable for the difficulties her child/ren might encounter throughout their lives, continues to prevail (Gattrell, 2005; Lawler, 1999, 2000; Miller, 2005; Silva, 1996; Walkderdine, Lucey and Melody, 2001). This is evident in the following letter from a mother to a UK daily newspaper:

I am at home with my three-year-old daughter full-time and while we do several activities each week (playgroup, soft play, swimming, etc), I always have a nagging feeling that I’m not up to scratch and could be doing more with her. This guilt strikes me particularly when I’m doing the housework and she has to occupy herself playing in her room or watching TV. She is a happy, healthy and bright little girl, so how can I stop my angst? (The Guardian, 17 February, 2007: 6)

In line with advances in time-saving domestic appliances from the 1950s onwards, the advent of what Elizabeth Silva (1999: 61) has termed the ‘technological nexus’ within the home, the importance not only of children’s play but of mothers being actively involved in playing with their children began to take up increasing amounts of a mother’s time (Urwin, 1985). As the above reader’s letter attests, this constitutes an ongoing theme as women attempt to get their motherhood ‘right’.

Mothers’ ‘time’ spent with children was then reconceptualised as an indication of her ‘care’. From her empirical research on the women’s experiences of mothering their young children, Jane Ribbens (1994: 170) observed that her interviewees’ ‘belief about time [centred] not just on “spending time” on children, but on “being there”, so that mothers are available when their children need them’. Ribbens’ concept of ‘being there’ in this instance implies proximity, being with. It is then an element of the mother/child relationship which their separation from one another disrupts.

In drawing on the notion of ‘time in childhood’, Allison James and Alan Prout (1997: 230, original emphasis) illustrate how child-to adult-hood can be plotted sequentially across the western life course: ‘childhood follows infancy and is succeeded by adolescence, adulthood, middle age and old age’ (231). As they further observe, each of these phases is accorded age-appropriate boundaries. They highlight how ‘time is used effectively to produce, control and order the everyday lives of children’ (231). In this analysis, time has a structuring force in children’s lives. As already noted, mothers’ time is equally produced, controlled and ordered to meet the needs, not only of their children, but of the constructions of both mother-and child-hoods. Thus, I suggest that the concept ‘time in motherhood’ is salient for my argument because if, as James and Prout suggest, ‘concepts of time play a key role in shaping and contextualising the lives and activities of children’ (234), it is logical to assert that mothers’ lives are similarly shaped.

Moreover, at the same time that mothers are ‘being there’ for their children, which I suggest provokes as well notions of immediacy and timelessness, they are also immersed in a developmental process of child rearing which focuses upon their children’s becoming adult. Chris Urwin (1985: 184) argues that the emphasis on ages and stages of developmental psychology of the 1960s and 1970s impacted ‘not only on how [mothers] saw their children’s development but also on how they thought they should spend their time with [them]’ (original emphasis). In these terms then, the time mothers spend nurturing their children through the st/ages of development has an underlying purpose; as James and Prout (1997: 239) argue, ‘the importance of age during childhood is that it indicates movement towards adulthood, the child’s future’.

Mothers are thus situated as pivotal in the process of their children’s preparation for the world beyond the family (Jaggar, 1983; Lawler, 2000; Mayall, 1996, 2002; Walkerdine and Lucey, 1989; Walkerdine, Melody and Lucey, 2001). Their responsibility for ‘getting motherhood right’ was a recurrent theme of the interviews I carried out for my research and was linked to notions of the future; as one of my interviewees said, ‘you’re raising the next generation’. Ultimately, she expressed a widely-held societal belief that underlies the purpose of mothering – that children are ‘adults in the making’ (Brannen, 1996: 114). A mother’s life course is therefore inextricably linked to that of her child whereby she is placed (and also places herself) as guarantor of the social order (Lawler, 2000; Walkerdine and Lucey, 1989; Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody, 2001).

The characteristics of contemporary western constructions of childhood are identified by Jenny Hockey and Allison James (1993: 69) as rooted in notions of ‘innocence, naturalness and vulnerability’, which separate children out as different from adults. Indeed as Jane Ribbens McCarthy and Rosalind Edwards (2000: 787) comment, ‘the fundamental social categories of “Child” and “Adult” […] are constructed by reference to one another, so that we know what it is to be a Child because it is to be Other than Adult, and vice versa’. In order for children to acquire the knowledge they need to participate independently in society, they need guidance from ‘one or more specific adults, [who give] children the social place and cultural knowledge required to be a participant in the society’ (Jamieson, 1998: 8).

As Jaggar (1983: 311) further observes, childrearing is always carried out ‘in accordance with prevailing norms of what constitutes acceptable behaviour in children and desired characteristics in adults’. Likewise, in his discussion of postmodern childhood, Chris Jenks (1996a: 79) comments that ‘to be socialised is to become one with the normative social structure’. Ultimately then, how adulthood is conceptualised is key to the purpose, and so the practice, of mothering a child. Thus it is that the child awaits instruction on how to become a responsible adult from those who have already achieved that status. As Ribbens McCarthy and Edwards (2002: 201) note, ‘the notion of the autonomous, self-contained individual predominates in Western cultures and suffuses the psychological, political, sociological and therapeutic literature’. In consequence, nurturing children’s independence and autonomy remains a major goal of motherhood in contemporary UK.

Jamieson’s (1998) ‘specific adult’, particularly during a child’s early years, is predominantly the mother, whose ‘job’ it is to ensure that her child is able to participate in society as an active citizen. Following Nicolas Rose (1991) Steph Lawler (2000: 35) argues that childhood ‘has been the focus of scrutiny from governments throughout the post-war period, in order to ensure that families (and especially mothers) fulfil their obligations to produce “good citizens”’. It is therefore the mother’s responsibility not only to protect the child’s innocence but also to shape the child’s future adult life and, as another of my interviewees put it, ‘keep them on the straight and narrow’.

Thus being a child is set in the context of being an adult-in-waiting, where the mother is given the task of ensuring that society’s desired characteristics of adulthood are achieved by her children. What these desired characteristics are shift over time however and, as Gill Jones, Mary O’Sullivan and Julia Rouse (2006: 381) found in their study of parents’ support (or otherwise) of their adult children’s partnership formulations, ‘there [were] no “traditions” to guide them in this respect, and they [could] not fall back on subjective assessment’.

The child-to-adult continuum continues to be popularly related to age and ‘common practice has been to break childhood down into three periods: early (0-4), middle (5-9) and late (10-14), with adolescence accounting for those aged between 14 and 17’ (Wyness, 2006: 4). As Sarah Irwin (1995a: 4) comments, ‘youth and adulthood are used as terms for describing particular locations with respect to the organisation of social reproduction’ and Tim Gill (1999: 67) notes that the ‘middle years’ of childhood are ‘around eight and 14’.

The Good Childhood Inquiry launched by the Children’s Society in 2006 found that UK parents were reluctant to let their children leave the home unsupervised before the age of 14 years (see www.childrenssociety.org.uk). The Chief Executive of the society stated in a national newspaper report, ‘as a society we are in a real quandary: on the one hand we want freedom for our children but on the other we are becoming increasingly frightened to let them out’ (Daily Mail, 05/06/07: 24). Although, as James and Prout (1997: 236) indicate, there are uncertainties in the position of ‘teenagers [as] neither child nor adult’, it would seem that the practice of delineating between particular ages and stages of children on their way to adulthood remains fairly intact and that the child’s age remains linked to a dual and competing notion of in/dependency (Brannen and O’Brien, 1996).

Understandings of the mother/child dyad have retained some continuity over time as embodiment and age remain major differentials between each member of this coupling. Mother-and childhood are thus encapsulated within a particular time-frame that is reliant upon an unequal pairing and moreover defines the young child through dependency on the mother. As Allatt (1996: 131) observes, ‘change is inherent in the physical, psychological and social development of the young’ so that, as children get older they become less reliant on their mothers (and fathers), for example, they walk/take the bus to school by themselves or with friends. Many of these ‘micro-transitions’ (Allatt, 1996: 138) are sited in the home, as the child progresses through the different st/ages of childhood. Thus, the shift to adulthood occurs along a continuum, the consequences of which ‘become visible when age distinctions between adults and children are reconstructed, or rather come to assume less salience’ (Brannen and O’Brien, 1996: 5).

The characteristics of chronological time include ‘shifting circumstances and life experiences, [which] mean[s] that change and transition are major features of every individual’s life’ (Gillies, Ribbens McCarthy and Holland, 2001: 8). The following chapters show that many of the transitions my interviewees underwent whilst mothering were to a great extent occluded by the parallel transitions of their children. Thus a focus on their children’s transitions has enabled me explore how these were experienced by mothers themselves.

As Hockey and James (1993: 5) argue, to participate in western society an individual requires ‘an individualistic, knowledgeable, independence’. This therefore contrasts sharply with the social experience of caring for a dependent child, and also with non-western collective practices and parenting goals (Brannen and O’Brien, 1996; Ghuman, 1999). As Paul Ghuman (1999: 24) notes in his comparative analysis of western and non-western childrearing practices, ‘[western] children from the early years are encouraged to develop autonomy, independent thinking, self-expression and achievement for themselves. The overall aim is to develop into inner-directed persons’.

A chronology of developmental ages and stages in which western childrearing is enmeshed, and that James and Prout (1997: 246) identify as ‘a series of small transition points’, creates and perpetuates an environment in which the child is in effect ‘becoming’ adult. Thus a sequence of st/aged accomplishments leads to the time of the child’s acquisition of independence both within, and later from, the home. A timed logic is thus accorded the home leaving of adult children into which mothers (and others) are acculturated from their children’s birth onwards.

Separation is then a seemingly inevitable part of the mother/adult child relationship. Indeed, as Kate Figes (2002: 357) indicates, childrearing incorporates multiple separations between mothers and their children, such as starting school and so forth, which ‘accumulate over the spectrum of a child’s life’. This being so, at the time they leave home, children are supposedly ‘ready’ and their mothers supposedly ‘prepared’ for this ‘final’ separation. Thus, for the majority of young people in the UK, leaving home is a culturally sanctioned and expected experience of the life course, for both the child and the mother.

However, the phase of a mother’s life course during which children leave home has also been identified as a ‘crisis period’ (Bart, 1972; Lurie, 1974) and loss of maternal identity expounded as underlying the ‘symptoms’ of women’s depression at this time. Diane Richardson (1993: 6), for example, has suggested that the centrality of motherhood in women’s lives limits their opportunities to ‘maintain a sense of independent identity’ so that, at the time of her children’s home-leaving a mother ‘may experience a crisis of identity’. Relinquishing an identity that formerly structured their everyday practices was thus perceived to have implications for women’s ability to cope. As Allison Jaggar argues:

The dependence that the mother develops on the child often is not obvious until the child leaves home. At this point, the mothers who have been most devoted to their children suffer most intensely from the ‘empty nest’ syndrome. They often become extremely depressed because they feel unloved, unwanted and as if there were no meaning left in their lives. (Jaggar, 1983: 314)

In her study of mothers’ depression during the ‘empty nest’ period, Dolores Borland (1982) provides a comparative analysis of white, black and Mexican-American women’s experiences. Each of the white women Borland interviewed was a fulltime homemaker/mother living within a nuclear family. Her black and Mexican-American counterparts worked outside the home and most lived in extended family situations. Borland concluded that the white women were more prone to symptoms of depression and loss of identity due to their domestic circumstances. Her conclusions indicate similarities with those of Richardson and Jaggar above, as she found that in the case of the white women who participated in her study: ‘empty nest syndrome might be closely tied to the absence of alternative roles in which to continue building an identity after the children leave home’ (1982: 127).

Much of the ‘empty nest’ literature, as the term implies, places the mother within the domestic arena and, although focused on the mother’s experiences of the child’s home-leaving, is reliant upon particular models of motherhood. As such, the changing context of mothering is not accommodated bu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Motherhood, Absence and transition
• 1 Becoming and Being a Mother
• 2 Researching Mothers’ Experiences
• 3 Modelling Motherhood
• 4 Managing the Process of Separation
• 5 Post-Separation Communication
• 6 Mothers’ Futures
• 7 Conclusion: Reflections on Motherhood, Absence and Transition
• Appendix 1: Participants’ Biographies
• Appendix 2: Interview Guide
• Bibliography
• Index