Mothers and Others: How Collective Strategies Reproduce Social Norms Around Motherhood

Abstract

This study examines how various actors deal with increasing mothering diversity in collective discourses and how they construct social norms around motherhood. Both questions address research gaps in the sociological literature. Theoretically conceptualized as relational behavioral rules, social norms around motherhood concern mothers who are expected to behave accordingly, and other actors, that is, mothers and others, who expect certain behaviors. Findings from a qualitative in-depth analysis of 24 gender homogeneous and heterogeneous focus groups in Austria ( n = 173) explicate how mothers and others collectively expected mothers to be child-centered and present. They constructed three types of mothers who did not fully adhere to these norms and employed corresponding strategies: Discussants responded to prevented mothers with rehabilitation strategies, to optimizing mothers with concession strategies and to ignoring mothers with refusal strategies. These collective strategies reproduce and enforce social norms around motherhood, although diversified mothering practices prove their utopian and relational character.