Ellie J. Lee

Living with risk in the age of ‘intensive motherhood’: Maternal identity and infant feeding

Socio-cultural studies have suggested that, even in societies where it is a commonplace practice, infant feeding with formula milk can compromise womens identity as ‘good mothers.’ This proposition is explored in this paper. We first provide a brief review of literature that has considered the broad socio-cultural context for infant feeding, that of ‘intensive motherhood.’ Attention is drawn to the idea that this context is one in which feeding babies formula milk is constructed as risky, for physical health but also for the mother–child relationship. Drawing on data from a study of mothers living in the UK, the paper then explores how mothers actually experience infant feeding with formula milk and how they live with a context that deems their actions risky. Maternal experience is found to include variously moral collapse, feelings of confidence, expressions of defiance and defensiveness, and opting to go it alone in response to ‘information overload.’ Despite these variations in how mothers live with risk, the conclusion is drawn that the current cultural context does appear to be one overall in which mothers who formula feed often have to struggle hard to maintain a positive sense of themselves as mothers.

Risk, health and parenting culture

In this Editorial, we have three aims. We mainly aim to highlight the key issues raised in the papers that follow, and orient readers to some thematic and methodological connections between them. We have divided the papers into three thematic groups: expert-led constructions of the risk-managing parent; risk society and the development of parental identity with reference to food; and extending ‘parenting’ backwards. We explain what we mean by these themes and how each paper fits in. We also seek to explain the background to this special issue of Health Risk and Society, and we describe the seminar series that gave rise to it, and make some points about what we mean by the general subject area for that series, ‘parenting culture’. Our final objective is to draw attention to a key point that emerges from the research discussed here, namely the importance of ‘parenting’ as a key site for the development of the risk-centred society and risk-consciousness.

Editorial: Risk, health and parenting culture

In this Editorial, we have three aims. We mainly aim to highlight the key issues raised in the papers that follow, and orient readers to some thematic and methodological connections between them. We have divided the papers into three thematic groups: expert-led constructions of the risk-managing parent; risk society and the development of parental identity with reference to food; and extending ‘parenting’ backwards. We explain what we mean by these themes and how each paper fits in. We also seek to explain the background to this special issue of Health Risk and Society, and we describe the seminar series that gave rise to it, and make some points about what we mean by the general subject area for that series, ‘parenting culture’. Our final objective is to draw attention to a key point that emerges from the research discussed here, namely the importance of ‘parenting’ as a key site for the development of the risk-centred society and risk-consciousness.

Infant feeding in risk society

Abstract A large percentage of British women, in common with women in other Western countries, feed their young babies formula milk. The paper reports some findings of a study of infant feeding that focussed on womens experiences of feeding their babies this way. Data about this issue were collected through detailed, qualitative face to face interviews with 33 mothers and through telephone interviews using a structured questionnaire with 503 mothers. The study found overall that mothers accounts of feeding babies formula milk draw attention to contradictions and tensions in motherhood and mothering. Formula feeding is predominantly experienced by mothers as ‘easy,’ enabling them to address a wide range of demands and difficulties that mothering a small baby poses for them. At the same time, mothers demonstrate awareness of the socio-cultural construction of the ‘moral mother’ as the mother who minimizes and avoids risk, and so does not use formula milk for infant feeding. How women react to this tension between ‘real life’ and ‘doing what is healthy’ varies, but the study reported here found a large minority of women experience manifestly difficult and debilitating feelings as they attempt to reconcile a pragmatic wish or need to formula feed with dominant constructions of the ‘moral mother.’ By detailing womens accounts of this aspect of motherhood, the paper contributes to sociological investigation of everyday experiences of risk society. To contextualize this discussion, a brief account of the relationship between eating, feeding babies and risk society is also offered.

Biologising parenting: neuroscience discourse, English social and public health policy and understandings of the child.

In recent years, claims about childrens developing brains have become central to the formation of child health and welfare policies in England. While these policies assert that they are based on neuro-scientific discoveries, their relationship to neuroscience itself has been debated. However, what is clear is that they portray a particular understanding of children and childhood, one that is marked by a lack of acknowledgment of child personhood. Using an analysis of key government-commissioned reports and additional advocacy documents, this article illustrates the ways that the mind of the child is reduced to the brain, and this brain comes to represent the child. It is argued that a highly reductionist and limiting construction of the child is produced, alongside the idea that parenting is the main factor in child development. It is concluded that this focus on childrens brains, with its accompanying deterministic perspective on parenting, overlooks childrens embodied lives and this has implications for the design of childrens health and welfare services.

Under the influence? The construction of foetal alcohol syndrome in UK newspapers

Today, alongside many other proscriptions, women are expected to abstain or at least limit their alcohol consumption during pregnancy. This advice is reinforced through warning labels on bottles and cans of alcoholic drinks. In most (but not all) official policies, this is linked to a risk of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) or one of its associated conditions. However, given that there is little medical evidence that low levels of alcohol consumption have an adverse impact on the foetus, we need to examine broader societal ideas to explain why this has now become a policy concern. This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative assessment of analysis of the media in this context. By analysing the frames over time, this paper will trace the emergence of concerns about alcohol consumption during pregnancy. It will argue that contemporary concerns about FAS are framed around a number of pre-existing discourses including alcohol consumption as a social problem, heightened concerns about children at risk and shifts in ideas about the responsibility of motherhood including during the pre-conception and pregnancy periods. Whilst the newspapers regularly carried critiques of the abstinence position now advocated, these challenges focused did little to refute current parenting cultures.

Growing better brains? Pregnancy and neuroscience discourses in English social and welfare policies

In recent years, English welfare and health policy has started to include pregnancy within the foundation stage of child development. The foetus is also increasingly designated as ‘at risk’ from pregnant women. In this article, we draw on an analysis of a purposive sample of English social and welfare policies and closely related advocacy documents to trace the emergence of neuroscientific claims-making in relation to the family. In this article, we show that a specific deterministic understanding of the developing brain that only has a loose relationship with current scientific evidence is an important component in these changes. We examine the ways in which pregnancy is situated in these debates. In these debates, maternal stress is identified as a risk to the foetus; however, the selective concern with women living in disadvantage undermines biological claims. The policy claim of neurological ‘critical windows’ also seems to be influenced by social concerns. Hence, these emerging concerns over the foetus’ developing brain seem to be situated within the gendered history of policing women’s pregnant bodies rather than acting on new insights from scientific discoveries. By situating these developments within the broader framework of risk consciousness, we can link these changes to wider understandings of the ‘at risk’ child and intensified surveillance over family life.

Neuroscience and family policy:what becomes of the parent?

This article discusses the findings of a study tracing the incorporation of claims about infant brain development into English family policy as part of the longer term development of a ‘parent training’, early intervention agenda. The main focus is on the ways in which the deployment of neuroscientific discourse in family policy creates the basis for a new governmental oversight of parents. We argue that advocacy of ‘early intervention’, in particular that which deploys the authority of ‘the neuroscience’, places parents at the centre of the policy stage but simultaneously demotes and marginalises them. So we ask, what becomes of the parent when politically and culturally, the child is spoken of as infinitely and permanently neurologically vulnerable to parental influence? In particular, the policy focus on parental emotions and their impact on infant brain development indicates that this represents a biologisation of ‘therapeutic’ governance.

Constructing abortion as a social problem: “Sex selection” and the British abortion debate:

Between February 2012 and March 2015, the claim that sex selection abortion was taking place in Britain and that action needed to be taken to stop it dominated debate in Britain about abortion. Situating an analysis in sociological and social psychological approaches to the construction of social problems, particularly those considering “feminised” re-framings of anti-abortion arguments, this paper presents an account of this debate. Based on analysis of media coverage, Parliamentary debate and official documents, we focus on claims about grounds (evidence) made to sustain the case that sex selection abortion is a British social problem and highlight how abortion was problematised in new ways. Perhaps most notable, we argue, was the level of largely unchallenged vilification of abortion doctors and providers, on the grounds that they are both law violators and participants in acts of discrimination and violence against women, especially those of Asian heritage. We draw attention to the role of claims made by feminists in the media and in Parliament about “gendercide” as part of this process and argue that those supportive of access to abortion need to critically assess both this aspect of the events and also consider arguments about the problems of “medical power” in the light of what took place.

The pregnant body

Whilst pregnancy can be defined biologically as the implantation of a fertilized ovum in a woman’s uterus, the meaning and significance of pregnancy can be considered social. As Hartouni has argued, pregnancy can be viewed as an ‘historically specific set of social practices, an activity that is socially and politically constructed and conditioned by relations of power, and that differs according to class, race, history and culture’ (Hartouni, 1997, p. 30). In this chapter ourfocus is upon how some of the ‘social practices’ that define pregnancy might regulate the pregnant body. Our purpose is to consider whether a Foucauldian analysis of the body — as a product of medicalized discourses and as a site for the exercise of disciplinary power — has any resonance for the experiences of pregnancy.