Mothering as Identity-Work: Long-Term Breastfeeding and Intensive Motherhood

This article argues for an anthropological engagement with parenting as “identity-work” in a bid to extend parenting studies beyond the more traditional focus on kinship, and also expand what “kinship” might mean to anthropologists. That is, it proposes a deeper exploration of how relatedness is enacted in conjunction with constructions of the self. Attention to identity- work—in this case the narrative processes of self-making that parents engage in as they raise their children—is borne of an argument that for a certain strata of parents in the UK, the word “parent” has shifted from a noun denoting a relationship with a child (something you are), to a verb (something you do). As Hays notes in The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (1996), “ideal” parenting is financially, physically and emotionally intensive, and parents are encouraged to spend a large amount of time, energy and money in raising their children. Further, as Lee and Bristow argue in the forthcoming volume Individual Freedom, Autonomy and the State, parenting is now an occupation in which adults (most typically, mothers) are expected to be emotionally absorbed and become personally fulfilled.