Many working mothers in the US say that they feel guilty about their inability to live up to
cultural ideals of the “good mother” embedded in intensive mothering discourse. Intensive�…

Even as research continues to explore mothering experiences and social psychologists
consider the costs of guilt and shame, few empirical works have examined the relationships�…

Despite the dramatic increase in women's employment since the 1970s, mothers' decisions
about work remain closely scrutinized. The intensive mothering ethos in which “good”�…

Objective This study compares mothers' perceptions of work–family conflict in four countries
that exemplify different work–family policy approaches: Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the�…

Maternal guilt has been a longstanding concern for mothers in the Western world. Literature
around mother's experiences of maternal guilt has allowed researchers to understand�…

Work status and mothering are culturally constructed as rigid binaries. The purpose of this
study was to explore the effect on mothers of these polarized characterizations of�…

The purpose of this study was to explore how mothers construct their worker–parent identity
within a cultural context of competing mothering ideologies. We used narrative data from�…

Social scientists have provided rich descriptions of the ascendant cultural ideologies
surrounding motherhood and paid work. In this article, I use in-depth interviews with a�…

Objective This study examined how college‐educated mothers emotionally manage the guilt
they experience as they perform maternal foodwork. Background Maternal guilt is prevalent�…

Successive moral panics have cast poor or socially excluded mothers-associated with social
problems as diverse as crime, underachievement, unemployment and mental illness-as bad�…