Motherhood and the normative expectations associated with it changed dramatically in many parts of the Western world in the late 20th century. In this context, the ideology of intensive mothering, introduced by American sociologist Sharon Hays in 1996, stands out as a hegemonic discourse of contemporary mothering in the West. Intensive mothering is based on child-centered attitudes, casting the mother as the primary caregiver with the responsibility to provide expert-guided and labor-intensive care for the child. This ideology emphasizes the need for mothers to be constantly available, especially during the early stages of the child's development, and to meet the child's physiological, emotional, and cognitive needs.

However, researchers note that the demands placed on mothers and the contemporary standards of mothering, which advocate for time- and resource-intensive child-rearing, are challenging to achieve. This is particularly true for single or socio-economically disadvantaged mothers. Studies have found that the strain of trying to meet these normative expectations has a detrimental impact on mothers' well-being. Moreover, the ideology of intensive mothering and the social norms it promotes are closely linked to problems of gender inequality and women's participation in the labor market. It can also influence fertility decisions.

In my presentation, I will discuss the peculiarities of the intensive mothering discourse and explain why this ideology could be seen as oppressive to mothers. Additionally, I will share relevant examples from an in-depth interview with a middle-class Lithuanian mother of three young children, revealing the internalized standards of the intensive mothering ideology.

Intensive motherhood has been identified as the dominant parenting standard across economically advanced countries that has spread across different socioeconomic and ethnic groups. However, more knowledge is needed to understand its actual variations and how they adapt to sociocultural conditions in different countries. We examine the different forms intensive motherhood takes in Czechia, which (similarly to other post-socialist European countries) experienced gendered refamilialisation after 1989 that brought policies that undermine women’s employment and impose care responsibilities on women. Drawing on a constructivist grounded theory-based analysis of semi-structured interviews with mothers living in Czechia, we argue that different, even contradictory, parenting styles fulfil the characteristics of intensive motherhood. We identify four distinct repertoires of intensive motherhood: contact , high-performance, free-range, and protective mothering. They differ in that they emphasize the transmission and development of different types of capital (health, emotional, educational, safety). Still, all of them fulfil the characteristics of intensive motherhood: they all are child-centred, emotionally absorbing, labour-intensive, financially expensive, expert-guided, supported by the expansion of paid services and goods for children, and they all contribute to social status safeguarding and the reproduction of inequalities. By showing how practices and ideologies of intensive motherhood vary, remain exclusionary and adapt to the sociocultural context of a given country, we also contribute to the debate of how intensive motherhood may differ within and across countries.

Children’s minority language competences are not always attained, even though they are usually valued and desired by the parents. A lack of minority language skills in children can cause various strong emotions in minority parents. Parental emotional well-being likely plays an important, but still rather overlooked role in minority language transmission. While the emotional dimension of minority language transmission appears in many studies, it is usually not foregrounded and not explicitly addressed.

In this paper, we aim to shed some light on the link between the Lithuanian cultural motherhood script and non-harmonious bilingualism. Drawing on critical motherhood theory, we analysed 5 semi-structured in-depth interviews with first generation Lithuanian migrant women from inter-ethnic families living in Europe. All the informants wanted to transmit their language, but, in their view, they were not successful and felt bad about it.

A part of the women’s pain is induced by the dominant national discourse on the preservation of the Lithuanian language and culture. This responsibility is chiefly assigned to Lithuanian migrant mothers. The Lithuanian motherhood script, which requires that “good” mothers must pass over Lithuanian language to their children unproblematically and to a high degree, impacts negatively on the women’s well-being and also hinder their language transmission efforts leading to even more suffering. The prevailing discourse that works as an external pressure and is internalised can in fact be counterproductive for minority language maintenance. We will also look at how mothers' difficult emotions are actively managed and regulated and what coping stategies are applied.

In this paper I present a section of emerging findings from my doctoral research, which involved in-depth interviews with 20 mothers who had been subjected to violent and abusive behaviours from their children. Specifically, I explore the ways in which the mothering identities of those experiencing Child-to-Mother Abuse (CMA) were not only impacted by the abuse but also targeted and, for many, permanently altered as a result of the responses received from those around them.

References to the archetype of the ‘good mother’ were prevalent throughout mothers’ accounts of their abuse and appeared to also inform the lens through which statutory services viewed the issue of CMA. For mothers and the professionals surrounding them, the abuse of a mother by her child directly contradicted normative expectations of what it means to be a ‘good mother’. The narrative that mothers are responsible for their child’s behaviour resulted in both deep feelings of shame for victim-survivors, and also in a professional culture that framed CMA as a consequence of insufficient and inappropriate mothering. Mothers were not only blamed for their abuse, but many also reported having their mothering identity de-legitimised by the silencing of their voices, and in extreme cases, the stripping of their maternal rights. From the accounts of mothers presented in this paper it is evident that the issue of CMA, and the way that professionals respond to it, is not just a form of violence against women, but a direct attack on their motherhood.