Sensitive Mothering (Walkerdine and Lucey)

Child-Focused Mothering

Sensitive mothering is focused on the child as the center of the household, and the needs, wants, and feelings of the child are of primary importance. This [Page 1112]focus is the result of research on attachment theory, which promotes the idea that a child must have a constantly available mother to readily meet his or her needs. Walkerdine and Lucey read this as a method of keeping mothers in the home, and hence, both unpaid for their labor as well as socializing children to reproduce this model of childcare in the next generation.

Earlier, mothering expertise was largely folk based; that is, it was part of the community and passed along from mother to mother. A sensitive mother turns instead to science and the “experts” to provide information regarding nutrition, child-rearing practices, health care, and so forth. In Walkerdine and Lucey's analysis, this turn to science is symptomatic of the ways and means in which middle-class mothers have been regulated since the late 1950s. On the basis of scientific “facts,” government policy and practice as well as social expectation about the relationship between mothers and children is shaped, and sensitive mothers then conform. This is all embedded in the power structures of the capitalist model of production, where conformity ensures unchallenged distribution of power.

Sensitive mothers avoid overt power struggles with children, including shunning anger, aggression, violence, and arguing. Instead, mothers use other means to manage children, ranging from complete assent to choice limitation to more manipulative techniques like bribery. The purpose behind this strategy is to ensure that the child is raised with a sense that the home is a harmonious place, and that harmony should be reflected in the larger society. With sensitive mothering, however, such harmony is achieved by passivity even in the face of challenging situations that might call for assertion and resistance. Walkerdine and Lucey assert that such a mothering strategy serves the larger purposes of the more powerful in society, whether political or economic: children who never learn to resist becomes adults that never learn to resist.

In the sensitive mother's home, any activity that takes away from the focus on the child is considered wrong. As a result, domestic duties are accomplished away from the gaze of the child, when the child is asleep or not at home. If housework, such as cooking, must be done when the child is present, then it is undertaken with a pedagogical intent. For instance, if carrots are peeled in the presence of a child, this is only acceptable if used as an opportunity to discuss health, nutrition, colors, vegetables, gardening, sharp objects, sequencing of tasks, and so forth. Walkerdine and Lucey posit that this situation has two deeper interpretations: first, teaching during work is meant to present work as fun, desirable, and rewarding; second, such teaching provides children with a knowledge base in topics and ideas that will be revisited in the schooling system. The first interpretation is seen as more of a socialization, this time about the positive nature of work, which prepares children to become productive citizens. The second interpretation points toward children's preparation in the chosen modes and topics of schooling, and therefore success.

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