Compensatory Connection:
Mothers’ Own Stakes in an Intensive Mother-Child Relationship
Journal of Family Issues (forthcoming)
Pre-published on-line January 21, 2014 as doi:10.1177/0192513X13520157
Ana Villalobos
Brandeis University
Abstract
In the past several decades, mothering has intensified by a number of measures. Explanations for
this intensification tend to forefront women’s concerns about others, such as concerns about their
children’s future economic security. This qualitative 3-year longitudinal study of U.S. mothers of
young children looks at women’s own needs in relation to their mothering intensity. It finds an
additional factor contributing to this intensity is “compensatory connection,” or increasing the
attention and prioritization given to one element of one’s life in order to make up for insecurity
experienced in other realms. Specifically, women who experience their partnerships or work
lives to be insecure are the women most prone to draw on ideals of the centrality of the motherchild relationship and to exhibit pronounced attachment behaviors with their children. As
partnership and work insecurities can occur across class, this study nuances prior work on class
differences in mothering.
Keywords
mother-child relationship, insecurity, work, marriage, attachment, qualitative
Mothering has become an increasingly intense endeavor over the past several decades by a
number of measures. For example, mothers are allotting more overall time to their children today
than they did in 1965 (Bianchi, Robinson, & Milkie, 2006). If we define “intensity” as the
proportion of one’s time with children spent actively engaged with them, we find that mothers
working in the labor market, the proportion of which increased more than 50% from 1975 to
2007, are paradoxically more “intense” than their stay-home counterparts (Bureau of Labor
Statistics, 2009; Hsin, 2006). The cultural norms and expectations associated with “good
motherhood” are becoming more demanding (e.g., Douglas & Michaels, 2004; Hays, 1996;
Thurer, 1995). And today’s mothers’ emotional absorption in children and monetary outlay on
their behalf are not merely high, but may be historically unprecedented (Coontz, 2007, p. 12).
Taken together, we see a generalized, multistranded pattern of the intensification of mothering.
Some of the most compelling research regarding why mothering has become increasingly
intense pertains to class differences and the economic anxiety and fear among privileged parents
that their children will slip down the social ladder without the boost of intense parental
involvement. For example, Lareau (2003) shows how, in an effort to give their children the upper
hand in gaining entry into prestigious colleges and jobs, privileged women often take a
managerial approach to motherhood: hiring tutors, scheduling enrichment activities, and pouring
ever greater resources into their progeny in order to ensure their future success and the
reproduction of the parents’ class status. Likewise, Nelson (2010) documents how social
uncertainty and a fear of downward mobility can drive professional parents to “out of control”
micromanagement and hyperconnectivity to children. Both Lareau and Nelson therefore address
why parents on the upper end of the social class spectrum engage in the high-intensity practices
they do. At the same time, both researchers show how less privileged parents tend to be less
intensive: less managerial, less negotiating, and generally less “out of control” in their parenting
than the professional class. They parent “with limits” (Nelson, 2010) and assume a model of
“natural growth” (Lareau, 2003) wherein children’s development and learning from the world is
assumed to occur without constant parental intervention to steer the direction of that
development.
In contrast, studies that describe intensive mothering as a more ubiquitous, cross-class
phenomenon require a somewhat different explanatory mechanism than the anxiety of privilege.
In The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, Sharon Hays (1996) poses a social equilibrium
explanation for the rise of the ideology of intensive mothering. She asserts that “the more
2 powerful and all-encompassing the rationalized market becomes, the more powerful becomes its
ideological opposition in the logic of intensive mothering” (p. 99). That is, just as the “cult of
domesticity” in Victorian Age arose in response to the splitting apart of public and private
spheres—creating a white, middle-class domestic haven to contain all the selflessness and
collectivism siphoned from the newly industrialized economy—Hays asserts this is happening
again today. Under the current ideology of intensive mothering, which she poses as “simply a
new version of an older solution” to the competitive self-interest of industrial capitalism, women
are once more assumed responsible “for unselfish nurturing” and “commitment to the good of
others,” which absolves the public world from caring commitments and frees men to “selfinterested profit maximization” (Hays, 1996, p. 175).
Additional explanations addressing the recent rise in parental involvement in children’s lives
include increased fear about things such as child abduction, school violence, toxins, and germs
(Bianchi et al., 2006; Douglas & Michaels, 2004; Furedi, 2002). Indeed, risk scholars employ a
variety of terms—such as “risk society,” “the new insecurity,” or “culture of fear”—to describe
the widespread emergence in the past several decades of heightened concern over various forms
of threat (Beck, 1986/1992; Giddens, 1999; Glassner, 2000; Hacker, 2006; Wallulis, 1998).
Some of the heightened insecurity may be in response to objective changes, such as the rise of
the New Economy, the increasingly global nature of environmental threat, or the spike in divorce
rates in the 1970s. However, some increasing fears have occurred in areas such as crime, health
and safety in which there have been objective improvements (Furedi, 2002). In the 1980s, risk
scholars developed what they call “the social amplification of risk framework” to explain how
people’s assessments of certain types of risk, including threats to children, were becoming
subjectively inflated (Slovic, 1987). At the same time as we saw this amplification of risk, there
3 was was a dramatic upsurge in a “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, laborintensive, and financially expensive” form of childrearing (Hays, 1996, p. 8). These historical
trends may very well be related, and as families have felt increasingly under threat (and
decreasingly buffered by social safety nets and other forms of support), they may be pinning
their hopes to intensive mothering as a private security solution for their own individual families.
All the forgoing explanations—that mothers are stepping up their involvement to confer
advantage upon children in the face of economic uncertainty (Lareau, 2003; Nelson, 2010), to
maintain a haven of selflessness and collectivism in an increasingly profit-driven world (Hays,
1996), or to protect children from the physical or emotional perils of risk society (Douglas &
Michaels, 2004; Furedi, 2002)—are important and resonant reasons that mothers may heap upon
themselves “so many duties and expectations that to take it seriously would . . . [jeopardize their]
mental health” (Thurer, 1995, p. xvi). However, what these explanations have in common is an
underlying claim that some variant of intensive mothering exists because society or children
need intensive mothering. Mothering is, therefore, framed as women’s altruistic or other-oriented
solution to various forms of social risk and uncertainty, and mothers are framed as security
objects.
What such explanations underdevelop is a key player in the security equation: the mother
herself, with her own personal needs, wants, and concerns with threats against her own person—
the mother as security subject. De Marneffe (2004), building on Chodorow (1978/1999),
attempts to correct this omission by developing the “desire to mother,” or the rich enjoyment and
meaning a woman can gain for herself from deep engagement with her children.
Like de Marneffe, I investigate mothers’ personal stakes in parenting, not just mothering as a
response to the needs of children or of the broader society, but I take the next step and examine
4 how the social world affects those stakes and specifically makes a consuming mother-child
relationship something many women want. Looking at some of the same social uncertainties that
Lareau (2003) and Nelson (2010) find are influencing mothers’ actions on behalf of their
children, I explore how such uncertainties may also affect what women seek from the motherchild relationship for themselves. This is not inconsistent with Lareau’s or Nelson’s arguments,
whose analyses include the possibility of mother-oriented benefits derived from having
successful children. In this analysis, however, I focus in on these and other mother-oriented
benefits and more fully elaborate their influence.
Examining mothers’ own interests, including those beyond those gained from the success of
their children, is relevant given that these interests are so pronounced. For example, 51% of
mothers of minor children say their relationship with their children is the single most important
aspect of their own personal happiness and fulfillment—whereas only 29% cumulatively say this
about their relationships with their partner or their careers (Pew Research Center, 1997). Thus, if
we seek to understand the intensity of a mother’s connection to her child purely with respect to
the child’s interests, we overlook a great deal.
Compensatory Connection
Young children will often reach for a security blanket when they feel threatened or insecure, and
Harry Harlow’s (1958) famous experiments in the 1950s show that young rhesus monkeys, in the
absence of a secure attachment figure, will cling to the little rags in their cages as if for dear life.
These monkeys simply turn toward whatever object is available to them and imbue it with
incredible significance, even though the rag may convey no actual protection. I use the term
compensatory connection to describe the phenomenon of turning to, magnifying, and imbuing
with security-producing power one life realm in order to make up for the perceived lack of
5 security experienced in another. I will examine modern mothering to see if and to what degree
children have become living security blankets for some women, providing a “sense of security”
through an unquestioned and presumably enduring source of connection that helps them
emotionally cope with insecurity elsewhere in their lives.
Although I offer compensatory connection as a new term, I make no claim that it is a new
phenomenon or that it only occurs between mothers and children. Historically, there have been
other society-wide shifts in personal relationship dynamics wherein one particular relationship
was magnified and drawn on for security to a greater extent after other forms of security were
seen as destabilized or diminished. For example, during industrialization many nuclear families
split apart from kin networks to locate themselves in urban areas near centralized workplaces.
The new and smaller family units could not rely as heavily on kin for the passing down of family
farms, learning a family trade, or marriage decisions. This decrease in the power and support
offered by kin corresponded historically to the blossoming of the companionate marriage. A
whole extended family’s worth of connection and security was squeezed into a single symbolic
repository in the husband-wife dyad that became more emotionalized. Shumway (2003) writes
that during the 19th century,
. . . increasing social fragmentation meant marriage had to fill in the emotional gap left by
the demise of other relations. As individuals found themselves ever more alienated from
each other and from their work, they made marriage the refuge of human connection (p. 23).
Shumway describes precisely the dynamics of compensatory connection. As other relations
receded, the romantic value ascribed to marriage, to weddings, and to lifelong heterosexual love
skyrocketed, and there was an increased anticipation of a powerful and important male-female
bond.
6 Social historians argue that putting such high expectations on a single relationship ultimately
destabilized it, so divorce rates increased and marriage subsequently lost much of its refuge
status (Coontz, 2005; D’Emilio & Freedman, 1988; Hackstaff, 2000). This loss, along with the
simultaneous destabilization of multiple other social and economic life realms, has again left a
security gap. The current historical moment may therefore be another epoch like industrialization
in which people shift the object to which they direct their energies in order to reestablish a sense
of security.
Among women, those whose security is most in need of remedy are certainly the poor. Edin
and Kefalas (2005) find that poor women’s lack of lucrative employment opportunities combine
with the dearth of available men who match their dream of stably employed co-providers to press
these women to center their lives elsewhere. Often the only avenue available for them to achieve
responsible womanhood and a higher status identity is through having a child. Edin and Kefalas
write,
The redemptive stories our mothers tell speak to the primacy of the mothering role, how it
can become virtually the only source of identity and meaning in a young woman’s life . . .
[T]hey believe motherhood has “saved” them. (p. 11)
These researchers therefore introduce the crucial element of women’s own interests into their
explanation of why these women put “motherhood before marriage.” In contrast, they argue
young women in the professional class, with more plentiful educational and career opportunities
available to them (and thus alternative realms in which to find security or meaning) more
frequently delay childbearing, and put “career before motherhood,” at least chronologically.
Interestingly, once these more privileged women have attained their credentials, careers, and
some level of economic security and finally do have their children, these now-older professionals
7 are the very mothers Lareau and Nelson have shown parent most intensively—out of uncertainty
for their children’s futures. When squaring the findings of Edin and Kefalas with those of Nelson
and of Lareau, one might conclude that current economic and social privation propels poor
young women to center their lives on motherhood for the sake of their own needs whereas
privileged older women’s fears of impending decline drives them to do the same in order to meet
what they see as their children’s future needs. However, I find it to be more complicated than
that, partially because “insecurity” is a subjective as well as objective phenomenon that varies
within as well as between classes. It therefore bears asking whether there are conditions under
which privileged women, too, turn to children to meet their own security needs.
DaCosta’s (1995) research indicates a preliminary yes. She examines the relationship between
single heterosexual women’s expectations of contingent, possibly expendable relationships with
marriage partners and their expectations of enduring unconditional love with and from their
children. In her mixed-class sample, she finds that “the negotiated, unstable character of adult
love leads women to emphasize the mother-child bond as a more reliable arena in which to fulfill
their needs for nurturance and security” (DaCosta, 1995, p. 1). This is a compensatory
connection argument based on the anticipated insecurity of one aspect of their lives, namely
adult partnerships, propelling them toward deeper attachment in the seemingly more reliable
realm of motherhood. However, DaCosta’s study looks only at the future aspirations of young
women who are neither mothers nor wives, and thus exclusively regards the ideal realm of future
hopes and expectations.
My research, an in-depth longitudinal study of mothers of various classes and racial and ethnic
identities, looks at actual mothers, both single and partnered. I follow them from pregnancy
through their children’s third birthdays to investigate how the perceived security of their
8 partnerships bears on the type of relationship they seek with their children. Furthermore, as paid
work is an increasingly central (and security-providing) aspect of women’s lives, I also
investigate the relationship between reported security in their work lives and their mothering.
Although both work and partnership insecurity map onto social class to some degree, they do
so imperfectly. Thus, this study is not about class differences in parenting per se, but may be
considered a refinement of such studies, investigating the underlying insecurity which may
partially contribute to previously observed class differences, but which may also occur, albeit
differently, among women in any class.
Method
This research is based on a 3-year longitudinal interview and observational study of 34 primary
parents during the first 3 years of their children’s lives. The interviews took place between 2003
and 2009. Informants were recruited primarily at birth-preparation classes during late pregnancy
where they were told this was a study of how parents balance independence and connection with
their children—which was, in fact, how the project began. Indeed, the focus on security was
emergent from the initial interview process. There was no formal compensation for participation
though I did often bring informants meals when their children were born.
The informants participated in semistructured, in-depth, face-to-face interviews that generally
took place before the birth, again during early infancy, and approximately once per year
thereafter until the child was 3 years old. Interviews typically lasted about 2 hours, were
recorded and transcribed, and most frequently occurred in the informant’s home. I began with 36
informants, but two moved away early in the study and could not be located. Two additional
informants that I do include in the sample were likewise difficult to locate, but I was able to
connect sporadically and thus include their data.
9 I deliberately sought informants with different approaches to parenting, so the birth classes
used for recruitment consisted of hospital-based classes geared toward physician-assisted births,
and also classes geared toward “natural births” with a midwife. Furthermore, I did not control for
demographics or seek a homogenous sample, hoping instead the sample would reflect other
diversities in American parenting and capture multiple perspectives. Indeed, in the two families
where the father was expected to have primary caregiving responsibilities, the informants were
male.1 Additionally, research participants ranged from impoverished to wealthy, with multiple
points in between. Twenty-four were American-born Whites, two were White immigrants to the
United States, two were Latinas (one U.S.-born, one immigrant), two were African American
(one was mixed-race but identified as Black), two were second-generation Chinese, and two
were second-generation East Indian. A fourth of the participants were unmarried to the other
parent of their child when the child was born, and the married participants included one lesbian.
A year after their children were born, participants’ labor market involvement split almost evenly
between full-time, part-time, and no paid work.
Given the intimate subject matter and long-term nature of the study, almost without exception
the research participants and I developed friendly, personable relationships. I myself became a
mother early in the data collection phase of the research which created a blur between the
scholarly and the personal about which I frequently debriefed with fellow family scholars to help
minimize projecting my own experiences onto informants. At the same time, my insider status
gave me intimate knowledge about the field, alerted me to certain issues to explore, and aided
my rapport with informants, all of which were highly fruitful for the research process.
Analytically, this work falls into the interpretive sociological tradition of scholars such as
Arlie Hochschild and Annette Lareau who use in-depth analysis of cases to uncover meanings,
10 dynamics, and conceptual understandings. Burawoy (1991) argues that when using “the
interpretive case method . . . macro and micro, general and particular, are collapsed. . . . The
micro is viewed as an expression of the macro, the particular an expression of the general” (p.
272). The strength of such a methodology is theory building and creating new understandings of
dynamics at play. However, the small sample size does not lend itself to testing its own
theoretical contributions, which would be a welcome next step with a larger sample.
Findings
In this sample, I find about one in four mothers expresses a tendency toward compensatory
connection. For example, regarding her two boys, one mother describes herself as
. . . hinging on everything they do as opposed to finding your own stuff, you know. At least
I [have] that problem, and I’ve talked to a lot of parents who share that, at-home moms. . . .
I think one of the things that drains you is when you just, you’re depending too much on
your kids for your own sense of stability [italics added].
Depending on one’s children for one’s own “sense of stability” is another way of describing
compensatory connection. The question of this study is the following: Does a woman’s
perception of insecurity in the world or in her own life predispose her to rely on her children in
this way? And specifically, does a lack of alternative security resources predispose her to seek a
more intensive mother-child relationship?
To understand how different security configurations in mothers’ lives relate to their parenting
intensity, we must operationalize “intensity.” Since this sample consists of mothers of babies and
very young children, intensity-seeking manifests in different ways than it would among mothers
of older children where scheduled activities, frequent text messages, help with homework, or
11 other forms of intense interactivity and intervention might come more into play. In this analysis,
I describe a woman as ideologically “intensity-seeking” if prior to the birth of her child she
stated a desire for an identity-defining, time-consuming, physically intimate, child-centered
relationship with that child. Mothers in the intensity-seeking ideological category stated during
pregnancy that they wished to nearly continuously hold or otherwise engage with their babies
once they were born, and believed at the onset that the relationship with their child would be the
singularly most meaningful and important relationship in their lives. A third of the mothers in
this study fall into this ideological category.
The remaining mothers fall at various points along a spectrum marked on its other end by an
ideology of mother-child independence. Many mothers along this spectrum try to strike a balance
between connection and independence, wanting to give the child developmentally appropriate
comforts, while still “having a life” for themselves. For example, they may carry their children a
lot, but may also do “sleep training” (letting the baby cry at night, sometimes for progressive
amounts of time) so the parents can establish uninterrupted sleep, especially when going back to
work. Or they may co-sleep and feed the baby exclusively breastmilk but also use kin or paid
caregivers from the start to allow the mother to uphold her other desires and commitments.
Other mothers are still further along the spectrum toward independence, striving for an adultcentered household, planning at the onset to teach their child to “self-soothe” (the way many
mothers describe letting their babies cry without adult intervention), and committed to
continuing their prior pursuits, such as work, hobbies and relationships, to a high degree and as
early as possible. For example, one respondent with a high-hours professional job shares her
“goal” of 2 weeks maternity leave, though she says she “probably won’t make it that long” since
she considers a number of her work responsibilities “just my job, not necessarily something I
12 trust an assistant to do.” Blair-Loy (2003) calls such women “career-committed” and points out
that some of these women have “begun to redefine childhood such that young children really just
need custodial care” (p. 136). Another professional mother from my sample engages in such a
redefinition. Regarding her yet-to-be-born baby girl, she says,
She’s just going to have to cry it out and my mom [the intended caregiver] will have to deal
with it. Or whoever it is. . . . [It’s] important to me that she have multiple people taking care
of her so that she is open to that, that I am not the sole source of her comfort.
While I recognize great variation among mothers who do not perfectly fit the “intensity-seeking”
ideological category, for the purposes of this analysis, I will simply use the term autonomyseeking to describe such mothers.
After the birth of their children, three mothers shifted their ideological orientation due to the
perceived needs of the baby, surprise about their own maternal feelings, or in response to
unforeseen circumstances. These orientations should therefore be viewed as fluid ideological
constructs rather than as fixed traits. However, the vast majority of mothers maintained their
original ideological orientation throughout the course of the study and, for the sake of clarity,
here I analyze mothers with a consistent orientation.
Regarding social locational differences such as race and class, we know from prior research
that race profoundly influences both security and the parenting tools used to cope with security
affronts, such as racism (Brown & Lesane-Brown, 2006; Carothers, 1998; Hill Collins, 1994).
Nonetheless, just as Lareau (2003) found that class trumped race regarding her own observed
parenting typology, the salience of material resources among the mothers in this sample is more
conclusive than the salience of racial identification in these mothers’ own expressed
understandings of their parenting orientations. Furthermore, I hesitate to make racial arguments
13 on the basis of my own findings, with such small numbers of informants of various racial
identities, lest the analysis imply racial determinism. I therefore focus on those issues about
which I have most conclusive evidence, which include the relationship between informants’
work security and their approach to mothering, and the relationship between the security of their
partnerships and their mothering.
Children as Substitute Partners
During pregnancy, almost half of intensity-seeking mothers (a) expressed the possibility of
leaving their partner, (b) expressed a concern that their partners might leave them, or (c) were
single mothers wishing to be partnered. In contrast, only a fourth of autonomy-seeking mothers
voiced these concerns. Thus, the mothers who most frequently expressed insecurity in their
partnerships were those who sought intense relationships with their children. Although we may
not generalize from a sample of this size, this is consistent with and lends preliminary support to
a compensatory connection argument.
We see additional clues pointing to compensatory connection in how mothers frame their
relationships. For example, one informant says, “[With men], you’re afraid that maybe they
won’t love you. With a kid you don’t have to worry about that . . .” Such sentiments are echoed
in other studies as well. For example, one of DaCosta’s (1995) respondents says,
[T]he love I would get in a relationship with a man is—this is going to sound horrible—
there’s always the chance that it might not always be there, but the love for a child will
always be there. (p. 10)
Notice that this woman refers to the threatened love she will “get” in a relationship with a
man, whereas the love that “will always be there” in the mother-child relationship is her love
14 “for a child” [italics added]. This may be one key to unlocking what DaCosta (1995¸ p. 6) refers
to as an “essentialized notion of love between a mother and child” versus the prosaic, contingent
love women see with men. With men, the tentative love women describe comes from someone
outside themselves, which makes it less reliable or at least less personally controllable, whereas
the unthreatened, unconditional love they describe with children is mostly their own.
Twenty-six of the mothers in this study were married or in a long-term lesbian relationship at
the point of the first interview, and eight were unmarried. However, among the unmarried
respondents—most of whom were poor or working class—the majority were living with the
fathers of their children, so the term single mother can be somewhat misleading. Nonetheless,
U.S. single women are more than four times as likely to live in poverty than their married
counterparts (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, & Smith, 2012, p. 17) and the double influence of
economic hardship and singleness may exacerbate compensatory connection.
Only two respondents in my study were pregnant by men who were not living in the same
geographical area, so I am unable to generalize regarding partner absence, yet both these women
were intensity-seeking with their children. One was a White part-time bus driver who lived with
her mother from whom she inherited her house when the mother passed away. The other was a
Black unemployed woman who likewise lived with her mother during my first interview with her
and then moved out after a fight and into a nonfamily member’s house where she slept on the
couch. She focused almost all her energy on her baby once he was born. Thus, although it may
be tempting to assume single mothers must work full-time and therefore focus much of their life
energy on pursuits besides motherhood, women without partners sometimes find solutions that
allow them to survive with very little money. Additionally, given their beliefs that love “will
always be there” with children, these women may go to great lengths, including living on a
15 couch, in order to focus their energies on one of the few self-affirming and seemingly guaranteed
aspects of their lives.
Most of the mothers in this study, however, were not single. They lived with the fathers of
their children to whom they were mostly married. Yet a marriage certificate is not equivalent to a
woman being “securely” partnered. Marital difficulties and doubts about the longevity of
marriage relationships are common, and children sometimes help married women deal with those
difficulties. For example, one respondent, who raises doubts about a difficult relationship with
her husband, feels her baby boy helps ameliorate those difficulties:
[My emotional response to having a baby is] happiness pretty much all the time. Things
could be going really bad with [me and my husband], but if I’m spending the day with [the
baby], I forget all about that . . . so it doesn’t matter what’s going on with me, I still am
happy when I’m with him.
A child relieving the emotional stress of a difficult partnership or appeasing one’s divorce
anxiety does not necessarily indicate that one is amplifying the mother-child realm to “make up
for” problems in the marriage. Yet it is noteworthy that talk of children easing difficulties in
one’s life, including in one’s partnership, is commonplace among intensity-seeking mothers and
is all but absent among autonomy-seekers.
The greatest divide between intensity- and autonomy-seeking mothers vis-à-vis their
partnerships, however, is in attention and prioritization. The mothers who orient toward
intensity-seeking with their children put less narrative emphasis on their partners, speak less of
efforts made to strengthen and maintain the partnership relationship, seldom mention the
partner’s needs, and speak almost exclusively of the mother-child relationship rather than
discussing “the family.” In contrast, autonomy-seeking mothers refer with greater frequency to
16 their “families,” and spontaneously bring up their partners more often. For example, this
autonomy-seeking full-time working mother peppers in comments about her husband throughout
her interviews: “Derek used to say I kissed [the baby] so much he’d get a hole in his head,”
“Derek thought I was insane on those post-birth hormones,” and “Derek’s had to adjust . . .
[since having a baby] changes how you are at the gym. You can’t hot tub for that last ten
minutes, and that was a hard adjustment for Derek.” Additionally, autonomy-seeking mothers
frequently discuss concessions they have made to their (typically male) partners, such as letting
him name the baby, or keeping the baby up late in order to attend an event he enjoys. Another
autonomy-seeking mother who works full-time says,
I don’t think [having a child] had a major change like in my whole life, only my relationship
with [my husband], not that it has changed, but the amount of time that I dedicate to my
husband—not to say that he’s demanding, but I was used to taking care of him, and with a
baby, I think he’s the one who has suffered. So I always try to see how he’s doing and to
prepare his favorite foods.
This mother not only expresses that her partner has needs, but she also articulates both pre- and
postbirth attempts to meet some of those needs. This consideration of the partner’s needs is not
common in the intensity-seekers’ narratives who rarely mention partners unless asked about
them directly. Regarding the causal direction, we might suspect that a child so absorbs an
intensity-seeker’s consciousness that the partner simply gets squeezed out from a position of
greater consideration. While this may be the case, these women’s infrequent mention of their
partners’ needs or of their sense of obligation in meeting those needs in their pregnancy
narratives suggests that this lack of partner prioritization predates the birth of the child.
17 An additional difference is that autonomy-seekers typically prioritize time alone with their
partners and schedule regular “dates” with them both before and after the birth of their children.
For example,
We like to have family time and do things with [our baby] on the weekend [since the baby is
in paid care fifty hours during the week], but it’s also important for [my husband] and me to
do things just us on the weekends, do adult things.
In contrast, an intensity-seeker whose husband seeks alone time with her says,
People say, “You need dates with your husband!” But you can go out with your baby and
your husband. . . . I’m not willing to leave the kids to do things just the two of us.
Another notable difference is that autonomy-seeking mothers frequently use the first-person
plural, “us,” or otherwise include their partners in discussions of the child. For example, “We
have a nanny rather than daycare partially because . . . our jobs are intense and we can’t afford to
get sick as much as we would if he was in daycare.” This differs from intensity-seeking mothers
who generally use the first-person singular when referring to parenting decisions, such as, “I’m
keeping [my son] out of kindergarten because I want him home with me one more year.”
Autonomy-seeking with a child clearly does not equate to autonomy-seeking with a partner. In
fact, part of the impetus for seeking an independent child may be in order to better accommodate
a spouse’s needs and to maintain a couplehood beyond parenthood, which autonomy-seekers
prioritize. Likewise, intensity-seeking with a child does not indicate a person who seeks an
intense, mutually obliged partnership. These intensities appear almost inversely related, and
those who least prioritize the couple relationship frequently seek the most connection with their
children.
18 While an in-depth analysis of mothering intensity with respect to other relationships is beyond
the scope of this article, I will at least mention that these findings are not limited to romantic
partnerships. Fragile friendships and undependable relationships within one’s family of origin
likewise predispose intensity-seeking with one’s young child (Villalobos, forthcoming). Nelson
(2010) finds this to be the case among privileged parents of teenagers as well; their highintensity parenting practices are “at least in part driven by a drive for connection across
generations, especially when upward ties have been frayed . . . and when horizontal ties (e.g.,
with friends, in voluntary associations) are diminished” (p. 69).
Childrearing as a Substitute Career
If prior to pregnancy- or birth-related leave-taking a woman was either in a temporary position,
worked 10 or fewer hours a week, was a low-wage worker, or was unemployed, I considered her
employment “insecure.” The majority of the working class and poor informants in this study fell
into this classification, as well as unemployed or tenuously employed middle-class and
professional mothers. Although the sample is not large enough to yield numerically generalizable
findings, it is noteworthy that 9 out of 10 intensity-seekers were insecurely employed as they
launched into mothering a new child as versus only 1 in 4 autonomy-seekers. This smacks
against the “choice” myth of securely employed privileged women opting out of high-powered
careers to focus their energies on motherhood. In fact, it presents the opposite picture of securely
employed mothers attempting to maintain their work by pursuing an ideology of mother-child
independence, and insecurely employed mothers seeking a more time-intensive mother-child
bond (see, Blair-Loy, 2003; Damaske, 2011; Gerson, 2011; and Stone, 2007, for further insights
on securely employed mothers’ desires to continue working—if they can make it work).
19 Census data likewise show that among married women in the United States stay-home
mothering is two to three times more prevalent in lower income families (families earning
$10,000 to $30,000) than higher income families (those earning $75,000 and more; cited in
Damaske, 2011, p. 7). Damaske argues this is partly because women in the lower income
families lack the resources to pay caregivers (they cannot afford to work), and partly because
they do not receive appreciation for working either from the workplace itself or from their
families (they have little to lose from quitting). Elaborating on this latter point, I contend that
when mothers receive fewer rewards from work, such as long-term security or decent pay, they
simply invest less energy there and instead invest their energy where they expect greater
rewards, in this case in motherhood.
Regarding labor market engagement, those who espoused intensity-seeking in their pregnancy
interviews averaged fewer than 10 work hours per week prior to having their children, whereas
autonomy-seeking mothers averaged more than 30 weekly work hours. The low work hours
among intensity-seekers may reflect both an inability to secure additional work and a low level
of work prioritization. One possible explanation is that, given these mothers’ intensity-seeking
with its emphasis on the centrality of the mother-child relationship and on continuous physical
closeness, they may be already gearing up for stay-home motherhood by backing off from
careers. However, this is not likely the case because their job histories generally reflect life-long
insecurity and low or intermittent work hours even preceding pregnancy. Another possibility is
that some third factor, such as being “relationship-focused,” makes career less central for them
and predisposes them to seek high levels of mother-child connection. Yet if this were true, we
might also expect them to prioritize partnerships, and we have already seen this is not the case.
Intensity-seeking mothers put less narrative focus on the partner relationship, and are more likely
20 to be single mothers or in marriages in which they foresee the real possibility of breakup than the
other mothers in this study.
A remaining possibility is that some women who experience low job security or who are not
tremendously engaged in the labor market may initially orient themselves toward more intensive
parenting in attempts to fill in the space that might otherwise have been filled by a job. As the
low rewards from and lack of investment in work typically precede having a child, it is not
simply that the energy put into mothering diminishes what is available for paid work, but rather
that work is insecure and then the woman orients toward intensity-seeking with a child.
One informant is very clear about how having a child is a palliative, distracting her from the
insecurity she feels about her work life:
In a way, [parenting is] like a job, and makes me feel good about myself, and it’s an excuse
not to find a job. I was thinking about why it’s hard to put Adrian in a daycare, and it’s kind
of like [parenting is] a way for me not to deal with issues of finding work. It’s as if my life
were on hold . . . [and I] wasn’t doing anything fulfilling, so then I had Adrian and that was
a good excuse for me not to do anything for a career. But now I have two days available
[when he is in daycare] and I need to figure out what to do with them. So the issue is open
again and it’s scary. Dealing with Adrian, it’s very convenient not to deal with these issues.
Parenting allows her to avoid anxiety about her career by substituting mothering for a paid job
in her daily structure and as a source of life validation and self-worth.
As with partnership insecurity, the child can also sometimes function as a salve over one’s job
insecurity. For example, one mother’s 15-month-old son eases the emotional toll of
unemployment and an otherwise harrowing job search:
21 (eyes welling up) Isaac is so compassionate toward others and feels such empathy. I was
really upset a week ago about a job [I had applied to] being filled [by someone else], and I
was at the computer reading this rejection . . . and Isaac came up and gave me a big hug,
and I thought, “How does he know?” (fully in tears)
In this mother’s case, her baby does not substitute for a paid career or distract her from insecurity
in that realm, but he does offset that insecurity with emotional support which may make it easier
to deal with.
Looking collectively at the trends depicted above, we see that a woman’s intensity-seeking
with her child relates to the presence or absence of stable partnership and her level of
engagement in the partnership, and to the presence or absence of job security and her level of
engagement in the labor market. Thus, I am able to say with some confidence that, in this sample
of mothers, individuals with less secure engagement regarding these aspects of their lives are the
likeliest to seek more intense relationships with their children. These findings point to the
existence of compensatory connection.
Intensity- and Autonomy-Seekers Compared
To put flesh to the analysis and to understand some of its complex dynamics, I will compare two
cases, Tammy Wong and Gina Haley. These mothers have much in common. They were ages 32
and 33 years, respectively, when they gave birth to the children in question, both were married to
the child’s father, and both experienced early maternal abandonment in their own childhoods.
Furthermore, as both women currently maintain upper-middle-class lifestyles in suburban
neighborhoods, their cases will allow us to view within-class variation. These mothers are both
22 extreme cases, one with a strongly autonomy-seeking ideology, the other strongly intensityseeking.
Tammy Wong, a second-generation Chinese-American, is the chief accountant at a large shoe
company. Her husband is a White graduate student and they have two children, a 1-year-old girl
and a 3-year-old boy. During Tammy’s childhood, her own mother was both in school and
working full-time, first as a factory seamstress and then at her father’s grocery store. When
Tammy was 6 months old, her mother sent her away to live with her grandparents in China for a
year: “I think my mom just couldn’t handle it; it was too stressful. I’ve never actually asked her
[about it] . . . I’ll just leave it at, okay, something happened and I had to go.” I ask if Tammy felt
abandoned by her mother, and she says, “No, not really, because my grandma came in and filled
the spot. I probably didn’t even notice, and I know [my mother] had a reason—at least I hope she
had a reason!” Tammy’s narrative does not dwell on this issue, and she describes herself as
having a “good relationship” with her mother today:
Having a child myself brought me a lot closer to my mom. During those first few months, I
thought like, God, if I imagine doing this when I was twenty-one, it’s just so overwhelming.
So . . . [having a child] totally changed our relationship a lot, for the better.
Tammy has a strongly autonomy-seeking orientation with her children. She is a vocal
proponent of “cry it out” sleep training, which she and her husband used a number of times with
both their children to eradicate “bad sleep habits.” She also says their baby “never came into bed
with us. . . . I don’t want to have a child who can’t sleep in their own crib!” Furthermore, she
does not wish to hold her children excessively:
23 We used the [mechanical] swing a lot [as a place to put the crying baby]. I had reservations,
thinking I should be able to calm my baby myself, but if he wasn’t in the swing, he’d be in
the car seat and I’d just have to move that, so it’d be the same thing. He just liked the
motion. We used the stroller, too. At least for me, it was just hard to spend my whole life
touching him!
She did not enjoy breastfeeding her first baby and found herself resenting him, so several days
after he was born, she switched to formula-feeding with a bottle: “I didn’t want to resent my
newborn straight from the start so we made that decision.” Notice her use of “we” referring to
her and her husband’s decision, even a decision related to her own body and her own resentment.
This is reflective of the partner-inclusive language common among mothers with an ideology of
mother-child independence. She also echoes many autonomy-seekers in her belief that “It’s very
important to continue to have an adult life even after having kids, for your own sanity, to
remember that you’re a person outside of being a parent.” She chose not to breastfeed her second
child at all.
In contrast with Tammy, Gina Haley, a White part-time in-home childcare provider and selfdescribed “stay-home mom,” has a strong ideology of intensity-seeking with her children which,
I will argue, is fueled by compensatory connection. Like Tammy, Gina experienced an early
maternal abandonment. When Gina was 2 years old, her mother left the family and moved to
another city 6 hours away. Her father was playful when he was around, but he was working two
jobs and putting himself through school, so she was in full-time daycare during the day and was
raised by a housekeeper during the evenings. Gina would cry, “Why did my mommy leave me?”
and reports that she began having “abandonment issues”:
24 [My early abandonment experiences] made me extremely needy in my teen years, so I
sought solace in boys and somewhat in drugs. And I was also like, even when I was very
young, I was always attracted to babysitting, and day camps for kids and things like that.
And so I think that, through nurturing children, it was filling some of my needs for
nurturing.
At age 17, Gina became pregnant and is “quite sure it was subconsciously planned” as a way
to “meet my needs.” She married her boyfriend, and while she views her parenting as motivated
by her own needs, indicating compensatory connection, she reports that she initially parented
nonintensively “because of not being educated about attachment parenting [a form of parenting
that involves close physical contact with children] . . . I wanted to nurse, but I didn’t seek out the
right support so I didn’t nurse.” During her second pregnancy at age 20 years when she and her
husband divorced, she radically changed her parenting practices. With the departure of her
husband, Gina’s bed was available for a new cuddlemate, and she began sleeping with her
second baby once he was born. She also began to hold him nearly continuously during the day
and breastfed him for more than 3 years. This shift in her parenting occurred just as her marriage
dissolved, so her radically new parenting orientation may have been at least partly a reaction to
her new life circumstances which became highly insecure as a newly single mother without a
high school degree.
Over a decade later, having earned both a GED and bachelor’s degree, she married a
financially well-off man with whom she had two more children. Yet she describes having an
argumentative and tenuous relationship with him, and her narrative indicates ambivalence: “I’ve
always been ‘Yeah, this may or may not work out,’ and when there’s a fight, I’m just: ‘Well, we
25 just won’t be together,’ whereas he’s hurt and wants us to be together.” She also reports no close
friends:
Friendship in general is not super important to me. . . . I can be equally happy to be with the
kids and can forget to call my friends for weeks at a time. Mostly short-term connections
meet my friendship needs and I just find it’s draining to be with other people too long.
For paid work, she is a caregiver in her home for two other children twice a week. She says that
having a career never mattered much to her, although she adds somewhat apologetically that “it
should in this day and age.”
Despite living an upper-middle-class existence in a large, beautiful home in the suburbs, given
low-paying work that makes it financially difficult to opt out of an unfulfilling marriage, an
enduring sense of abandonment from childhood, and no close friends, her experience is one of
insecurity. Some of this seems to be of her own making as she takes a dismissive stance toward
various aspects of her current life.
When Gina and her new husband had their second child together (whose name “Ginny”’
closely resembles her own), Gina held her continuously, day and night. She even bought a water
sling so she could hold Ginny while she showered since “it would not be okay if she cried for me
and I wasn’t there.” This continued for much of Ginny’s first year of life. Gina also nursed
preemptively, offering the breast before the baby asked for it. At 6 months, Gina estimated she
breastfed about 50 times in a 24-hour period. With a smile of pride rather than concern, Gina
characterized her level of closeness with her baby as “complete enmeshment.”
During a later interview, Gina discusses Ginny, now 3 years old:
26 I’m completely enamored of her. . . . It’s still kind of a very magical thing—like the
newborn period where you can’t imagine not being with that baby or not smelling that baby
and you’re so close—it’s very similar to that . . . I feel such complete and utter gratitude.
Every night I tell her, “Thank you so much for being here.” I realize this could so easily not
have happened.
There is a complete tonal shift in how she talks about her child from how she talks about any
other element of her life. Rather than following suit with the rest of her relationships and taking a
dismissive stance with Ginny, she funnels all salience into this one singularly meaningful
relationship.
She directly attributes her intensity-seeking parenting approach to her own needs, saying, “I
[don’t] want my kids to abandon me, to make up for how I was left as a child, so it [has]
impacted how I parented.” Furthermore, Gina shares how her children make her feel more secure
in the world:
I get really anxious . . . and just don’t feel quite right out in the world without at least one
child next to me; it just feels very abnormal to me. Um, I guess that’s kind of surprising,
that at my age—I feel I should be a lot more confident out there in the world and not need a
child as almost a crutch, you know.
While Gina is an extreme case, seeking safety in one’s children and amplifying the mother-child
relationship as a form of redress for oneself are typical of compensatory connection
relationships.
As I showed earlier, both the security of one’s personal relationships and one’s degree of
involvement with paid work appear to influence one’s propensity to be either intensity- or
27 autonomy-seeking with children. I will now further unpack this relationship between work,
partnership, and parenting.
Whereas distrust in the institution of marriage seems to heighten Gina’s attachment to her
children, Tammy’s own distrust in marriage seems instead to propel her toward intense
attachment to her work as an accountant, and toward autonomy-seeking with her children.
Tammy does not define her mothering by spending a great deal of time with her children and
she frequently returns home only after her son is asleep. Hearkening Hochschild’s (1997)
findings that some individuals find workplaces more appealing than their homes, Tammy says,
“The first three months [when I was on maternity leave with the baby] were really hard . . . so
there was a lot of ‘I’d rather be at work than here!’” She neither assumes primary responsibility
for meeting her children’s needs nor appears to seek her own sense of security and identity
through the mother-child relationship. I would therefore not describe her as an intensive mother.
She does, however, appear to be an intensive worker. She assumes great responsibility for
“coming through” for the company where she works and she draws on her career for her own
security, even if that puts her family at risk. For example, when she experienced preterm labor at
7 months’ gestation and was placed on medical bed rest to avoid a dangerously premature birth,
she defied doctor’s orders and continued to go into the office daily, working 60-hour weeks.
The strong allure of work for her does not appear related to the work itself, which she does not
positively describe (such as by describing it as meaningful, interesting, or as conveying power).
Instead, it seems to relate to her paycheck and to the financial independence from her partner that
her paycheck provides:
Independence and self-reliance comes from my mom teaching me always to . . . have your
own job, always have your own income, and don’t be, don’t have to depend on a man,
28 because you can get stuck. I mean the underlying message behind that is: “You don’t want
to be in a situation like I am where you have to be in this relationship because there’s no
other choice,” or at least she didn’t perceive another choice. So that sort of drove me to,
“Yes! I’m going to biz school. Yes! I’m going to do . . . all these things,” because my mom
gave that to me and I think that’s important.
Tammy’s sentiments are not unique to her. In an era where approximately half of marriages
end in divorce after a median length of 8 years (Kreider & Ellis, 2011, p. 15; Furstenberg, 1990),
most women consider financial independence absolutely crucial. In fact, when listing their
primary financial goals, a 1999 Roper poll found U.S. women rank being “financially
independent of others” as their single most important goal above other (more family-inclusive)
goals such as “hav[ing] enough for me and my family to live as well as we can” (Roper Starch
Worldwide, 1999). Mothers also value financial independence for their daughters, and I often
heard statements such as from this mother of a 1-year-old girl: “I want her to have a job and be
independent and make money so if things go wrong and she gets a divorce, she’ll be okay.” I
never heard informants discussing their sons in such a way. A lot is at stake with women’s
personal earnings, then, over and above household earnings. For Tammy, a solid personal
paycheck is how she establishes herself as independent from men and avoids the sort of
miserable but financially compulsory union her mother endured.
Gina is likewise dubious about marriage, yet she is in a different situation from Tammy. Gina
harbors fears “that eventually he’ll just leave me behind all together,” but she does not personally
control the material resources necessary to support herself or her children and she “never got
security from a job.” With no financial insurance policy against a failed union, then, she needs a
different “solution” to marital insecurity.
29 Gina’s strategy of creating a sense of safety for herself has two stages, both of which heighten
her compensatory connection with children. The first is to put emotional distance between
herself and her husband, which produces an intimacy gap and thus a greater need for
compensatory connection with her children. When I ask why she does not feel close to her
husband, she explains it is mostly her doing:
I think a lot of it is my fault, that I put up an emotional barrier a lot of the time . . . I feel
like, if I were the one to care too much, that would be a bad, dangerous thing, so I make
sure whoever I’m with is the one who cares more.
While Gina allows herself to depend on her husband financially, she is unwilling to depend on
him emotionally as that double-dependency would simply feel too “dangerous.” This fear of
attachment is not exclusive to her husband, however. Emotional barriers also help to explain why
she has not developed close friendships, has not invested herself in a career, and has never let
prior romantic partners “in.” In her attempts not to care too much, she keeps all relationships
either short-term or expendable—all, that is, except one. Gina’s security-through-detachment
does not apply to her children who must make up for all her other relationships. This is step two
of her strategy: Gina finally lets down her guard and, like a fourth of the mothers in this research
sample, seeks her own sense of safety in her children.
Seeking one’s security with children has a clear logic in a risk society. Unlike work, where
one may fear layoffs, or marriage, where divorce often feels like a coin flip away, young
children’s great dependence on caregivers, as well as laws of guardianship, may make the
mother-child relationship appear to be one’s most guaranteed bond. Thus in this one relationship,
Gina allows herself to feel the deep attachment, vulnerability, and need that she experiences as
too “dangerous” elsewhere in her life. As her single realm of deep emotional connection and
30 caring, however, the mother-child relationship has to fill a disproportionally high volume of
security needs to compensate for those not found in her minimal friendships, a nonprioritized,
emotionally distant partnership, and part-time work that is token in the family economy and with
which she does not strongly identify. Thus, I propose, the one relationship in which she allows
herself to become deeply attached—with her children—becomes magnified. Taking up more life
space with the connection she sees as most likely to endure then creates a subjective experience
of greater overall life security.
Although the case studies represent two extremes, with work and mothering intensity at
seemingly opposite poles, among women with more robust security resources going into
motherhood, particularly with deeply trusted intimate relationships, it is possible to be deeply
connected both with their work and with children, and I discuss these cases elsewhere
(Villalobos, forthcoming). However, among women going into motherhood with less trust in
their intimate relationships, I find a tendency to either focus on a strong connection with their
work and favor mother-child independence or withdraw their energies from work and seek an
intensely connected mother-child relationship.
Gina’s and Tammy’s different strategies create different family dynamics, which reinforce
their choices and further explain why Gina engages in compensatory connection with her
children and Tammy does not. In both cases, insecurity about the institution of marriage propels
them to security-seek elsewhere, yet Tammy struck upon her security solution—maintaining a
clear exit strategy from the marriage through her accountant’s paycheck—prior to the birth of her
child. The vehemence of her attachment to work (perhaps its own form of compensatory
connection), in turn, propels her autonomy-seeking with her children, which allows her work
devotion to continue. However, in a paradoxical twist, avoiding financial dependence on her
31 husband also seems to make it unnecessary for her to maintain emotional distance from him in
order to feel independent and thereby safe. She already feels safe. Thus, it is not threatening for
her to be more inclusive of her partner as part of an “us” in her mothering discourse, which is
consistent with the partner-inclusive language generally used by autonomy-seekers (who tend to
be career-identified). Furthermore, including her partner allows her still greater independence
from her children as she fully relies on her husband as a coparent. For example, Tammy happily
slept through the night during her children’s infancies as he was the “night shift” parent.
In contrast, Gina, who also vehemently wishes to avoid dependency on a man, lacks the
financial means to support herself and has no other recourse than to emotionally distance from
him and vigilantly gatekeep around her parenting terrain. Her narrative, like that of other
intensity-seekers, is conspicuously lacking in any “us” except mother and child. Her financial
insecurity, her emotional distance with her husband, and her sole responsibility for parenting all
conspire to up the ante on the mother-child relationship, and she fervently seeks compensatory
connection with her children.
Discussion and Analysis
Most prior explanations of mothering intensity overlook the mother’s own stakes in an intensive
relationship with her child, yet in this study half the mothers who seek an intense mother-child
relationship share a primary motivation of this intensity as benefiting themselves. This is despite
great cultural pressure to present one’s mothering as a selfless, child-oriented endeavor engaged
in exclusively “for the family” (Damaske, 2011). Furthermore, comparing intensity-seekers with
other mothers in this study, I find mothers who seek the most intense mother-child relationships
are those experiencing the greatest insecurity in the realms of partnership and work.
32 Given a rather small, nonrandom sample, it is not the intention of this research to test
hypotheses or generalize to society at large, and even within this sample, there are outliers in
either direction. For example, some gainfully employed mothers ascribe to an intensity-seeking
mothering ideology (see Blair-Loy, 2003, for further illustrations of intensive mothering
ideologies among securely employed professionals). And among those mothers whose parenting
emphasizes physical closeness but who enter motherhood with a deeply trusted partnership, the
dynamics are entirely different from either of the case studies discussed here (Villalobos,
forthcoming).
However, after analyzing the patterns above, I am able to propose a theory consistent with
those patterns: namely, compensatory connection. I suggest that some women who experience
insecurity or a lack of connection in other aspects of their lives draw on ideals of the centrality,
closeness, and enduring nature of the mother-child relationship as a way to compensate.
Bobel (2002) finds mother-oriented relationship dynamics similar to this in her study of
“natural mothers” whose practices resemble Gina’s. Bobel writes, “Again and again, I heard
women speak of their reluctance to separate from their children, resisting this division for their
own sake . . .” (p. 139).
The security-seeking Gina and others engage in with their children has implications for
attachment theory. John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory, describes the criteria of
attachment as (a) proximity seeking, wanting to be with the attachment figure (i.e., the child),
especially under conditions of threat; (b) secure base, deriving comfort and security from the
attachment figure; and (c) separation protest, protesting when the attachment figure becomes or
threatens to become unavailable (Bowlby, 1969/1982). I find all these criteria are met among
33 those mothers whose intensity-seeking with their children is motivated by compensatory
connection.
This finding stands in contrast to psychological studies of mother-child attachment security
that have historically looked exclusively at the child as the attachment subject and the mother as
the attachment object. Although in the 1980s, attachment research did evolve and studies began
to recognize that women (and men) have their own attachment needs (George, Kaplan, & Main,
1985), adult attachment studies continued to overlook attachment both to one’s children and to
one’s work, the very relationships about which my informants spoke with the greatest emotional
intensity. Instead, such studies typically viewed romantic partnership as the defining adult
attachment relationship. Very recent adult attachment research is attempting to correct this
romantic relationship bias by also investigating adults’ attachment to friends, adult siblings,
aging parents, and work (Fraley, Heffernan, Vicary, & Brumbaugh, 2011; Hazan & Shaver,
1990). Yet this still omits from consideration the possibility of a person’s attachment to her own
child. This omission may be intentional as attachment researchers directly claim that “parents do
not direct attachment behaviors toward their infants” (Hazan, Gur-Yaish, & Campa, 2004, p. 73).
My findings, however, dispute this claim and suggest that further broadening adult attachment
studies to include parental attachment to children could, in fact, be a highly fruitful line of future
study.
My findings also have gender implications, particularly regarding the relationship between
work insecurity and intensity-seeking with a child. Given that women continue to earn less than
men and work fewer hours for pay (Crittenden, 2001; Williams, 2000), these conditions could be
among the structural forces predisposing women toward more intensive involvement than men
with children. Of course, it is a chicken-and-egg issue. Being heaped with disproportionate
34 responsibilities for children curtails many mothers’ time and energy available for paid work (and
creates assumptions within workplaces that mothers are so curtailed even when an individual
mother is not). This, then, translates to mothers being offered fewer opportunities to advance and
to greater gender inequality at work (Crittenden, 2001; Williams, 2000). However, at least in this
study, the women with less secure relationships with the labor market prior to having children
were most prone to seek intense connectivity with their children. Thus, the influence appears to
be bidirectional, and not only are mothers penalized on the labor market, but these labor market
disparities in turn appear to influence mothering.
Regarding heterosexual partnership, my findings show that for women who doubt the
reliability of marriage, one solution is a solid paycheck of one’s own. In absence of financial
independence, however, another solution is to forefront the mother-child relationship and
intensify attachment in that realm. Even among women in the sample who generally seek
emotional safety by taking a dismissive stance with their various other relationships—in fact,
especially among these women—there is one relationship in which they appear to feel
comfortable expressing the love, longing, and vulnerability they minimize everywhere else,
namely, with their children.
This exploration of the dynamics between mothering and primarily secure or insecure
partnerships and work lives extends Edin and Kefalas’s (2005) work which shows how poor
women seek emotional security (and identity and meaning) in their relationships with their
children. Edin and Kefalas’s informants have minimal opportunities for secure and lucrative
careers to form an alternative basis of security, which compels them toward motherhood. Yet
work insecurity is increasingly common at points higher on the class spectrum as well (Sharone,
2013). I argue that Edin and Kefalas’s findings extend beyond just the poor and that even
35 mothers in resource-rich families can look eerily similar to these researchers’ informants because
many privileged women feel insecure as well; it is simply a different form of insecurity.
Similarly, whereas Edin and Kefalas’s informants are primarily single mothers, this study shows
how partnered women can likewise experience partnership insecurity and “put motherhood
before marriage” within marriage. That is, it is not simply one’s current circumstances, such as
one’s class or marital status, that influence one’s subjective experience of security and hence
one’s mothering; it is rather one’s level of engagement with and appraisal of the reliability of
those circumstances.
If we take as axiomatic that human beings need to feel safe in the world, then if security is
lacking in certain realms of a person’s life, it logically follows she will seek it elsewhere, and I
find childrearing is one realm in which this can occur. This study shows how children can
become attachment figures for mothers, a sort of living security blanket, particularly in those
cases where work, partnership, and other forms of meaningful connection are weakest or least
reliable.
As thousands of attachment studies attest that people gravitate toward attachment figures when
they feel frightened or under threat, we might conjecture there would be more compensatory
connection and a heightened attachment to children during periods like the present in which there
is a perception of increased societal insecurity and risk as well as a perceived destabilization of
other avenues of meeting those security needs. This possibility, which forefronts the mother’s
own security needs in explaining mothering intensity, has been overlooked for too long.
Note
1. I refer to the informants collectively as “mothers” because in most cases primary parenting
responsibility fell to the mother, and using a gender-neutral term such as “primary caregiver”
implies a false sense of gender equality in today’s parenting.
36 References
Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity (M. Ritter, Trans.). London, England:
Sage. (Original work published 1986)
Bianchi, S. M., Robinson, J. P., & Milkie, M. A. (2006). Changing rhythms of American family
life. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
Blair-Loy, M. (2003). Competing devotions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bobel, C. (2002). The paradox of natural mothering. Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press.
Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. New York, NY: Basic Books.
(Original work published 1969)
Brown, T. N., & Lesane-Brown, C. L. (2006). Race socialization messages across historical time.
Social Psychology Quarterly, 69, 201-213.
Burawoy, M. (1991). The extended case method. In M. Burawoy, A. Burton, A. A. Ferguson, K.
J. Fox, J. Gamson, N. Gartrell, . . . S. Ui (Eds.), Ethnography unbound: Power and resistance
in the modern metropolis (pp. 271-287). Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Carothers, S. C. (1998). Catching sense: Learning from our mothers to be black and female. In
K. Hansen & A. Garey (Eds.), Families in the U.S.: Kinship and domestic politics (pp. 315328). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Chodorow, N. (1999). The reproduction of mothering: Psychoanalysis and the sociology of
gender. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published 1978)
Collins, P. H. (1994). Shifting the center: Race, class, and feminist theorizing about motherhood.
In E. N. Glenn, G. Chang, & L. R. Forcey (Eds.), Mothering: Ideology, experience and agency
(pp. 45-66). New York, NY: Routledge.
37 Coontz, S. (2005). Marriage, a history: From obedience to intimacy, or how love conquered
marriage. New York, NY: Penguin.
Coontz, S. (2007, September 1). The family revolution. Greater Good, Fall. Retrieved
from http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_family_revolution
Crittenden, A. (2001). The price of motherhood: Why the most important job in the world is still
the least valued. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books.
DaCosta, K. (1995). Marriage and motherhood: A new perspective on commitment, sacrifice,
and self-development (Unpublished master’s thesis). University of California, Berkeley.
Damaske, S. (2011). For the family? How class and gender shape women’s work. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
de Marneffe, D. (2004). Maternal desire: On children, love, and the inner life. New York, NY:
Little Brown.
D’Emilio, J., & Freedman, E. B. (1988). Intimate matters: A history of sexuality in America.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
DeNavas-Walt, C., Proctor, B. D., & Smith, J. C. (2012, September). Income, poverty, and
health insurance coverage in the United States: 2011 (U.S. Census Bureau Current Population
Reports P60-243). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from
http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p60-243.pdf
Douglas, S. J., & Michaels, M. W. (2004). The mommy myth: The idealization of motherhood
and how it has undermined women. New York, NY: Free Press.
Edin, K., & Kefalas, M. (2005). Promises I can keep: Why poor women put motherhood before
marriage. Berkeley: University of California Press.
38 Fraley, R. C., Heffernan, M., Vicary, A., & Brumbaugh, C. C. (2011). The experiences in close
relationships-relationship structures questionnaire: A method for assessing attachment
orientations across relationships. Psychological Assessment, 23, 615-625.
Furedi, F. (2002). Paranoid parenting. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review.
Furstenberg, F. F. Jr. (1990). Divorce and the American Family. Annual Review of
Sociology, 16, 379-403.
George, C., Kaplan, N., & Main, M. (1985). Adult attachment interview protocol. Unpublished
manuscript, University of California, Berkeley.
Gerson, K. (2011). The unfinished revolution: Coming of age in a new era of gender, work, and
family. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Giddens, A. (1999). Risk and responsibility. Modern Law Review, 62, 1-10.
Glassner, B. (2000). The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things. New
York, NY: Basic Books.
Hacker, J. S. (2006). The great risk shift: The assault on American jobs, families, health care and
retirement and how you can fight back. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Hackstaff, K. B. (2000). Marriage in a culture of divorce. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
Harlow, H. (1958). The nature of love. American Psychologist, 13, 673-685.
Hays, S. (1996). The cultural contradictions of motherhood. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Hazan, C., Gur-Yaish, N., & Campa, M. (2004). What does it mean to be attached? In J.
Simpson & S. Rholes (Eds.), Adult attachment: Theory, research, and clinical
implications(pp. 55-85). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
39 Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1990). Love and work: An attachment-theoretical perspective. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 270-280.
Hochschild, A. (1997). The time bind. New York, NY: Metropolitan.
Hsin, A. (2006, December). Mother’s time with children: Does time matter? (California Center
for Population Research working paper). Retrieved from
http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/2vn214z3
Kreider, R., & Ellis, R. (2011, May). Number, timing, and duration of marriages and divorces:
2009. (U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Reports, P70-125). Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p70125.pdf
Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Nelson, M. K. (2010). Parenting out of control: Anxious parents in uncertain times. New York:
New York University Press.
Pew Research Center. (1997, May 9). Motherhood today: A tougher job less ably done.
Retrieved from http://www.people-press.org/1997/05/09/motherhood-today-a-tougher-jobless-ably-done
Roper Starch Worldwide. (1999, May). American Women’s Opinion Poll. The Roper Center for
Public Opinion Resarch, University of Connecticut. Retrieved from
www.ropercenter.ucon.edu/data_access/ipoll/ipoll.html
Sharone, O. (2013). Flawed system/flawed self: Job searching and unemployment experiences.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
40 Shumway, D. R. (2003). Modern love: Romance, intimacy, and the marriage crisis. New York:
New York University Press.
Slovic, P. (1987). Perceptions of risk. Science, 236, 280-285.
Stone, P. (2007). Opting out? Why women really quit careers and head home. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Thurer, S. (1995). Myths of motherhood: How culture reinvents the good mother. New York,
NY: Penguin.
Villalobos, A. (forthcoming). Motherload: ‘Making it all better’ in insecure times. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Wallulis, J. (1998). The new insecurity: The end of the standard job and family. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Williams, J. (2000). Unbending gender: Why family and work conflict and what to do about it.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
41