mothers of young children we interviewed. As Kim’s statement below suggests, she
feels that not engaging in paid employment was no longer an option that was
approved of by her immediate environment or wider society:
And it was always sort of like that, it was always very small comments like
that, “Are you going for a job?” whereas they don’t seem to think, “Well, I
done the same things when my kids were young, I stayed at home and looked
after them,” it doesn’t seem to be an acceptable thing any more, that’s the
impression I get, to be at home and look after your kids. (Kim, two children,
white UK, married, pt self-employed)
This strong work ethic displayed by the mothers in the study concurs with the
direction of Labour government policies which have been designed to encourage just
such a transition. Individual decision-making in relation to the acceptable balance
between paid work and home life was also influenced by examples of mothering
identities available close by, those of peers, family and particular cultural or ethnic
groupings. A strong ‘traditional’ mothering philosophy that emphasised staying at
home with one’s children full-time was evident within smaller sub-groups, a group of
Muslim mothers with a South Asian background and some of the teenage mothers, but
it was not dominant across the sample. Whilst we accept, as we noted earlier, that the
location of our research - the heterogeneous communities of Battersea and Stoke
Newington - may well explain (at least partially) the relative absence of traditional
views and practices concerning mothers staying at home with their young children,
statistics concerning the growing rate of employment amongst mothers (ONS 2006)
do suggest that our findings are not atypical. However, and in sharp contrast, a
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