Objective
This study examined how college‐educated mothers emotionally manage the guilt they experience as they perform maternal foodwork.
Background
Maternal guilt is prevalent in the United States, ...as most mothers report feeling guilty about their inability to live up to the high standards set by intensive mothering. While research has shown that guilt pervades mothers' experiences, less focus has been paid to what mothers do about the guilt they feel. With a focus on maternal foodwork, this study investigated how college‐educated mothers emotionally manage the recurring feelings of guilt that arise due the pressures and expectations around feeding children.
Method
Using in‐depth interviews with 35 college‐educated mothers in the San Francisco Bay Area, this article examined mothers' emotional management of guilt. Data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis.
Results
Mothers experienced guilt as they perceived themselves to be falling short of intensive mothering's ideals around maternal foodwork. In an effort to manage this guilt, mothers employed the gendered and classed emotional management strategy of upscaling, whereby they actively worked on their emotions in ways that paradoxically served to amplify their feelings of guilt and fuel additional physical and cognitive labor. Three approaches were central to upscaling: raising the bar, seeking control, and leveraging social comparison. All of these approaches relied on mothers' ongoing surveillance of themselves and others.
Conclusion
The findings show how mothers' emotional management strategies are key to the maintenance of intensive mothering ideals over time, with consequences for the reproduction of gender inequality.
Objective
This study examined how lower‐income mothers engage in emotion work in order to feel like good mothers within broader contexts of stigmatization, economic insecurity, and precarity.
...Background
Despite the pervasiveness of the intensive mothering ideology, research shows that lower‐income mothers in the United States also routinely diverge from the ideology's norms due to structural and cultural factors. In doing so, these mothers simultaneously work to reframe and negotiate what it means to be a good mother. While scholarship reveals how mothers cognitively and behaviorally carry out this work, less attention has been paid to how mothers perform this work on an emotional level.
Method
Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 33 lower‐income mothers in the San Francisco Bay Area, this study investigated, through the lens of maternal foodwork, how mothers work on their emotions to feel like good mothers. Data were analyzed abductively.
Results
Mothers worked on their emotions as part of an effort to negotiate what good mothering looks like and to feel like good mothers as they performed maternal foodwork. To do so, mothers engaged in the gendered and classed emotion work strategy of downscaling. Downscaling involved working to inhibit negative emotions and evoke positive ones. Downscaling was facilitated by three key approaches: reflecting on harder times, redefining good foodwork, and leveraging social comparison.
Conclusion
Downscaling serves as a rational, effective emotion work strategy to help mothers navigate ongoing hardships, cultivate a positive maternal identity, and feel like good mothers within contexts of stigmatization, economic insecurity, and precarity.
Background
Traumatic childbirth experiences are common in the United States – affecting a third to a fourth of mothers – with significant negative impacts on maternal health. Yet most research on ...traumatic childbirth focuses on white mothers’ experiences. Drawing on a racially and ethnically diverse sample of mothers who experienced traumatic childbirth, this exploratory qualitative study examined Black, Latina, and Asian mothers' traumatic birth experiences and the role of obstetric racism in shaping these experiences.
Methods
In‐depth, semi‐structured interviews were conducted in 2019–2020 with 30 mothers who identified as women of color (37% Black, 40% Latina, and 23% Asian) who gave birth in the US and self‐identified as having experienced a traumatic childbirth. Data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis.
Results
Mothers reported obstetric racism as core to their traumatic birth experiences. This racism manifested through practitioners' use of gendered and racialized stereotypes, denying and delegitimizing mothers' needs. Mothers shared key consequences of the obstetric racism they experienced, including postpartum anxiety and depression, increased medical mistrust, and decreased desire for future children.
Conclusions
Mothers' reports suggest that obstetric racism played a role in their traumatic birth experiences. Particularly, practitioners' deployment of gendered and racialized stereotypes influenced mothers' treatment during birth. These findings point to opportunities to address obstetric racism during childbirth and improve patients' experiences through enhancing their agency and empowerment. The findings, in addition, highlight the need for increased practitioner training in anti‐racist practice and cultural humility.
Through in‐depth qualitative interviews, this study explores the role of obstetric racism in shaping the traumatic birth experiences. Findings point to opportunities to address obstetric racism during childbirth and improve patients' experiences through enhancing their agency and empowerment.
Widespread inequities in diet and nutrition present a pressing public health problem. Sociologists working to illuminate the causes and contours of these inequities often center the role of family ...foodwork, or the multifaceted domestic labor that supports eating, including planning and preparing meals. Mounting sociological scholarship on foodwork considers how food's meanings are socially patterned to reflect broader social structures, ideologies and institutions that influence their manifestation and families' resources to enact them. Here, we present three core contributions from the sociology of foodwork that can advance essential transdisciplinary conversations around nutrition disparities as well as efforts to tackle these disparities. We lay out how (1) family foodwork is historically rooted in broader structures of capitalist exploitation and women's subordination, and today remains gendered through normative discourses equating “good” feeding with “good” mothering; (2) the moralization of foodwork is buttressed by an ideological context idealizing homecooked meals and lamenting foodwork's decline, and; (3) foodwork—and societal evaluations of it—are shaped and stratified by intersecting gendered, classed, and racial inequalities. After reviewing each contribution and its importance for addressing nutrition inequities, we conclude by advocating for a closer conversation across disciplines and highlighting important future directions for sociologists.
Objective
The purpose of this study was to examine correlates of failure—trial attrition and weight gain—in a randomized clinical weight‐loss trial.
Methods
The Diet Intervention Examining The ...Factors Interacting with Treatment Success (DIETFITS) trial included 609 adults (18‐50 years; BMI 28‐40). Participants were randomized to a 12‐month healthy low‐fat or healthy low‐carbohydrate diet for weight loss. At baseline, participants completed psychosocial, demographic, and anthropometric measures. Stepwise logistic regressions identified baseline factors associated with (1) study attrition and (2) among trial completers, weight gain at 12 months.
Results
Having higher baseline food addiction and self‐efficacy was linked to treatment failure. Being younger, not having a college education, having higher outcome expectations and quality of life, and having lower social functioning and self‐control increased the odds of trial attrition. Identifying as other than non‐Hispanic white; not being married or cohabitating; having higher cognitive restraint and self‐control; and having lower amotivation, family encouragement, and physical limitations increased the odds of gaining weight by treatment’s end.
Conclusions
Participants’ baseline psychosocial and demographic factors may support or impede successful weight loss. Trialists should attend to these factors when designing treatments in order to promote participants’ likelihood of completing the trial and achieving their weight‐loss goals.
Scholars commonly account for dietary disparities across socioeconomic status (SES) using structural explanations that highlight differences in individuals’ wealth, income, or location. These ...explanations emphasize food’s material value. But food also carries symbolic value. This article shows how food’s symbolic value helps drive dietary disparities. In-depth interviews with 160 parents and adolescents and 80 hours of observations with four families demonstrate how a family’s socioeconomic position in part shapes the meanings that parents attach to food. These differing meanings contribute to distinct feeding strategies across the socioeconomic spectrum: whereas low-SES parents use food to buffer against deprivation, high-SES parents provision food to fulfill classed values around health and parenting. The findings suggest that an understanding of how families’ material circumstances shape food’s symbolic value is critical to fully account for dietary differences across SES.
Scholars have documented multiple influences on family food practices. This article examines an overlooked contributor to family diet: fathers. Using 109 in-depth interviews with middle and ...upper-middle class mothers, adolescents, and fathers in the United States, I show how fathers can undermine mothers' efforts to provision a healthy diet. While family members perceive mothers as committed to provisioning a healthy diet, many fathers are seen as, at best, detached and, at worst, a threat to mothers' dietary aspirations. Fathers not only do little foodwork; they are also viewed as less concerned about their own and other family members' dietary health. When tasked with feeding, many fathers often turn to quick, unhealthy options explicitly avoided by mothers. Mothers report efforts to limit fathers' involvement in foodwork to ensure the healthiness of adolescents' diets, with variation across families by mothers' employment status. Fathers' dietary approaches reflect and reinforce traditional gender norms and expectations within families. In highlighting how and why fathers can undermine mothers’ efforts to provision a healthy diet, this study deepens our understanding of the myriad dynamics shaping family food practices.
Amidst growing concern about adolescents' diets and dietary health in the United States, this article asks: what does healthy eating mean to adolescents? Using data from in-depth interviews conducted ...with 74 adolescents across socioeconomic status (SES) in California in 2015–2016, I show how adolescents view healthy eating as a moral, affluent practice and use discussions of healthy eating to assert their own morality and socioeconomic position. Adolescents associate healthy eating with 1) financial privilege and 2) moral superiority. Adolescents differ, however, in how they view their own families' healthy eating habits, and accordingly, their own moral worth. Most middle- and high-SES adolescents depict their families as healthy eaters. They trace their families' healthy diets to financial privilege while simultaneously framing these diets as morally superior. In the process, middle- and high-SES adolescents distinguish their families – as healthy eaters – from poor, “unhealthy” families. In contrast, few low-SES adolescents describe their families as healthy eaters. On the one hand, these adolescents report that financial constraints limit their families' abilities to eat healthily. But most also subscribe to the same discourses that label healthy eating as morally superior. While a minority of low-SES adolescents push back against these discourses to regain a sense of moral worth, overall, more privileged adolescents' beliefs about healthy eating enable them to assert themselves as good, moral people, while those shared beliefs challenge less privileged adolescents’ abilities to do the same. In this way, beliefs about healthy eating serve as a powerful medium for adolescents to mark and moralize socioeconomic groups, and each other.
•Adolescents across SES associate healthy eating with affluence and moral worth.•The effect of adolescents' beliefs about healthy eating varies across SES.•Wealthy adolescents' beliefs about healthy eating bolster their sense of worth.•Poor adolescents' beliefs about healthy eating damage their sense of worth.
Gaslighting is a type of abuse aimed at making victims question their sanity as well as the veracity and legitimacy of their own perspectives and feelings. In this article, we show how gaslighting ...can operate as a key, yet underexamined strategy of obstetric violence, or the institutional and interpersonal violation of women's rights during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. We draw on forty-six in-depth, semi-structured interviews with mothers who experienced a traumatic childbirth to examine how obstetric providers gaslight mothers before, during and after childbirth when they deny – and thereby destabilize – mothers' realities. We identify and examine four core types of denials: denials of 1) mothers' humanity, 2) mothers' knowledge as valid, 3) mothers' judgements as rational and 4) mothers' feelings as legitimate. All four denials work to render mothers noncredible and their claims illegible within clinical encounters. In explicitly naming, theorizing, and examining obstetric gaslighting, our aims are threefold: 1) to uncover and theorize an underexamined mechanism of obstetric violence through a sociological lens, 2) to offer a typology of obstetric gaslighting's manifestations to aid scholars and practitioners in recognizing when obstetric gaslighting is occurring and 3) to advance a growing research program on gaslighting in medicine.
•Gaslighting can operate as a key, yet underexamined, strategy of obstetric violence.•Obstetric providers can gaslight mothers when they deny mothers' realities.•Gaslighting includes denials of mothers' humanity, knowledge, judgments or feelings.•All four denials work to render mothers noncredible and their claims illegible.
Weight change trajectory from diet and lifestyle interventions typically involves rapid weight loss followed by a weight plateau after approximately 6 months. Changing from one weight-loss diet to ...another at the time of the plateau could instigate renewed weight loss. Therefore, our secondary analysis aimed to assess trajectory of weight loss in a 12-month, randomized, cross-over study. Forty-two adults were randomized to eat a healthy low-fat or healthy low-carbohydrate diet for 6 months then switched to the opposite diet for an additional 6 months. Regardless of diet assignment, participants experienced rapid initial weight loss, which slowed between 3 to 6 months. After switching diets at 6 months, weight modestly decreased until 9 months, but at a rate slower than the initial 3 months and slower than the rate from 3 to 6 months. This suggests that the weight loss plateau typically seen at 6 months is physiological and cannot be overcome by simply switching to a different weight-loss diet.
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