Intensive mothering and informational habitus: Interplays in virtual communities

Abstract

Funding informationMV and BM thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its financial support. MV thanks the Fonds de recherche du Québec for its financial support.

Doing family online: (In)formal knowledge circulation, information‐seeking practices, and support communities

“…Six papers in this issue illustrate concerns over a possibly growing digital information divide. Vivion and Malo (2023) and Lee (2023) demonstrate how socially advantaged parents— “informed mothers” in Québec and caregiving fathers in South Korea, respectively—search the Internet in their quest to be “good parents”: parents who put their children's well‐being at the center of their lives, sometimes against social norms, as in the case of fathers in South Korea.…”

“…Even though mothers are still considered the “better” parent when it comes to children's care, online communities partake in fashioning “a new informational habitus based on the importance of being an informed mother” (Vivion & Malo, 2023). This process involves weighing the value of different resources and sources of knowledge that circulate online and selecting what corresponds the most to a mother's values.…”

“…Gender, social pressure, and social control Online groups may also produce forms of social pressure and social control on their members that push them to conform to normative ideologies. As several articles in this special issue show, parenting is deeply affected by these new vectors of normative ideologies (see Lavoie & Côté, 2023;Lee, 2023;Longo, 2023;Scheibling & Milkie, 2023;Vivion & Malo, 2023). Online blogs addressed to fathers, mothers, or both parents reproduce and spread certain ideologies around "good" ways to behave as parents (Das, 2017), which are gendered and tied to "intensive mothering" (Hays, 1996).…”

“…This process involves weighing the value of different resources and sources of knowledge that circulate online and selecting what corresponds the most to a mother's values. Building on studies that attest to mothers' dissatisfaction with the information proposed by practitioners such as doctors (Simas et al, 2021), Vivion and Malo (2023) show how mothers use the Web to gather information from a variety of sources, some of them alternatives to main authoritative channels, to make "informed" choices for themselves and their family. Through this process, mothers thus have greater control over their children's health and perceived well-being (Lupton & Maslen, 2019).…”

“…New forms of expertise are being built online, at the margins of institutions, as counter-narratives or complements to official authority figures' prescriptions (e.g., governments, doctors, social services, immigration services). If these online entities sometimes follow and support governmental guidelines about nutrition, sleeping patterns, and health (Vivion & Malo, 2023), social media affords their members greater control over their decisions and a space free of institutional intermediaries (nurses, social workers). In this regard, Lavoie and Côté's (2023) article shows how individuals hoping to become parents, surrogates, and egg donors in Quebec, often turn to Facebook groups to liaise and find a "match" based on trust, away from medicalized and legal contracts provided by agencies.…”