Invested Mothering: An Intersectional Analysis of Mothers’ Feminized Breadwinning Strategies Under State-Mandated Child Support Arrangements

Abstract

This article conceptualizes invested mothering to explain how mothers typically serve as both primary caregivers and financial providers under court-mandated shared parenting. A line of feminist literature has conceptualized hegemonic expectations of women’s caregiving through the umbrella theory of intensive mothering, and family scholars have studied how these ideologies influence parental investments in children. I assert that more research is necessary at the juncture of this scholarship, especially in contemporary family forms which reflect most parents’ reality. In this study, I analyze 46 in-depth interviews with parents under state-mandated child support arrangements as an empirical case of shared parenting experiences. I show that the onus is on mothers to secure financial resources for children’s basic and enrichment needs through relational, paid, and invisible work strategies—mothers enact invested mothering. An intersectional analysis reveals the distinct invested parenting work that mothers, especially low-income Black mothers who are the most disadvantaged, perform as adaptive strategies in the face of interlocking sexism, systemic racism, and historical economic inequality. Overall, mothers’ financial role as primary breadwinners is feminized as their contributions are unsupported, unacknowledged, and undervalued by both the courts and fathers.