“When I was a kid:” Childhood memories, care work, and becoming mom

Temporal Imaginaries in Accounts of Parenting Practices: Negotiations of Time, Advice, and Expertise

“…Like, they're just…they're letting them run riot and it is going to be worse in twenty years' time, because everybody's going to be taking drugs and it's not going to be a big deal and Thus, temporal configurations of imagined pasts and anticipated futures can serve to legitimate current parenting practices that are regarded as having contextual salience within parents' lives, hence delegitimize the recommendations received in various parenting programs. In line with Kromidas (2021), we could analyze this as parents drawing on an image of their own childhood and the future that childhood enabled for them, in order to think about the present and the future of their own children, or "to shape how children's past will shape their futures" (Kromidas 2021, 49). The construction of such temporal imaginaries within Thea and Charlie's talk can also be regarded as a reaction to some of the middle-class norms that are imbued within anglophonic brain-based parenting advice (Edwards, Gillies, and Horsley 2015).…”

“…The idea of attachment, and interrelatedly the proclaimed future importance of a healthy attachment, helps to orient parents towards a time beyond the present in respect to how they parent their children in the here and now. The future also plays a role in professional and wider public discourses of "good mothering," with motherhood (or parenthood more generally) configured as a moral project through which women especially are encouraged to see themselves as having special and principal responsibilities for their children's futures (Lee 2008;Song et al 2012;Lowe 2016;Leaver 2017;Kromidas 2021).…”

“…Along similar lines, Maria Kromidas (2021) has analyzed how her parent respondents in the United States enjoined, and configured, their own childhood memories in how they negotiated scientific and cultural norms relating to raising their children. For instance, some mothers reacted to North American norms of middle-class parenting (e.g., full, hectic children's schedules containing club meetings and extracurricular lessons and activities) by drawing on a configuration of their own stress-free childhood.…”