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This chapter explores the parental experiences of 21 mothers of young and/or adult children who have been diagnosed with developmental disabilities (DD). Specific attention is paid to mothers’ reflections on marginalization, stress, and resiliency. Intersectionality of marginalization was explored with a select number of participants who identified with minority racial groups, with the LGBTQ community, and/or as a single or young mother. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews and analyzed using the constant comparative method. Eighteen mothers reported experiencing elevated levels of stress specifically related to challenges associated with DD; the need for greater investments of time and money was emphasized. However, nearly every participant highlighted stories of resilience and acclimation to these challenges associated with raising a child with DD. Thirteen mothers overtly discussed experiences of discrimination and marginalization. Some of these scenarios included being stared at or criticized in public, being excluded from social events, and facing discrimination within school settings. Select participants from marginalized backgrounds (being as a young parent, or as Black, single, lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgender) provided insight into how layers of marginalization negatively impacted their parental experiences. These personal accounts provide additional evidence that mothers of children with DD experience courtesy stigma. In addition, they provide a holistic illustration of motherhood experiences that does not center on only negative or positive aspects. Finally, the reports of mothers who identified with multiple marginalized identities strengthen the call for additional empirical focus on intersectionality as it concerns mothers of children with DD.

In this chapter, we use feminist and intersectional frameworks to explore how marginalized mothers discuss maternal support. In-depth interviews with an economically diverse group of 21 mothers of color suggest that most affluent, married Black mothers framed support as child-centric and engaged in concerted cultivation (Lareau, 2011) practices. Lower income, single Black mothers engaged in a strategy we call “nurtured growth” – they used low-cost school, church, and community-based resources to promote their children’s development. In contrast to these child-centric strategies of support, three mothers used mother-centric supports and practiced self-care. The families of these three mothers, however, often criticized their parenting efforts as “parenting like a White person.” The authors conclude by exploring the implications of our study for feminist outreach efforts on behalf of marginalized mothers.

Activist mothering by marginalized women is well specified, but the paths by which women seize agency to move from the margins of motherhood to the center of social movements have been under-theorized. This chapter advances the literature by examining how a Texas-based organization, Mothers Against Police Brutality (MAPB), frames that shift. MAPB was founded by Collette Flanagan, a Black woman, after the police shot and killed her son. The MAPB website data indicate that the organization draws on activist mothering to explain the devaluation of Black and brown children and their mothers via racialized state violence, to frame MAPB as lifting up the value of those children and their mothers, and to present MAPB as striving to ameliorate the effects of race and gender inequalities on family and community life. As illustrated here, following a child’s death in police violence, women are mothering from the margins in a new way. In that context, a mother’s shift from those margins to a central role in an activist movement is a powerful transition toward a redefined self. The process neither erases the loss of a child nor elides grappling directly with their death; rather, it redefines the mother’s engagement with mothering once the traditional referent for that identity and practice, her child, is no longer living. In this way, a unique path by which marginalized mothers “summon the courage” to enter activist mothering is elaborated.

Student mothers on welfare balance three primary “identities” or “responsibilities”: mothering, being a student, and being a welfare participant. Each role or identity is expected to be an individual’s top priority; however, mothers who participated in my research discuss how some days kids must come first, or their schoolwork needed their primary attention, or welfare requirements demanded it. The women in my research examined their stress and the strain of navigating these various “primary” roles and identities. In this chapter, the author explore how mothers who were marginalized by being poor, being student parents in college, and being on welfare managed this struggle. With so few resources – especially so little time or money – participants discussed the juggling act and identity negotiation that they managed on a near daily basis. Mothers explored how this delicate balancing act sometimes fell apart and resulted in burnout, welfare sanctions, failing or dropping classes, or fights with their kids. How is their mothering affected by this balancing act? This chapter explores the women’s experiences from an intersectional lens, and also from a theoretical frame of how women’s human, social, and cultural capital played a role. The women who were active with the grassroots activism were more clear about their role negotiations, how to balance it, and also felt less alone in their struggle. Finally, the implications of this research for social policies are addressed in the conclusion.

Previous accounts of exclusion, primarily those proposed in the context of access to welfare, marginalize the role of negotiation and its potential for highlighting distinct barriers and possibilities within specific institutional configurations. Furthermore, when negotiation is examined in the context of access to social services, it is rarely considered as reflecting changes in exclusion or the need to distinguish among exclusionary outcomes in mothers' lives. The author proposes a conceptualization of the distinction between civic exclusion and isolated exclusion, introducing the latter as a specific condition in which mothers are forced to respond to their children's needs by resorting to privatized entitlement.

Structured interviews were conducted between 2016 and 2017 with 90 mothers “providing in poverty” from seven marginalized categories in Israel. The interviews were analyzed using a grounded theory perspective.

Three negotiation positions are revealed: positive citizenship, privatized entitlement and inconsistent gains. These positions reflect specific conditions of civic exclusion, which manifests in the form of multiple disadvantage in the lives of mothers, regardless of available forms of welfare support; and isolated exclusion, which manifests as the inability to protect one's children from harsh material scarcity, regardless of attempts to establish eligibility.

Longitudinal data could better reflect the ramifications of isolated exclusion, particularly when translated into privatized entitlement.

The consequences of isolated exclusion should be studied, in order to prevent negotiation failure leading to this phenomenon.

Up until recently, the notion of exclusion was used without relevant distinctions obscuring the meaning of failing to negotiate access to welfare, in mothers' lives. Conceptualizing negative outcomes of negotiation as leading to isolated exclusion and privatized entitlement clarifies the meaning of poverty as dependency. Further, without relevant distinctions, scholars' and activists' effort to introduce higher commitment to mothers' negotiation among street-level bureaucrats cannot be accounted for.

The “moral panic” generated by public response to teenage mothering marginalizes the experiences of young women as mothers, with adolescent pregnancy viewed as catastrophic for young women, their families, and society. In this analysis, focused on the experience of a group of teen women from the city of São Paulo, Brazil, the author explores how the integration of a maternal identity, shaped by Brazilian norms of “good motherhood,” with previously existing identities might lead to new aspirations and ambitions for the future or to hopelessness and despair.

Visions of the future were shaped by individual women’s structural circumstances and fell into four rough groups. Well-established adult women expressed their maternal identity through personal ambition, revealing confidence in their ability to provide “the best” for their children. Some adolescent mothers were fortunate enough to be buffered by family resources so that optimistic objectives for the future that pre-dated the pregnancy remained fairly attainable and were compatible with a “good mother” identity. For teens from less well-off families, motherhood resulted in a new-found determination to succeed in school and work, in line with ideals of Brazilian “good mothering” that focus on working hard to benefit one’s children. Women from the poorest households could or would not conjure a vision of the future, faced with the overwhelming challenges of their circumstances. The detailed, longitudinal qualitative data analyzed here reveal how the construction of maternal identity and visions of the future among adolescent mothers are shaped by the embodied experience of motherhood and pre-existing structural forces.