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Nannies occupy a rather problematic position in childcare. Their presence facilitates intensive mothering for their employers’ children, while their absence from their own children facilitates distance parenting. By moving away from home and working as nannies, they enable ideal mothering for their often White, middle-class employers, seemingly at the expense of their own children. Unspoken feeling rules further complicate their provision of emotional labor in childcare, while continuous efforts to avoid strong attachment with the children under their care become a source of struggle. Employers need them as invisible extensions of themselves with limited parental authority. In order to provide for their families, nannies, who are often Black working-class single women, also make parallel childcare arrangements. These arrangements differ, as community othermothers enjoy the respect and authority that nannies do not. The continuation of their caregiver role from a distance requires active nurturing of emotional bonds despite spatial separation using a variety of means. Gift-giving also features strongly as a means to bridge physical gap between nannies and their children. As Black mothers from communities which emphasize communal childcare, their support networks are well placed to care for their children and concurrently reinforce their position as mothers – a position they do not enjoy in paid employment.

Since the 1990s, public health agencies as well as nutrition and child health experts have recognized breastfeeding as the most appropriate infant-feeding mode for optimal health and psycho-emotional development. Consequently, breastfeeding has become a standard of good mothering, internalized by mothers, who implement a demanding self-discipline to perform breastfeeding. This dedication reflects the delegation of biopolitics to individuals in modern neoliberal societies: authoritative experts inform new parents, who then bear the responsibility of their children's health risk management. They are expected to choose appropriate practices as part of a collective strategy of risk management and anticipation of the future by changing current behaviours, aiming at the emergence of a ‘healthy body and mind’ society. Among these practices, breastfeeding holds a central place due to medical consensus about its benefits. In my ethnography of postpartum consultations by independent midwives in Switzerland, I studied the breastfeeding practices and experiences of home birth parents as part of the ‘holistic care’ provided by these midwives. Shadowing midwives during their postpartum visits between 2014 and 2017, I witnessed parents committing to the body and emotional work required to carry out their ‘breastfeeding project’, designed in continuity with their out-of-hospital birth choice. During their follow-ups, midwives engage with parents in a shared construction of meanings around breastfeeding, anchoring parenting identities in the body. I explore in this chapter the issues raised by the production of lactating maternal bodies and how women engage in body and emotional work to achieve it.

In face of global deinstitutionalization policy, some aging parents find themselves confronting violence and crime in the family due to abusive behavior from their adult child with mental disorder. The aim of this paper is to explore and understand the meaning given by aging parents to this deviant behavior and the different ways in which they cope with a lifetime in the shadow of violence.

Data collection was performed through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 16 parents, followed by content analysis.

Three themes that expressed the meaning attributed to life with ACMD in the shadow of violence: (1) constructing parental identity in a shared reality of violence, (2) social and family networks as a resource in coping with ACMD, and (3) keeping a daily life routine as an anchor in a vulnerable, abusive relationship

Intervention with such families should focus on the life review process as a therapeutic tool. Interventions should also provide a “safety belt,” including health services, public social networks, and knowledge regarding their right for self-protection.

Old age becomes an arena for redefined relationships combining increased vulnerability, needs of both sides, and its impact on the well-being of the ageing parents. This calls for better insights and deeper understanding in regard to intervention with such families.

In recent years, academics, policymakers and activists in a number of countries have become increasingly concerned with the needs and experiences of imprisoned mothers and their children. With a few exceptions, this research has tended to focus on single jurisdictions or on limited jurisdictional comparisons. Several common themes emerge when considering international perspectives on mothering and imprisonment, but political, social, cultural, economic and penological factors mean that these issues can play out differently in different settings. Thus, in the United Kingdom and the United States, much of the debate is around keeping mothers and babies together, whereas in many other countries the focus is on the desirability of developing realistic and practical alternatives to children growing up in the prison with their mother. International organisations such as the UNCRC have considered the particular needs of children imprisoned with their mothers and also the challenges of ‘mothering from the inside’. That said, this research has tended to focus on narrow biological and gestational definitions of motherhood which may not reflect contemporary realities. With this in mind, this chapter will outline and explore international perspectives on mothering and imprisonment, identifying key issues of commonality and difference and situating these perspectives within emerging research on imprisonment, diversity and mothering.

The definition of the term “family” around the Western world is more heterogeneous than ever before and so are its roles and the social expectations of it. However, prisoners’ families (specifically parents and siblings) are expected to support their incarcerated son/brother as they are perceived responsible for his choices and as having the closest relationship with him. Based on a study of parents and siblings of incarcerated men in Israel, this chapter’s goal is to shed light on families’ choice to support their incarcerated son or brother and the struggles this choice entails. A thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 17 parents and 10 siblings of incarcerated men in Israel showed that nuclear family members may experience various struggles throughout the legal proceedings, including family hardships, negative social experiences, and negative experiences with formal institutions – all leading to social self-exclusion. Looking through the intersectionality lens, the findings show that when accumulating hardships that prisoners’ families experience encounter perceived harsh institutional systems of oppression, preordained marginalization can be deepened as families operate in opposition.

We descriptively examined measures of family structure, socioeconomic disadvantage, and exposure to crime, violence, and substance use in young adulthood and childhood for those who experienced maternal incarceration as children.

We used data from waves I and IV of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. We compared these individuals to two groups: those who did not experience maternal incarceration and those who experienced paternal incarceration. We generated weighted means and conducted F-tests using bivariate regressions to determine where these groups significantly differed.

We found that individuals whose mothers were incarcerated during their childhoods experienced greater hardships in both childhood and young adulthood than those whose mothers were not incarcerated. Individuals who experienced maternal incarceration reported similar levels of socioeconomic disadvantage and exposure to crime and violence as those who experienced paternal incarceration. One notable exception was family structure, where maternal incarceration was associated with significantly fewer respondents reporting living with their mother or either biological parent.

With the exception of family structure, the childhood and transition to adulthood were comparable for individuals experiencing any form of parental incarceration. These children were significantly more disadvantaged and exposed to more risk factors than those whose parents were never incarcerated. Additional support and resources are necessary for families who have incarcerated parents, with special outreach made to families without a biological mother in the household.

There has been no overarching, descriptive study comparing child and young adult outcomes of those with an incarcerated mother using a nationally representative, longitudinal dataset in the United States.