Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood: Gender, Intimacy and Equality 3030774023, 9783030774028

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Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood Gender, Intimacy and Equality Charlotte Faircloth

Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood

Charlotte Faircloth

Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood Gender, Intimacy and Equality

Charlotte Faircloth University College London London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-77402-8    ISBN 978-3-030-77403-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77403-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Amol (with love, and remarkably little fury)

Preface

This book presents findings from a research project with couples (in London, UK) as they become parents. The argument is that new parents are caught in an uncomfortable crossfire between two competing discourses: those around ideal relationships and those around ideal parenting. On the one hand, they should be committed to being ‘equal partners’. On the other, they should be parenting their children ‘intensively’, in ways which are markedly more demanding for mothers. Reconciling these ideals can be difficult, and, as the book explores, has the potential to create resentment and disappointment. Drawing largely on the narratives of couples who have faced relationship difficulties, the book points to the social pressures at play in raising the next generation at material, physiological and cultural levels. These are explored through concrete practices, linked to physiology by varying degrees: birth, feeding and sleeping, three of the most highly moralised areas of contemporary parenting culture. London, UK

Charlotte Faircloth

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Acknowledgements

First thanks, of course, to the couples who shared their accounts of becoming parents with me. This project really would be nothing without them. It would also have been nothing without the Leverhulme Trust, which funded the research whilst I was an early career fellow at the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent. That project was under the mentorship of Ellie Lee, someone who has remained a constant source of support and guidance throughout my career. I’m particularly grateful to those colleagues I have been lucky enough to collaborate with in recent years, or who have been kind enough to give me feedback on drafts of this book—Jennie Bristow, Zeynep Gürtin, Rachel Rosen, Ann Oakley and especially Katherine Twamley. At Palgrave, thank you to Amelia Derkatsch for prompting me to submit a proposal, to Linda Braus for seeing it through to production and to the anonymous reviewers for their feedback. A final thanks to Eliana Johnson-Leighton, who worked with me as a student research volunteer during a summer at UCL, providing much-needed support with the analysis of a rather copious number of narratives. To my children, this book would no doubt have been published much faster without your arrival, but thank you for putting some practice into the theory, confirming that no amount of research can really prepare anyone for parenthood. And, for confirming that no amount of work can get done without childcare (especially in 2020–1), a heartfelt thank you to Claire Carson.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Part I Context  19 2 Theoretical Context 21 3 Political and Methodological Context 51 Part II Practice  75 4 Birth 77 5 Feeding 91 6 Sleeping107 7 Conclusion135 Author Index153 Subject Index155 xi

About the Author

Charlotte Faircloth  is Associate Professor of Social Science in the Social Research Institute at University College London (UCL), UK. From sociological and anthropological perspectives, her work has focused on parenting, gender and reproduction using qualitative and cross-cultural methodologies. This research has explored infant feeding, couple relationships, intergenerational relations and, recently, the impact of coronavirus on family life. Her first monograph, Militant Lactivism? Attachment Parenting and Intensive Motherhood in the UK and France, was published in 2013. She also co-authored Parenting Culture Studies in 2014. She is co-editor of the volumes Parenting in Global Perspective: Negotiating Ideologies of Kinship, Self and Politics (2013), Feeding Children Inside and Outside the Home: Critical Perspectives (2018) and, most recently, Conceiving Contemporary Parenthood: Imagining, Achieving and Accounting for Parenthood in New Family Forms (2021).

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Study participants The mental load: A feminist comic

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Changes to what has been termed ‘Parenting Culture’ have now become a well-established field of social science scholarship (Faircloth, 2013; Hays, 1996; Hendrick, 2016; Lee et al., 2014; Nelson, 2010). This scholarship, largely based on research in Euro-American settings, has called attention to an ‘intensification’ of parenting in the last 40 years, suggesting that raising children has become, culturally at least, a more demanding and complex task. So far, the majority of research in this area has looked at the effect of these changes on individuals, and particularly on women. Mothers (more than fathers) are recognised as increasingly ‘torn’ by the competing expectations to parent intensively on the one hand, whilst participating in the labour market on the other (Hays, 1996; Miller, 2005). More recent work has documented the experiences of men grappling with shifting ideals of a more intensive ‘involved’ fatherhood (Dermott, 2008; Miller, 2011; Shirani et al., 2012). No research to date, however, has explicitly looked at the impact of these changes on couples. Focusing for the first time on couple relationships in the context of an intensified parenting culture, this book reports on a longitudinal study with 20 couples becoming parents (in London, UK) over a five-year period. This is a particularly interesting historical moment at which to observe couples’ experiences of the transition to parenthood as, at the policy level, there has been a growing commitment to gender equality, especially insofar as childcare responsibilities relate to men and women’s © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Faircloth, Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77403-5_1

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career prospects and ‘work-life-balance’ (see Miller, 2017). Parental leave and ‘flexible working’ are two of the key policy responses, under the auspices that sharing the responsibility for childcare traditionally assumed by women will reduce gender differentials in terms of career progression and pay (O’Brien & Wall, 2016). The couples were all professionally employed, and the vast majority were heterosexual first-time parents, one of whom were still at the stage of ‘trying’ for a baby. However, 5 of the 20 couples had a deliberately different profile: some were second-time parents, one couple had twins, another were in a co-parenting relationship as a gay couple with a ‘single’ mother and the last were a lesbian mother family (Fig. 3.1 in Chap. 3 explains this further). The research shows that new parents are caught in an uncomfortable confluence between two competing discourses: those around ideal relationships and those around ideal parenting. On the one hand, they must be committed to egalitarian ideals about being ‘equal partners’. On the other, they must be parenting ‘intensively’, in ways which are markedly more demanding for mothers, and which makes paternal involvement in particular more complicated.

Relationships End, But Children Are ‘Forever’ Drawing largely on the narratives of couples who have faced relationship difficulties, this book points to the social pressures at play in raising the next generation at material, physiological and cultural levels. As Collins has noted, there is a contradiction at the heart of many couple relationships, and therefore many contemporary families: a tension between the aspiration for self-realisation through individualism (the freedom to ‘be myself’) on the one hand and commitment through coupledom and parenthood (a desire to ‘make a life’ with someone) on the other (Collins, 2003). Before children, couples are arguably temporary; individuals are more important than relationships, which exist—in theory at least—only as long as they work (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). But children are ‘forever’. The extraordinary cognitive dissonance provoked by having a child, and the sense of being tied into something permanent, understandably takes some acclimatisation. Furthermore, as one mother in this study said, it was birth and early motherhood that made her ‘see’ her gender for the first time, in that her bodily difference to her husband suddenly seemed to ‘matter’ more than it had in the past. Indeed, whereas physiological

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difference or roles associated with specific genders might potentially be downplayed in the time before children arrive, during the perinatal period each parent is likely undergoing a deep (re-)gendering. All of these factors considered, it is not surprising that the transition to parenthood creates a complex of feelings on both sides, bound to cause at least some disruption. This is not a new subject for academic research. Indeed, the idea that parenthood disrupts marriage and is incompatible with romantic relationships goes back at least to LeMasters in 1957, and there was a large body of work on the transition to parenthood beginning at around that time, much in the US but also in the UK. Perhaps most famous in the UK was the work of Ann Oakley in the ‘Becoming a Mother’ study which commenced in 1974. The resultant books, From Here to Maternity, published in 1979, and Women Confined: Towards a Sociology of Childbirth (1980), highlighted the ‘shock’ of childbirth in forcing couples, especially women, to acknowledge the divergence between expectations and reality, and to realise that equality between men and women did not exist. Women Confined in particular examined the theme of shock and analysed it in relation to women and the diagnosis of postnatal depression, contextualising it thus: the crushing numbness that can follow a birth over which a mother feels she has little control; the cumulative insult of multiple, poorly explained technical procedures; the extraordinary (but yet ordinary) isolation and exhaustion of finding oneself suddenly in charge of another human life. (Oakley, 2018 [1979], p. vii)

This ‘extraordinary (but yet ordinary) isolation and exhaustion’ resonates with other work in the area since (see, for example, Asher, 2011; Maushart, 1999; Miller, 2007, 2017; and also Fox’s When Couples Become Parents: The Creation of Gender in the Transition to Parenthood (Fox, 2009) to which this book pays homage by echoing the title). The original ‘Becoming a Mother’ study was repeated 37 years later with many of the same women, which prompted similar interesting temporal comparisons about changes in the management of childbirth as women reflected on how different things were (or are) for their own daughters, as well as around the sociology of memory (Oakley, 2016). Whilst much had changed about motherhood (mothers in general being older, a higher proportion of same-sex couples and a more routine use of technologies such as ultrasound and caesarean section), it was notable how much had

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stayed the same. Feelings of alienation due to the medicalisation of childbirth and the ‘shock’ many women experienced seemed uncannily similar, a feature that was ‘just as prominent in the second study as in the first’ (2018 [1979], p. ix). Another important theme to emerge from these later studies was around the shifting role of the partner. Whilst there was a great degree of continuity in the views expressed about partner relationships in the studies, there was greater surprise in the later ones at how the addition of a baby changed many partner relationships towards more traditional gender roles (around the division of labour, paid employment, personal interests and so on), something that was not always anticipated or welcomed by the women in an era of supposed ‘gender equality’ (see also Miller, 2017). In line with this, there was an increased emphasis on the lack of independence, which many women described as frustrating (Brunton et al., 2011, p. 24). As such, this study recognises these historical continuities around the transition to parenthood, at the same time as calling attention to changes in the conception of both parenting and personhood which might make this shift more acute today. Tensions around lack of independence might be said to be a reflection of shifting conceptions and expectations of personhood, or indeed womanhood itself. As numerous scholars have discussed, our biographies in recent years have increasingly become ‘choice biographies’, as part of an era in which an overarching discourse of individualism within wider society, where individuals are increasingly expected to ‘fulfil’ but also regulate themselves through carefully curated life trajectories, behaviours and choices (Butler, 2020; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Faircloth & Rosen, 2020). This can create discord when it comes to couple and family relationships, in that there can be difficulty in reconciling tensions between partnering and parenting which are based on investments and commitments beyond individual choice. That is, whilst becoming a parent can be read as an exercise in ‘self-expression’ (particularly in the current historical moment), it is also about a moral responsibility beyond the self (Ruddick, 1995; see also Doucet, 2015). To this end the book takes a relational perspective in understanding subjectivities within a family context, to try and take a holistic view of how, why, when and with what implications people within families make decisions that they do. Certainly, a tension between the desire to ‘be oneself’ and ‘make a life’ with someone is as difficult to resolve, if not more difficult, for contemporary ‘equal partners’, than ever. All of the couples I spoke with in the

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course of the research would describe themselves as committed to gender ‘equality’ (or rather, none would say that they were against it). But what was interesting was that, in spite of this, all of them were ‘gender traditional’ in that mothers tended to take longer periods of leave than fathers, and scale back working commitments further down the line—and this is in spite of the fact that the period in which these couples became parents for the first time was during the advent of first ‘Additional’ Paternity Leave and then ‘Shared’ Parental leave (see discussion in Chap. 2). Paying close attention to how they talked about and understood equality in their relationships, I outline a typology in development with Twamley (see Twamley, 2020; Faircloth, 2020) to suggest a loose grouping into those couples who talked about equality in terms of ‘fairness’ (a general principle as to how to treat a partner) and ‘balance’ (in an overall sense, including cases where each member of the couple ‘takes turns’ to take the lead on respective roles of working and caring). These are in contrast to those who talked about it as ‘breaking gendered roles’ (e.g., men doing care work) or ‘50/50’ (with each member of the couple doing the same tasks to the same degree.) Those in the latter group were most likely to talk overtly about their commitment to equality, and relatedly, about their desire to split their parental leave, for example, so that each member of the couple took some sole responsibility for childcare (even if this did not actually materialise in practice). One of the most illuminating aspects about the design of this study was being able to trace how expectations around parenthood and the division of care matched up with reality (or rather, did not). What emerged is that those couples who were most strongly committed to equality in general (and ‘50/50’ in particular) were also those who were most disappointed in terms of how things worked out in practice. Due to their resources—as households with comfortable incomes, professional, flexible jobs and with high levels of social capital—these are the couples who should be most able to balance these competing demands of discourses around ‘good parenting’ and ‘equal partnership’, and yet they, particularly the women, seemed to be the ones who are most exasperated by the situations they find themselves in. To put it another way, why was it that so many of the well-­ educated, professionally employed, middle-class mothers I spoke to in the course of this research were so frustrated? One idea explored in the book is that underlying ideas about equality (and particularly one concerned with ‘50/50’) is a highly individualised understanding of subjectivity, as opposed to a more ‘relational’ one. The

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suggestion is that this leads to a more ‘tit-for-tat’ rubric in relationships in terms of how fairness is understood, calibrated and processed. This is especially hard to reconcile in the period of early parenthood when gender difference is suddenly so ‘obvious’ and the edicts of a culture of intensive motherhood reign with such ferocity.

Overview Throughout the book, extended vignettes from three first-time, heterosexual couples illustrate the larger themes around gender, intimacy and equality which are explored in the research as a whole. The vignettes sit outside the usual chapter-based structure and can be read separately from the normal narrative flow. Including these extended narratives in an unbroken fashion is one of the huge privileges of publishing research findings in a monograph rather than in shorter articles, building over the course of the book as a whole to provide an in-depth, rich and detailed picture of the workings of couple relationships over a prolonged and critical period. The couples featured are those who struggled the most to reconcile the competing narratives around relationships and parenting, and who suffered the greatest relationship breakdown. They are not intended to be representative of the sample, nor, as a qualitative study, is the sample intended to be representative of the wider population. Indeed, the accounts in this book are those of a highly privileged, largely white, middle-to-upper-income group of participants, and the workings of intimacy and inequality in less privileged households cannot be extrapolated to here. However, given all of the resources at the disposal of the couples featured, these extended narratives arguably both magnify and clarify tensions faced by couples making the transition to parenthood today: the ‘ideal’ of the reflexive, pure relationship is revealed to be very hard work, particularly after the arrival of children, as it makes absorbing the practical difficulties—and joys—of life extremely difficult. By way of background, the first chapter reviews the literature on current parenting culture and relationships, pointing to some of the contradictions between them. The second chapter gives an overview of the political context into which new babies are born in the UK, including the kind of parental leave or childcare their parents can expect (if any). This chapter also provides a discussion of the methodological design of the study, following 20 sets of parents intensively during pregnancy and the first year of their child’s life, and then intermittently for the next five years.

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The three central substantive chapters—which draw on the accounts by all couples in the sample—take as a starting point the practices (and the issues which flow from them) of birth, feeding and sleep, three heated topics in contemporary parenting culture. These are ‘practices’ of parenting which to varying degrees are unavoidable, and on a sliding scale of physiology. Birth might be said to be nearly 100% physiological (particularly as all mothers in this sample were birth mothers, and no babies were adopted or conceived via surrogacy, for example). By contrast, feeding is only potentially constrained by physiology, if women are breastfeeding or expressing milk, or if doing either of these in combination with the use of formula milk. Sleeping practices, by contrast, are not necessarily tied to physiology at all—although often seem to be. As such, these three practices provide an interesting spectrum which are highly physiologically constrained at one end, and more socially constrained at the other (although of course these overlap, as will become evident). Secondly, these are topics that are discussed at length by professionals and experts, and which are central to contemporary social policy, connecting to debates around gender, workload distribution and intimacy. Finally, birth, feeding and sleep can also be seen as the first major parenting issues, again which are dealt with as varying matters of urgency. They are practices which help establish a pattern of behaviour between parents—namely who, how, when and why one or other parent will respond. As work on the ‘structuring principle’ suggests, it is also the case that these early patterns can be extremely difficult to break (Searing et al., 1973). By way of conclusion, the book returns to ideas about equality, subjectivity and relationality, pointing to some of the problems that arise when people (individuals, couples or parents) have to live and create meaning in their lives when normative assumptions are contradictory.

Vignette 1: Anthony and Claudia I first met Anthony and Claudia at their house in South London, when Claudia was eight months pregnant with their first child. At that time, she worked as an academic at a central London university, whilst Anthony worked in the city as an IT manager. They were a high-earning and well-­ educated couple (Anthony earned more than Claudia, but their household income was around £150,000), who were highly reflexive. In our meetings (four in-person, joint interviews over the course of the next 12 months, followed up by email exchanges two-and-a-half, and five years

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later) they demonstrated time and again how central the issues of this study—gender, intimacy and equality—were to their everyday negotiations and conversations. Anthony and Claudia met at university, and were together for a long time before getting married and deciding to have children; they felt that they had to ‘get over themselves’ as 30-somethings before they felt ‘able to accommodate somebody else in the relationship’. From the outset, it was clear that independence was something that they valued—they socialised separately a lot and as Claudia explained at our first meeting, the ideal of independence (which she held dear) was something that troubled her with regards to their imminent arrival: I’m part of this generation…I suppose, who hate the idea of children. It’s sort of a disgusting thing that they’ll come and, you know, infringe on your life…me and my friends are all very sort of independent, and independence has been so valued through our childhoods…and so, and it’s seen as a really, really bad thing to have anybody who’s dependent on you. So, in relationships…and all my girlfriends and I would always establish this thing, ‘you must never have someone who’s dependent on you’, that’s the sort of the revolting thing to happen and you should get rid of them immediately. And as an extension of that it feels like you’re not really allowed to have children either because they’re also dependent on you and that’s like…not a very nice thing to happen.

This concern about maintaining independence segues into Claudia’s views on gender equality in the context of their relationship, which she saw as under threat from the heavier physical burden carried by mothers in terms of gestating, birthing and caring for children—albeit one which was ‘socially shaped’ in terms of the role expectations that came with it: I mean we’ve definitely had a lot of discussions about how it works gender equality-wise and what gender equality actually means, because I’m carrying the baby and I’m allowed time off…And so, right from the start, you’ve got this gender imbalance which I really struggled with. You know…Anthony’s sort of point here [is] ‘well, of course you’re not equal because you are biologically different’. So then, what is equality in this instance? I’m still not convinced about how much of that is socially shaped, and how much of that is absolutely has to be that way biologically…at the beginning I was saying, well, ‘if we bottle feed the baby there isn’t any reason that he should be more dependent on me than on you because we’re both feeding him and

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what’s the difference?’, you know, we could say there is absolutely no difference, we could do exactly 50/50, or you could do more than me [to Anthony].

This concern with equality was baked into their plans to become parents—Claudia agreed to try to conceive a child if her husband signed up to the idea of ‘splitting things 50/50’ once she had returned to work after a six-month maternity leave, with each of them working a four-day week and providing childcare on the fifth day. (Whilst this couple did know about the possibility of splitting parental leave, at this point it would have meant Anthony only being eligible for three months of statutory pay, with no top-up from his employer, and this was deemed unaffordable). Although Anthony was hesitant about the chances of his boss agreeing to him moving his role from five to four days a week, Claudia said that this arrangement was important, not only for equality reasons but also because: I’m a kind of controlling person so I could end up just saying, ‘that’s not how you do it’, if I’m there all the time, and I could end up like in that situation where I’m resenting Anthony and so on…I am one of those high achieving people who probably would get…I have the potential to get very like ‘into’ it. So I have to—we have to—put in place things that will stop me from doing that and that will allow Anthony to have direct control over this situation as well.

During that first interview, just before the birth of their first child, this was a couple that was highly committed to ideals of equality, with the intention that care for the baby, including feeding, be split ‘as evenly as possible’, particularly after the initial period of maternity leave. In fact, even during this period, although Claudia thought there was too much ‘propaganda’ about breastfeeding, she intended to express breastmilk in parallel with breastfeeding, so that her husband could ‘do his share’. Once they were both back at work, they would split everything at night (unless the other person is having a day ‘off’ with the baby the next day in which case that person would take the lead). As such this maps onto the ‘50/50’ iteration of equality mentioned in the introduction. At the same time, Claudia also expressed an affiliation to the idea of ‘breaking gendered roles’ as a marker of equality—although interestingly, this was something which was more obviously a point of contention between them. Anthony said, for example:

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And we were talking about things like, what colour would you paint the room? What would you dress them in? And, you know, you [Claudia] said, ‘I don’t, if we have a girl I don’t want everything to be pink and ponies and stuff, it has to be, you know, allow them, not, give…and then I said ‘I want them to have enough structure so they have something to work with. So, dress the boy in trousers, give him a train set but don’t suppose that he’s automatically going to want to play with a train set, he may want to play with an action man, or some sort of doll or, you know, be a, provide a kind of an expected structure but not necessarily hold him to it.

Asked about plans for her maternity leave, Claudia said: ‘I guess we’re just going to see…But [at least after these conversations] I think that I’m now in the position where I do genuinely believe that he really does want to be involved, because before I really was…I was like, yes, maybe you’re just saying it and really you just want to recreate the scenario of your own childhood where your mum did everything.’ They were hoping for a waterbirth in their local hospital, and to avoid ‘too many interventions’, particularly an epidural. So what happened? I went back to the house when their son—James—was 12 weeks old exactly. It was around 7 pm at night, and Claudia held the baby throughout the interview, moving him to a sling at one point to help him sleep; his jabs that day had apparently made him a bit more cranky than usual. We started with the birth, which did not go as anticipated—but was in fact the only one in Claudia’s NCT (National Childbirth Trust antenatal childbirth education) group of six mothers that did not end in Caesarean section or forceps delivery. Claudia had a long labour, over 53 hours, which included an induction with pessaries and then a drip, an episiotomy and an epidural (something she felt ‘guilty’ about and which had added complications due to spinal fluid leaking so badly she had to stay prone for four hours). Shortly after the birth, she haemorrhaged so badly that she was rushed into emergency theatre—it turned out that some of the placenta was still inside her uterus. A few weeks later, she developed an infection of the uterus in addition to a Strep B infection. She described these early days as a ‘continuous physical onslaught’. In the midst of the ‘onslaught’, feeding the baby was far from simple. She tried breastfeeding after birth, but her nipples bled so badly she had to express milk using the hospital pumps—her milk came in early (on day

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two) but pumps were in short supply, her breasts became engorged, and she was sent home, with a view to being able to express better there (albeit with a question mark over her own need for a blood transfusion at this point). Her husband was very active in helping getting the baby latched on to feed in the early days, especially as Claudia was too weak to even sit up for long periods. However, she ‘persevered’ with breastfeeding through ‘tremendous pain’ (‘my whole body would…I screamed. Sometimes I couldn’t hold the head’), often expressing and bottle-feeding which was marginally less painful. Even once breastfeeding was established, the baby was regularly distressed when feeding. On seeking support for these issues, the couple received a huge amount of conflicting advice as to the cause: Thrush and lip tie were diagnosed and treated to little effect; Claudia restricted her diet to control for intolerances such as dairy; Reynard’s disease was suggested, in conjunction with vasospasm, but the anti-hypertensive she was prescribed resulted in horrendous headaches. At nearly nine weeks in, she said it felt like things were ‘getting so extreme’ that they decided to give the baby some formula. However, being advised to try and wean their son off the bottles of expressed milk so that he more readily took the breast, at this point, the baby refused to take a bottle (of formula or expressed milk). His weight started to plateau. In conjunction with a GP (‘the only person, really, who’s given any support to me, as an individual, not as a breastfeeding mother’) who told Claudia to try different types of bottle and different varieties of formula, they eventually managed to find some sort of compromise, and it turned out that the baby had a cow’s milk allergy coupled with possible reflux. At our 12-week interview, feeding continued to be a trial, with the baby fussing, back-arching and regularly upset. At this point, he fed at least eight times in 24 hours (every feed was logged in a spread sheet), though Claudia worried that she had created a ‘horrible environment’ for him, and ‘guilty’ about making this ‘awful awful decision’ to use formula. She was cross that this was something she was confronted with every time she looked at a packet of baby milk, where the law required a public health message about the benefits of breastfeeding be listed. She was also angered by well-meaning friends who asked if she had ‘tried a local breastfeeding café?’ or any implication that she had been ‘a wuss’ for ‘giving up’. As planned, Anthony continued to go to the office at similar hours to before, with Fridays at home where possible to ‘help’, but Claudia’s days had ‘no routine’ at all. She read numerous books and realised that the

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baby ‘should be sleeping in his cot’ for naps, but so far was only able to sleep in the sling that she wore, which felt like ‘a cheat’. Nights were very broken, and being so tired, she felt ‘no capacity to make any decisions at all’. She hated not being able to follow up with work requests about some of her publications more efficiently, and had several people waiting on her emails. Claudia’s mother was able to come to London one day a week to help, but she felt she needed ‘way more help than she realised’. Her in-­ laws offered, but this was not deemed a viable option. One Friday when Anthony was at home, Claudia went to get her hair cut, only to receive a phone call from Anthony shortly into the appointment, saying that the baby would not take a bottle, and ending with Anthony driving down to the hairdresser so that she could (breast)feed. This left her feeling ‘very much the key player’ in spite of their intentions to be ‘equal partners’, saying to her husband: ‘if you can’t look after him, you will bring him to me…I am in charge’. She commented (again, it is worth reiterating that this was an in-person, joint interview): it does feel so unfair that I’m at home and Anthony’s not, particularly now when there’s no reason that it could be either of us who’s at home [now that the baby is on formula milk]. And I know that’s a really horrible thing to say ’cause it makes it sound like I don’t like being with James. But it’s a really…it’s really intense. It’s really, really hard work. But it’s really, really mundane and boring. It’s really hard because it’s unrelenting and you are completely out of control of it, which doesn’t suit me.

Although the baby went on to sleep in a separate room (with a monitor on, always by Claudia’s side of the bed), there was little time for intimacy; Claudia remained ‘obsessed’ by making sure the baby was asleep and ‘obsessed’ by ‘how many mills [millilitres] of food’ he had. ‘Any intimate time…[would] distract me from my task at hand’, she said. Anthony felt grateful for the ‘redundant intimacy’ that comes in long-term relationships: ‘You know it’s there but…you don’t really have to work to maintain it’ (to which Claudia replied, ‘We’re taking it for granted’). When I next saw this couple, James was six and-a-half months old. Claudia had returned to work, and the couple employed a nanny three days a week (rather than use a nursery as anticipated)—Claudia was using Annual Leave to look after the baby on Fridays, whilst her mother looked after him on Mondays. Anthony, however, was at home full time, having been made redundant shortly before Claudia went back to work. After requesting to move to a four-day week, his boss felt that he ‘didn’t have

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the commitment he wanted from me’, and he was told his position was impossible to accommodate in shorter hours. He received a generous financial package, and was taking some time off over the Christmas break before looking for a new job in earnest in the New Year. As Claudia said, they decided that they had to keep the nanny, who had just started before this news, because Anthony needed the time to apply for new roles, and in case he was offered something starting immediately. However, she had been ‘feeling very jealous of this scenario because I didn’t get to do any of this stuff [like play tennis, as Anthony now does regularly]’. With her return to work on the horizon, and their nanny wanting to know what sort of routine James was on, the couple had decided that the ‘sleep situation’ was something they needed to tackle. James at this point was having four naps a day, for which he would need to be rocked to sleep, often for up to 30 minutes at a time, and often waking as soon as he was put down. During the night at around five months old, he would wake up numerous times, and ‘we would spend an hour, sometimes two hours, each time he woke up in the night, holding him until he went to sleep. Put him down, he’d wake up, hold him again. Put him down. He’d wake up. Hold him again’. They undertook some ‘sleep training’—a regimen with a basic rule that the baby needed to be able to settle himself to sleep from being awake. They read several books before finding an approach which suited them, and although it was ‘awful’, because the baby cried to begin with, this resulted in much better sleep all round. Coupled with this, James had recently been weaned onto solids and seemed more settled digestively, although he still vomited regularly. At our final formal interview, when James was just over a year old, things had changed again. Anthony had had six months out of paid work, seven including parental leave. He had a new job, for five days a week, whilst Claudia normally worked a four-day week as originally planned, with a grandmother taking care of James on a Monday, and a nanny share for the three remaining days. She said: [It’s] just an unrealistic hope that Anthony could find a job that was going to fulfil him, which is still really important, and enable him to be able to do a four day week. It was a nice idea. I felt let down by it because I wanted Anthony to stick to it because that was our pact before we had a baby, that we’d do that, and I felt like he was letting me down but having now seen how difficult the job market has been, how difficult it is to get any job, the fact that Anthony’s got a job which is really good for him and is the ideal job, then it doesn’t matter.

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James was sleeping better than he did before, and his problems with feeding had continued to settle. Claudia tended to attend to him in the night as she was ‘better’ at soothing James than Anthony, and because she had been at work, she felt ‘happier’ to do it because she missed him. Claudia felt happy that Anthony has at least had some days (before starting his new job) where he had been in sole charge of the baby. This, however, was something Anthony struggled with, for fear that people would look at him and think, as he put it, ‘why is that man pushing that pram and why the hell isn’t he at work?’ Whilst they felt that time for ‘intimacy’ was lacking, with Claudia feeling ‘alienated’ from her body, the couple continued to be very communicative and reflexive about their relationship, especially around the question of equality. Claudia clearly had to do some cognitive work to reconcile her ideals around equality with the way things had worked out. Here, we see her shift her ideals around equality from ‘50/50’ to one more aligned with ‘balance’, thereby maintaining the idea that this is an ‘equal’ partnership: Anthony was saying isn’t it really important that I’m bringing money into the house and I was like, ‘No, that’s not what matters to me’…That’s not what makes you an active participant in terms of equality. What I had been saying before is equality is if you also feed James and do all of these things and then you know what it’s like, then you can do the same thing…[now, I’m saying] what Anthony brings is a very different thing but it’s still equally important.

I received no response from this couple when I checked in when James reached the age of two-and-a-half years; in time it emerged that they had a second son at around this time. At the five-year check-in, however, Claudia responded by email and told me that the couple had separated several times. She linked this to some of the feeding practices they followed with their second son: I breastfed Alex [their second son] until he was 18 months old and this was blamed by everyone for why he didn’t sleep so well (he continued to not sleep well when I stopped, though), and I was told I had ‘made my bed’ so I deserved to be woken continuously by him and deserved to have to not only feed him but settle him, which would take 1–3 hours each time, after which he would only sleep for 1–2 hours. It was utterly exhausting and took everything out of me, and yet I was expected to be performing motherly

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duties to my other child, and on top wifely duties to my husband who complained of the lack of intimacy and I think justified him deciding to switch off entirely from our relationship and fantasise about being out of it and with other people. The whole thing has been utterly heart breaking and devastating.

She also reflected on how much she ‘gave’ to the baby during this period, saying that she wished she had been a bit more laissez-faire with her approach to parenting: that’s one of my regrets, when [my first son] was small, he could’ve sat in his bouncy chair and I could’ve done my hair but I didn’t want to split my attention from him because I thought that would damage him for life. So it’s just mental and you completely neglect yourself…[and] then you just judge everybody else because they’ve managed to put some makeup on!

Claudia linked some of their discord to the fact that, by this point, she was earning more than her husband: intimacy is now a luxury, equality is far more acutely negotiated, and gender has become much more obvious in terms of expectations…Anthony became very distressed because of my attention going to the children, and became resentful of me which created a very difficult atmosphere which affected not only our relationship but our family unit. Unwittingly, I think the children became competition for my attention in our relationship. It remains unclear how women can live up to all the expectations, not just with work, but with partners who also need their support e.g. in periods of unemployment. I do feel this fell a lot on my plate as a woman—and was expected not only in our nuclear family but also by our own families, who continued to promote the idea that any father doing more than they did in the 80s was a bonus. Not starting from equality but from stark inequality. Like, ‘women working is a luxury and even a cause of the problem, being selfish’. While of course this was necessary financially but this somehow is hidden and unspoken because it is uncomfortable to talk about a woman being the breadwinner, even between us in our house. There was a lot of dancing around issues and treading on eggshells with each of these issues you list: gender, intimacy and equality. I think you anticipated exactly the key issues that can be faced, which are made very acutely problematic when we are in the employment situations of this time.

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At a more recent check-in, while writing this book, I found that the couple were living separately, with Claudia looking after the children for a majority of the time. Re-reading our interviews, it is striking how dominant Claudia’s voice is in the accounts—it is rare that her husband proffers an opinion on anything without taking the lead from his wife, or being contradicted by her when he does. Indeed, in the quotes, only a small number come directly from Anthony, and even then they are usually follow-ups to something Claudia has said. (As I explore further in the section on methodology, this may of course say something about the research environment and the gender of the researcher as much as the couple themselves.) It is also noticeable here that the spoken commitment to ‘equality’ is not reflected by the contribution of both partners to their accounts of parenting. What this book tries to do is explore how ‘ideals’ of equality mesh with contemporary couples’ experience of becoming parents for the first time; how they weather the conflicts between ‘independence’ and ‘nurturing’ (as Claudia puts it), by looking closely at issues around birth, feeding and sleep; and how, therefore, the issues of gender, intimacy and equality play out in the lives of new parents.

References Asher, R. (2011). Shattered: Modern motherhood and the illusion of equality. Harvill Secker. Beck, U., & Beck-Gernsheim, E. (1995). The normal chaos of love. Polity. Brunton, G., Wiggins, M., & Oakley, A. (2011). Becoming a mother: A research synthesis of women’s views on the experience of first-time motherhood. EPPI-Centre. Butler, J. (2020). The force of non-violence: An ethico-political bind. Verso Books. Collins, M. (2003). Modern love: An intimate history of men and women in twentieth- century Britain. Atlantic Books. Dermott, E. (2008). Intimate fatherhood: A sociological analysis. Routledge. Doucet, A. (2015, February). Parental responsibilities: Dilemmas of measurement and gender equality. Journal of Marriage and Family, 77, 224–242. Faircloth, C. (2013). Militant lactivism? Infant feeding and maternal accountability in the UK and France. Berghahn Books. Faircloth, C. (2020). When equal couples become unequal partners: Couple relationships and intensive parenting culture. Families, relationships and societies, Online First. Faircloth, C., & Rosen, R. (Eds.). (2020). Childhood, parenting culture, and adult child relations in transnational perspectives. In Families, relationships and societies (Volume 9, Issue 1).

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Fox, B. (2009). When couples become parents: The creation of gender in the transition to parenthood. University of Toronto Press. Hays, S. (1996). The cultural contradictions of motherhood. Yale University Press. Hendrick, H. (2016). Narcissistic parenting in an insecure world. A history of parenting culture 1920 to present. Policy Press. Lee, E., Bristow, J., Faircloth, C., & Macvarish, J. (2014). Parenting culture studies. Palgrave Macmillan. LeMasters, E. (1957, November). Parenthood as crisis. Marriage and Family Living, 19(4), 352–355. Maushart, S. (1999). The mask of motherhood. The New Press. Miller, T. (2005). Making sense of motherhood: A narrative approach. Cambridge University Press. Miller, T. (2007). ‘Is this what motherhood is all about?’: Weaving experiences and discourse through transition to first-time motherhood. Gender & Society, 21(3), 337–358. Miller, T. (2011). Making sense of fatherhood. Cambridge University Press. Miller, T. (2017). Making sense of parenthood: Caring, gender and family lives. Cambridge University Press. Nelson, M. (2010). Parenting out of control: Anxious parents in uncertain times. New York University Press. O’Brien, M., & Wall, K. (2016). Fathers on leave alone: Setting the scene. In M. O’Brien & K. Wall (Eds.), Fathers on leave home alone: Work-life balance and gender equality in comparative perspective. Springer. Oakley, A. (1979). Becoming a mother (later republished as From Here to Maternity). Martin Robertson. Oakley, A. (1980). Women confined: Towards a sociology of childbirth. Martin Robertson. Oakley, A. (2016). A small sociology of maternal memory. The Sociological Review, 64, 533–549. Oakley, A. (2018). From here to maternity: Becoming a mother. Re-issue. Policy Press. Ruddick, S. (1995). Maternal thinking: Toward a politics of peace. Beacon Press. Searing, D., Schwartz, J., & Lind, A. (1973). The structuring principle: Political socialization and belief systems. The American Political Science Review, 67(2), 415–432. Shirani, F., Henwood, K., & Coltart, C. (2012). Meeting the challenges of intensive parenting culture: Gender, risk management and the moral parent. Sociology, 46(1), 25–40. Twamley, K. (2020). ‘She has mellowed me into the idea of SPL’: Unpacking relational resources in UK couples’ discussions of Shared Parental Leave uptake. Families relationships and societies, Online First.

PART I

Context

Introduction to Part I The following section outlines two fields of academic scholarship—intimate relationships and parenting—to make the argument that contemporary couples are caught in an uncomfortable confluence between competing narratives of family life. The field of Parenting Culture Studies is informed by the insight that ‘parenting’ (as opposed to child-rearing) has become a hugely expanded task in recent years, replete with a multimillion-pound industry of advice and support. Underlining the emergence and popularisation of developmental psychology, this chapter shows how parenting has become a more ‘intensive’ activity for parents, particularly mothers, than it was a generation ago, with infant experience understood as having life-long consequences. It has been observed that in recent years the word ‘parent’ has shifted from a noun denoting a relationship with a child (something you are), to a verb (something you do) (Lee et  al., 2014). Goffman’s concept (1959) of ‘identity work’—the narrative processes of self-making that mothers and fathers engage in as they account for their parenting practices—helps us understand the significance of this linguistic shift for the experience of parents. ‘Parenting’ is now cast as an occupation: the ‘most important job in the world’, and something in which adults (particularly mothers) are expected to be emotionally absorbed and become personally fulfilled. It is also a growing site of interest to policymakers in the UK, understood as the cause of, and solution to, a wide range of social ills (Lee et  al., 2014). The ‘ideal’ parenting promoted by these policymakers is

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financially, physically and emotionally ‘intensive’. Parents (again, namely, mothers) are encouraged to spend a large amount of time, energy and money in raising their children (Hays, 1996). The ‘permanence’ of parenting is contrasted with literature around ideal (couple) relationships which instead endorse notions of equality, intimacy and fluidity, in line with the ‘reflexive modernisation’ thesis (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). An overview of these two bodies of literature, as well as the policy context around parental leave and childcare (particularly the low take-up for ‘shared’ parental leave, the current policy iteration) sets the scene for the chapters which follow, outlining how the contradiction between these two ‘ideals’ is experienced by contemporary couples in the UK in terms of their experience of birth, infant feeding and sleeping.

References Beck, U., & Beck-Gernsheim, E. (1995). The normal chaos of love. Polity. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday. Hays, S. (1996). The cultural contradictions of motherhood. Yale University Press. Lee, E.  Bristow, J., Faircloth, C., & Macvarish, J. (2014). Parenting culture studies. Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 2

Theoretical Context

Couple Relationships and Ideals of Equality Work by Giddens (1992), Bauman (2003), Beck (1992), Beck and Beck-­ Gernsheim (1995) and others (Illouz, 2007) has explored shifting relationship patterns in the contemporary age. Broadly speaking, this body of work argues that, in an age of ‘reflexive modernisation’, there has been a shift away from traditional, patriarchal couple relationships, based on an inherent inequality between men and women, towards a more equitable, mutually fulfilling model, accompanied by the rise of a more ‘plastic’ sexuality in particular (Giddens, 1992). Sex, now ‘liberated’ from reproduction by contraception has, he suggests, become more democratised for men and women, and means that women in particular are able to express themselves erotically in ways completely unlike the past. In terms of relationships, Giddens argues that in the late twentieth century, in the place of traditional patterns of marriage for example, individuals became more aware of the need for a fulfilling relationship, based on ‘confluent love’, one that is active and contingent. As part of a wider culture of ‘individualisation’, independence within relationships is highly valued. The ‘pure relationship’, which is not bound by traditional notions of duty and obligation, has come to depend, instead, on communication, intimacy and a sense of equality. Taking a more critical stance, Illouz has argued that ‘equality’ is itself an internally contradictory concept, in that it has been modelled on © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Faircloth, Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77403-5_2

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rational, economic systems of bargaining and exchange, indicative of a ‘cold’ intimacy and a turn towards an ‘emotional capitalism’ more widely (Illouz, 2007). This leads to what she calls ‘romantic suffering’, in that wider social structures (including marriage) are in contradiction with the ‘quest for love’, and that this is internalised as disappointment and personal failing. In an era where choice in partner is (apparently) more free and open, Illouz’s work has pointed to the gendered nature of this ‘romantic suffering’, in that women are disadvantaged by being more family oriented, and ‘need’ to find a partner within a specific physiological timeframe, unlike men who have more flexibility (2012). Further, the separation of romantic relationships from wider social and moral structures, manifest in increasing freedom in our choice of partner for example, means that even ‘love’ itself has become individualised, rationalised, an ‘object of endless investigation, self-knowledge and self-scrutiny’ (2012, p.  163) and a lonely site for self-validation, again to which women are, culturally, more vulnerable. However, while the research here presents evidence for Illouz’s assertion that ‘love hurts’ (2012), it also points to the limits of an analytical focus on individual or self-reflexive ‘choices’, to bring relational tensions around partnering and parenting to the fore. Indeed, since the publication of these ‘individualisation’ theories of modern intimacy scholars working in the field of personal life have argued for a more nuanced perspective, grounded in the realities of everyday experience, which is often less equitable than either theory or legislation might suggest (Smart, 2007). As Gillies (2003, p. 2) states, concepts of ‘individualisation’ and ‘democratisation’ that underpin theories of intimacy are much debated, ‘with many disputing the claim that personal relationships have become more contingent, negotiated and self-directed’. In short, whilst discourses around ideal relationships may have changed, practices have not kept pace (Jamieson, 1999)—precisely the gap this book seeks to explore. Although Jamieson is critical of Giddens’s argument regarding the emergence of the pure relationship, she agrees that disclosing intimacy and equality is an ideal within contemporary relationships, through which individuals narrate and idealise their own aspirations (see also Twamley on the ideal of love in relationships, 2012). Jamieson observes, therefore, that in heterosexual relationships, much ‘creative energy is deployed in disguising inequality, not undermining it’ (1999, p. 485, emphasis added). This chimes with work by numerous scholars (see, for example, Van Hooff, 2011), who argue that in (heterosexual) relationships it is typical to find

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both male and female participants claiming that women have ‘higher standards and are more competent performers of household chores, and that the division of labour is practical, based on the hours worked by both partners’ (Van Hooff, 2011, p.  19). Importantly, however, what I am interested in here is not the actual amount of time spent by each couple member per se on particular domestic or parenting related tasks, so much as participants’ perceptions of the amount of work they do compared with their partners, and ‘how this is reconciled with discourses of equality’ (Van Hooff, 2011, p. 21). This is important: in their study drawing on Swedish data regarding housework and rates of divorce, Ruppanner et al. (2018) make a related point that it is not the unequal division of labour between couples in itself which causes conflict, but rather the lack of recognition with regard to that inequality that leads to lower relationship satisfaction. So how do these messages about ‘good relationships’ being based on equality intersect with messages about ‘good parenting? Collins (2003) has pointed out, for example, that in post-industrialised settings, whilst (some) couples might live relatively equal lives before having children, parenthood accentuates the gendered division of labour and still has the potential to divide egalitarian couples along more traditional lines. Where independence and equality might be hallmarks of ideal contemporary relationships, parenthood is marked by ideals of obligation and permanence (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). As they argue, the understood irreversibility of a kinship tie with a child sits uncomfortably with a more ‘plastic’ approach to relationships. In line with this thesis, Roman observes in her study of couples becoming parents in Sweden that her study participants perceived children and parenting to be risk-filled projects in relation to self-realisation, but also the couple relationship (2014, p.  454). To this extent, many couples are in the paradoxical situation of seeing marriage, cohabitation and parenthood (and lack of opportunity for an ‘independent life’) as a threat to that very family life, in that they might lead to relationship breakdown. At the same time, in a culture which shuns permanence and commitment for the sake of self-fulfillment, there is something existentially appealing, relaxing, even, about a relationship that is beyond the remit of personal preference, and therefore the parent–child relationship is one suffused with deep meaning (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Ribbens McCarthy & Edwards, 2002). I turn now to consider social science work in this area to help ‘think through’ the implications for couples when they become parents, and the shift towards creating something ‘permanent’.

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Contemporary Parenting Culture Across the world, and across history, parenting has long been subject to moralising and guidance (Hardyment, 2007; Faircloth, 2013). However, as becomes rapidly apparent to those who start to research the way that any routine aspect of bringing up children is discussed, a distinctive language is now used to describe these activities. If one looks, for example, at the question of how to discipline children, this is rarely conceptualised as a community task or responsibility of adult society as a whole where cultural, moral or religious norms are foundational. Instead, it is an individual- or family-based ‘parenting strategy’, focused primarily on changing parental behaviour (so as to discourage spanking or shouting at children, for example) (Daly, 2010; Reece, 2013). There are ‘parenting manuals’, ‘parenting guides’, ‘parenting classes’ and ‘parenting education’ that all purport to be able to improve matters in this area of the everyday life of parents (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). A central source of scholarship for what has been termed Parenting Cultures Studies (see Lee et al., 2014; Macvarish and Martin, 2021) is to understand the development, usage and meaning of this terminology— noting that the use of the term ‘parenting’ as opposed to ‘child-rearing’ indicates a privatisation and individualisation of the responsibility for children away from the wider community and into the realm of the private family. From this point of view, a trajectory towards placing particular significance on the role and contribution of the parent, using their ‘skills’ to ensure a child’s ‘successful life’, has a long history. It is at least as old as industrialisation, and, as Sharon Hays (1996) details, it may be considered that the basis for contemporary parenting culture lies in the working through of the separation of ‘the family’ from the wider economy and society. This ‘separate spheres’ thesis, whilst having important implications for gender relations, also meant that the family and, by extension, childcare became understood as a ‘sacralised’ endeavour, away from the world of work, which was governed by more commercial interests. However, despite its long history, it is also recognised that ‘parenting’ has acquired specific connotations more recently. By looking at the language of ‘parenting’, a picture emerges of a growing momentum from the 1970s onwards towards the targeting of parental behaviour as deficient and also ‘parenting’ as something of a relentless task or ‘job’, to be conducted under the watchful gaze of experts. The other central idea is that people other than parents have special insights that can

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and should be brought to bear. Indeed, one of the dominant observations is that ‘parenting’ is now viewed, particularly by policymakers, as an activity that cannot be effectively carried out without being explicitly taught and learned (Lee et al., 2014). The central proposition to emerge is that parenting is not a neutral term to describe what parents do as they raise their children. Rather, the transformation of parenting into a verb has taken place through a sociocultural process centring on the belief that ‘parenting’ is a highly important and problematic sphere of social life. In turn, ‘parenting culture’ can be summarised to mean the more or less formalised rules and codes of conduct that have emerged over recent years which reflect this deterministic view of parents and define expectations about how a parent should raise their child. One of the earliest—and still most influential—observers of the changes in parenting culture was the US sociologist Sharon Hays, in her 1996 book, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. She noticed that many mothers she worked with were going to extreme lengths in the course of raising their children: Why do so many professional class employed women find it necessary to take the kids to swimming and judo and dancing and tumbling classes, not to mention orthodontists and psychiatrists and attention-deficit specialists? Why is the human bonding that accompanies breast-feeding considered so important that elaborate contraptions are now manufactured to allow children to suckle on mothers who cannot produce milk? Why are there copious courses for babies, training sessions in infant massage, sibling-preparedness workshops, and designer fashions for two-year olds? Why must a ‘good’ mother be careful to ‘negotiate’ with her child, refraining from the demands for obedience to an absolute set of rules?’ (Hays, 1996, p. 6)

Hays recognises that human children need an extended period of physical care to make the transition from infancy to adulthood, of course. But as she says, ‘modern American mothers do much more than simply feed, change and shelter the child until age six. It is that “more” with which I am concerned’ (Hays, 1996, p. 5). What she noticed about this ‘more’ is that it involves devoting large amounts of time, energy and material resources to the child. There is a belief that a child’s needs must be put first and that mothering should be child-centred. This ‘more’ is also almost always done by the mother—these messages about parenting are more strongly internalised by women, so that even where fathers are very

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‘involved’, ultimately the buck stops with the mother. This has huge implications for women’s relationship with employment and notions of gender equality, as I discuss throughout this book. And finally, observes Hays, the ‘more’ requires a mother to pay attention to what experts say about child development. It is not enough to just muddle through or do what seems easiest. Hays terms this an ideology of ‘intensive motherhood’, one which urges mothers to ‘spend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money in raising their children’ (Hays, 1996, p. x). Under this ideology, ‘the methods of appropriate child rearing are construed as child-centred, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, and financially expensive’. But as she says, ‘the ideas are certainly not followed in practice in every mother, but they are, implicitly or explicitly, understood as the proper approach to the raising of a child by the majority of mothers’ (Hays, 1996, p. 9). So rather than being a uniform set of practices, then, intensive motherhood is best thought of as ‘the normative standard…by which mothering practices and arrangements are evaluated’ (Arendell, 2000, p. 1195). Hays is particularly puzzled by the emergence of this ideology at a time when women (in the US at least) make up over 50% of the workforce (Economist, 2009). What one might expect—that as women work longer hours, motherhood becomes less time consuming—does not appear to be the case. In fact, according to time–use studies, in the case of two-parent families, today’s children are in fact spending substantially more time with their parents than in 1981 (Gauthier et al., 2004; Sullivan, 2013; see also Sayer, 2004). This is despite increases in female participation in work, despite increases in attendance at childcare and preschool by children and despite an increase in time spent with children by fathers. Perhaps it is not surprising then that the mothers Hays worked with talked about being tired, overstretched and ‘torn’, when the worlds of work and home have both become so demanding. Rizzo et  al. (2013) point to some of the negative mental health consequences of this rise of intensive motherhood: not only are parents spending more time with their children—the quality of that time has become far more intense, leading to feelings of pressure and anxiety.

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Motherhood and Moralisation Numerous scholars have picked up on Hays’s concept of ‘intensive motherhood’ to describe the contemporary experience of parenting in Euro-­ American settings. And whilst Hays recognises that not all mothers will be working mothers, the cultural contradiction between the worlds of work and home is one, she argued, that affects all mothers. She notes the irony that we live in a society where child-rearing is generally devalued, and the emphasis is on the world of work, whilst at the same time motherhood is held up as an almost-sacred endeavour. This means that people have to undertake what she calls ‘ideological work’ to make their own positions liveable. (In fact, says Hays, people are forced to make their decisions around childcare in circumstances that are often beyond their control, although this does not feed so well into the ‘Mommy Wars’ ostensibly between working and stay-at-home mothers, now so familiar in media accounts (Douglas & Michaels, 2004).) What is clear is that as well as whether women work or not, the day-to-­ day practices of motherhood have become the subject of public, even political debate (Freely 2000). What parents feed their children, how they discipline them, where they put them to bed, how they play with them: all of these have become politically (and morally) charged questions. Indeed, as soon as a pregnancy is confirmed, a whole chain of events is set forth: prenatal diagnostic tests, birthing options, feeding solutions, sleeping practices, whether to use a dummy or not. All of these are highly controversial issues, and yet all require, to a greater or lesser extent, decisions to be taken, and fast. There are an overwhelming number of alternatives, necessities and personal desires at play, often not entirely harmoniously. As Lee et al. note: ‘What were once considered banal, relatively unimportant, private routines of everyday life for children and families…have become the subject of intensive debates about the effects of parental activities for the next generation and society as a whole’ (Lee et  al., 2010, p. 294). As noted, one of the reasons the intensive motherhood injunction wields such power, Hays suggests, is because it links to the separate spheres thesis: ‘intensive’ mothering is perceived as ‘the last best defense against what many people see as the impoverishment of social ties, communal obligations, and unremunerated commitments’ (1996, p. xiii). Wolf (2011), writing about motherhood in the US, links this public interest to a broader argument around risk-consciousness and an emergence of a ‘neoliberal’ culture. Where dangers are redefined as risk and

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thus ‘viewed as the product of human action and decision-making rather than of fate’ (Lupton and Tulloch, 2002, p. 318, in Nelson, 2008, p. 517), individuals hold themselves ever more responsible for ensuring the safety of themselves and of those who are dependent on them. Wolf therefore talks about the concept of ‘total’ motherhood to characterise the experience of contemporary mothers. She notes that mothers are expected to become their own experts on all aspects of child-rearing—making sure that mealtimes, stories and playing are not only safe, but optimal for infant development, and thereby becoming: ‘lay paediatricians, psychologists, consumer products safety inspectors, toxicologists, and educators. Mothers must not only protect their children from immediate threats but are also expected to predict and prevent any circumstance that might interfere with putatively normal development’ (Wolf, 2011, p. xv). Echoing Hays, Wolf draws attention to the way in which this focus on risk frames good motherhood as totally child-centred, with no cost considered too high for mothers to bear. Since children are considered vulnerable and unable to protect themselves, mothers are charged with reducing (or avoiding altogether) any risks to their children’s health and well-being. This frames the mother–child relationship in an antagonistic way: Total motherhood is a moral code in which mothers are exhorted to optimise every aspect of children’s lives, beginning in the womb. Its practice is frequently cast as a trade-off between what mothers might like and what babies and children must have…When mothers have ‘wants’—such as a sense of bodily, emotional, and psychological autonomy—but children have ‘needs’—such as an environment in which anything less than optimal is framed as perilous—good mothering is defined as behaviour that reduces even infinitesimal or poorly understood risks to offspring, regardless of the potential cost to the mother. The distinction disappears between what children need and what might enhance their physical, intellectual, and emotional development. Mothers are held responsible for matters well outside their control, and they are told in various ways that they must eliminate even minute, ultimately ineradicable, potential threats to their children’s well-­ being. (Wolf, 2011, p. xv)

Lee et al. (2014), in particular, draw attention to the ‘army of professionals’ who now colonise this area of social life, because parenting is increasingly understood to be too important a task to be left up to parents. Instead, the view of policymakers, at least in the US and the UK, is that parents should be ‘enabled’ to parent well, via practices based on ‘research

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about the characteristics of effective parenting’ (Johnson, 2007). Edwards and Gillies (2013) back up these assertions in their research on the differences between parenting in 1960s and 2010s Britain. What would have been considered standard parenting practice in the 1960s (leaving children unsupervised to play, letting them go out at night alone or asking older children to supervise younger ones, for example) would be considered neglectful today. The expectation more latterly is that parents should be constantly present to monitor their children, and prevent them from ‘risks’, both known and unknown. Each of these scholars points to the way that, within this new style of ‘parenting’, a specific skill set is denoted: a certain level of expertise about children and their care, based on the latest research on child development, an affiliation to a certain way of raising a child and a particular educational strategy. There are, of course, many ways of caring for children ‘intensively’, as is discussed below; but whichever way one does it, it is clear that there is a broader cultural logic around intensive parenting, which holds that parents are wholly responsible for their children’s outcomes. This has interesting implications for the subjectivity of parents. As Macvarish and Martin note, what is interesting about verbal nouns such as ‘parenting’ is that they have no subject. ‘While calling someone “the parent” defines a person in particular ways, “parenting” is detached from the parents, floating more freely from the particular adult subject…In this respect, “parenting” could be done by people who need not be parents and, parents may not necessarily be “parenting” at all times or at any time all. Thus, it has been argued, “parenting” signifies a de-centring or demoting of the parent as an autonomous subject while focusing attention on monitoring their relationship with their child as the implementation of a series of tasks requiring the acquisition and application of skills and techniques’ (Macvarish & Martin, 2021, see also Ramaekers & Suissa, 2011). Clearly, being well-educated is a requirement for participation in these choices between parenting models, as is a certain access to economic resources which enable parents to consume the material goods that in turn come to define the various methods of infant care. But this is also about adopting a certain sort of identity, then: Most of all [parenting] means being both discursively positioned by and actively contributing to the networks of idea, value, practice and social relations that have come to define a particular form of the politics of ­parent-­child relations within the domain of the contemporary family. (Faircloth et  al., 2013, p. 2)

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Different Performances of the Cultural Script The ideology of intensive parenting described above does not, of course, affect all parents equally, and certainly not all parents today in the US (or the UK) are ‘intensive parents’. However, it remains an important ‘cultural script’ or ‘ideal’ to which parents respond in negotiating their own practices. (see Lee et al., 2014, for a fuller discussion). Gender As Hays observed, perhaps the most obvious difference in response to the ideology of intensive parenting is in terms of gender. While some recent research has shown how men increasingly see ‘good fathering’ as about being ‘involved’ with and emotionally present for their children (Dermott, 2008), mirroring the ‘intensive’ mothering model to some extent, other research has shown that they also continue to hold on to more traditional ideas about fathering. Shirani et al. (2012), for example, show that men (in the UK) are more likely to question expert advice about parenting, reject the need for hypervigilance and limit material consumption as a means of contesting the competitive aspect of contemporary parenting culture. Similarly, Shaw’s (2008) work on family leisure draws on work with parents in North America, to explore gender differences in response to this cultural change. In an era of ‘intensive’ parenting, there has been a shift in family leisure patterns towards maximising children’s health and well-being, rather than on adult-oriented activities, she observes. Parents are expected to act as pseudo-teachers, optimising their children’s intelligence through a range of extracurricular activities. Shaw notes that it is women who act on these discourses, both self-consciously and in more invisible ways. Much of the work of enabling a child-centred approach to family time (the scheduling and planning) falls to women, says Shaw, echoing Dermott’s (2008) observations on the gendered split between ‘caring about’ and ‘caring for’ children, or what Lupton (2012, p.  13) refers to as the ‘invisible mental labour’ of mothering—something I return to in later chapters.

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As Macvarish and Martin note, however, there is another way of looking at this process—not just one of en-gendering but rather de-gendering, with important implications for women’s subjectivity: By de-naturing the caring instincts of parents, ‘parenting’ also undoes the specific authority attached to the status and biological reality of being either a ‘father’ or a ‘mother’. ‘Parenting’, Smith argues, particularly ‘marginalises motherhood’ (2010, p.  362), perhaps because modern mothers have historically been attributed authority in partially naturalised terms: as natural carers, hormonally and neurologically suited to nurturing infants, or at the very least, physically equipped to breastfeed their babies. Although this, of course, has trapped women in sex-based, highly-moralised gender roles, much has also been written about how mothers gained authority relative to men by the creation of a modern version of ‘good mothering’, which incorporated external expertise from the sciences of hygiene, medicine, psychology and psychoanalysis (Apple 1995, 2006)…Similarly, policy and practitioners often talk of ‘engaging fathers’ in ‘parenting’ in order to ‘involve’ them in family life (Doucet 2018). This is sometimes argued for in terms of redressing the gender imbalance within the home, but it also contains an implicit assumption that natural paternal affinity with the child is lacking. It must, therefore, be cultivated by father-focused parenting support. (Macvarish & Martin, 2021)

As such, although much of the literature around the intensification of parenting points to the gendered toll of this on women, much of it could also be read as a de-authorisation of the parent as someone with a particular moral responsibility to the child at all. Class The ‘script’ of intensive parenting (or, mothering) is clearly a very middle-­ class vision of what ideal family life should look like. This is a limitation, but not one that invalidates the attention paid to these middle-class discourses. Engagement with this framework of intensive mothering is valuable because it presents a culturally dominant belief: that is, the middle class presents the most powerful, visible and self-consciously articulated model readily apparent in public discourse and policy. As Strathern puts it in After Nature, her examination of English kinship, ‘I focus on middle-­ class usage [of kinship terms], largely to do with the way the middle class enunciate and communicate what they regard as general social values’

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(Strathern, 1992, p. 25). As such, attention to these culturally dominant beliefs can be highly instructive. This is not to say that parenting is not ‘classed’. Nelson’s work in particular draws attention to the classed differences in the internalisation of the ‘intensive’ parenting ideology (2010; see also Gillies, 2009; Lareau, 2003). For the professional middle-class parents with whom she worked, who demonstrated the ‘intensive’ parenting style, she sees a desire to extend and protect childhood. For the working-class parents, the impetus to do this was constrained by material, financial necessity that children earn their own living as quickly as possible. Thus: ‘within what I have called the professional middle class, parents do, indeed, adopt a style of parenting that has as its key features constant oversight, belief in children’s boundless potential, intimacy with children, claims of trust and delayed launching’ (Nelson, 2010, pp. 174–175). As is discussed further below, they were, of course, also the parents who had the material resources to invest in additional classes and equipment, as well as the time to invest in one-to-one interactions demanded by a more ‘intensive’ parenting style. By contrast, in ‘the working class and middle class…parenting styles draw on concerns about concrete dangers, an awareness of youthful indiscretions, and a desire to see children mature sooner, rather than later’, similarly constrained by their own material conditions (Nelson, 2010, p. 175). However, although class differences in orientation have been observed— as have individual differences throughout social classes—the problem here is the way that intensive parenting is the one that is culturally validated, meaning that the vast majority of parents, regardless of class, will be left feeling that they ‘fall short’. As such, ‘ideal’ parenting practices can be mobilised in a class-based way. Jensen’s work on the politics of parent-­ blame is relevant in this regard, showing how what she called ‘crisis talk’ around parenting has been used to police and discipline families who are considered to be morally deficient and socially irresponsible. More worryingly, she also shows how this has been used to justify increasingly punitive state policies towards families (2018). Cultural Variation In a recent collection with colleagues (Faircloth et al., 2013), we collated a series of chapters to explore the cultural purchase (or otherwise) of ‘intensive’ parenting in a cross-cultural perspective. What emerged there is that while the discourses and practices of parenting may be seen as

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culturally and historically specific, they are currently acquiring a global significance as they diffuse and interact with local and indigenous conceptualisations of raising children. As a number of anthropologists have pointed out (e.g., Stephens, 1995), in a period characterised by the spread of neoliberal economic regimes around the world, parenting ideologies have a particular salience and significance in that parenting has become intimately tied to projects of governance. In a range of settings around the world, recent work on parenting has therefore foregrounded negotiations around the shifts towards a new ‘parenting’ culture—whether that is resistance, rejection, accommodation, modification or a complex combination of several forms of agency (see, for example Bueskens, 2018; Faircloth & Rosen, 2020; Kokanović et al., 2018; O’Reilly, 2009). Having this global perspective is essential, not only because parenting is at present a globalising set of ideas and practices that cannot be separated from considerations of global power inequities. An international perspective also allows us to challenge ideas about the moral valence of particular notions of parenting, as well as revealing the many ways in which kinship, identity and cultural ideals concerning motherhood/fatherhood are challenging and resisting certain formations of intensive parenting. Finally, they help us contextualise categorical assumptions not only around gender, but also more fundamentally around our understandings of adulthood and childhood (Faircloth et al., 2013; Faircloth & Rosen, 2020).

Children at Risk Certainly, developments in parenting can be understood as implying the emergence of a historically distinct way of thinking about children and childhood. Debates around social and historical constructions of childhood form a whole subfield of sociology, and cannot be adequately summarised here. Rather, I aim to highlight the central points of this way of thinking about childhood that are relevant to the discussion pursued in this book. This begins with the observation that a growing distance has been placed between children and the adult world; children, by and large, have less to do than they used to with ordinary adults in communities. Yet this distance by no means leads to children being left to ‘do their own thing’. Children are not free or more autonomous beings by merit of their increased estrangement from adults. On the contrary, they are, as indicated, both more overseen in their activities by their parents and the

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subject of more intervention and social control in other ways too. As the sociologists of childhood James, Jenks and Prout have commented: Children are arguably now more hemmed in by surveillance and social regulation than ever before…parents increasingly identify the world outside the home as one from which their children must be shielded and in relation to which they must devise strategies of risk reduction…On the other hand, both public and private spaces are increasingly monitored by closed circuit television to contain the threat that unsupervised groups of children and young people are thought to potentially pose. Even the boundaries of the family are held to be at risk of penetration by insidious technologies like video and the Internet which could pose serious moral threats to our children’s childhoods. (James et al., 1998, p. 7)

Certainly, childhood has always been as much about the imagination and actions of adults as it is about physical children, and across space and time, societies have had different ideas about children, which in turn shapes how parents are expected to behave towards them (see Hardyment, 2007 for full overview). Centring on the definition of children as ‘at risk’, it is this way of thinking about children, what they need, and the problems of how adults relate to them, that makes a more ‘intensive’ or ‘total’ motherhood possible. Historically, it was during the post–Second World War period in particular that psychological and cognitive child development theorists came into an ascendency, with Freud, Erikson and Piaget studying the association of childhood experience with adult development. Despite the differences between these theories, what united these studies was the assumption of the absolute necessity of a mother’s loving nurture. ‘Attachment theory’, discussed further below, claimed that the constant presence of a loving and responsive attachment figure—typically the mother—was the foundation for lifelong mental health. On the basis of his research with children in institutional settings, the psychiatrist John Bowlby wrote: What is believed to be essential for mental health is that the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother-substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment. (Bowlby, 1995 [1952], p. 11)

It was along these lines that Dr Benjamin Spock, Penelope Leach and Thomas Berry Brazelton, to name three of the most popular experts to

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emerge in the second half of the twentieth century, produced the first editions of their books designed to help parents ‘parent’. The underlying paradigm, subsequently developed by parenting experts, was that experience in early infancy has life-long implications and that this period of life is one entailing enormous risk (Hays, 1996). Indeed, the developmental paradigm is one of the key reasons parents are seen as a determining force in how their children turn out. The flipside to the ‘vulnerable child’ is the risky parent: or, as Furedi puts it, ‘Omnipotent parenting is the other side of the coin of child vulnerability’ (Furedi, 2002, p. 58). These two important ‘myths’ result in a highly skewed understanding of adult–child relationships, and opens the door to increased intervention: The interlocking myths of infant determinism, that is, the assumption that infant experience determines the course of future development, and parental determinism, the notion that parental intervention determines the future fate of a youngster, have come to have a major influence on relations between children and their parents. By grossly underestimating the resilience of children, they intensify parental anxiety and encourage excessive interference in children’s lives; by grossly exaggerating the degree of parental intervention required to ensure normal development, they make the task of parenting impossibly burdensome. (Furedi, 2002, p. 45)

As Lee et al. (2010) note, it is hard to overestimate how far the concept of the ‘at risk’ child has expanded when applied to the area of parenting: parents are, in effect, seen as risk managers, tasked with optimising their children’s outcomes in conjunction with expert advice (Lee et al., 2010). Of course, for many centuries there have been ‘child experts’ or self-­ proclaimed ‘authorities’ who set out their views on the mistakes they think parents make. Today, however, what this means is that ‘now almost every parenting act, even the most routine, is analysed in minute detail, correlated with a negative or positive outcome, and endowed with far-reaching implications for child development’ (Furedi, 2002, p. 65; also see Wall, 2010, who looks at this in light of the new ‘brain science’ around early childhood, or Macvarish, 2016 on the rise of ‘neuroparenting’). With experts stressing the importance of the early (even preconception) environment for infant development (see, for example, Gerhardt’s (2004) book Why Love Matters), providing children with the right kind of environment turns normal activities of parenting into a series of tasks to be achieved. Touching, talking and feeding are no longer ends in themselves,

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but tools mothers are required to perfect to ensure optimal development. Lee et al. (2010) give the example that playing with a child is no longer simply an enjoyable activity for adult and child; it is an instrumental way of ensuring positive ‘long-term outcomes’. Rose has even argued that ‘love’ can be used to promote a certain type of self-understanding in children, and is duly emphasised for mothers: increasing confidence, helpfulness, dependability at the same time as averting fear, cruelty or any other deviation from the desired norm (Rose, 1999, p.  160). The conversion of ‘love’ from a spontaneous sentiment manifested in warm affection into a parental function or skill is one of the key reasons mothers are now routinely told to ‘enjoy their baby’, with almost magical powers ascribed to ‘unconditional love’ (and disastrous consequences to its absence) (Furedi, 2002, p. 79).

The Many Methods of Raising Children Intensively Methods of childcare can be divided into those styles that are ‘structured’, and those that are (putatively, at least) ‘unstructured’. The former might be characterised by scheduled feeding, formula feeding and separate sleeping, made famous (in the UK at least) by authors such as Gina Ford and her controversial but bestselling Contented Little Baby Book (1999). Unstructured models, by contrast, aim to dissolve notions of rational efficiency in favour of more relaxed styles of care, often characterised by practices like long-term, on-cue breastfeeding, a family bed and ‘positive’ discipline (Bueskens, 2001, p. 75). Liberal models of childcare have been made most famous by the work of William and Martha Sears, who coined the term ‘Attachment Parenting’ in The Baby Book (1993 [1982]). They drew on the bonding work done by Bowlby, Klaus and Kennel, agreeing that the optimum way of caring for a child was to keep mother and baby in prolonged physical contact. The argument is that babies have evolutionary expectations that must be met if they are to mature into happy, healthy children and adults. Doing anything other than this is to deny the child’s innate needs (paraphrased from Bobel, 2002, p. 61). Arguing that modern culture has impeded ‘common sense parenting’, the Searses claim that it is ‘what we would all do if left to our own healthy resources’ (2001, p. 2). The ‘ABCs’ of attachment parenting are given by the Searses in the form of a table (2001, p. 4). The ‘B’ tools, such as breastfeeding and babywearing enable parents to tune in to their baby’s ‘cues’, which in turn enables them to parent appropriately.

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This model of care has been gaining popularity in recent years, as reflected in shifting NHS guidance around (e.g.) the importance of skin-to-skin contact after birth or feeding babies ‘on demand’ (NHS, 2020). It was certainly one that many of the couples in my sample identified with, at least as an ‘ideal’ in terms of how one ‘ought’ to raise children, even if a more ‘structured’ approach (e.g., to sleeping) was one they eventually came to. Of course, the distinction between the models may be more heuristic than descriptive, as many parents will attest, since one can adopt characteristic elements of one style (e.g., breastfeeding) and deploy them as part of the other (e.g., on schedule, as part of separate sleeping). Similarly, there may be a gap between intention and outcome (formula feeding being not always a deliberate, reflexive choice but sometimes a necessary intervention when breastfeeding is problematic). Certainly, one of the issues that emerged in earlier literature around the transition to parenthood (see Oakley, 1979) was the impact of the baby’s personality and behaviour, which many parents commented on being totally unprepared for. Just then as now, many parents in this sample expressed shock that the babies would not do what the books said or what the parents wanted, a source of surprise and some tension. Nevertheless, because the plurality between these models of parenting exists, at a heuristic level at least, parents are accountable for the choices they make both within and between them. In Foucault’s language, in contemporary liberalism the responsible moral actor is not one who conforms blindly to expert or even popular recommendations. ‘Rather, she is expected to subject such recommendations to evaluation and questioning, operating as an informed consumer’ (Murphy, 2003, p. 457). Following Strathern, this is a heavily moralised affair: those who are not reflexive, informed consumers are deemed irresponsible or in need of education. The argument here is that whichever way an ‘informed’ woman in the UK chooses to mother, she must now do so intensively. This inflation of the role of the parent has meant that ‘parenting’ has become an increasingly important part of adult identity: ‘Adults do not simply live their lives through children, but in part, develop their identity through them…parents are also inventing themselves’ (Furedi, 2002, p. 107). The widespread moralisation of infant care practices (particularly feeding and sleeping) appears to have amplified tensions between various ‘tribes’ of mothers, who often feel the need to defend themselves in vociferous and highly judgemental terms (Faircloth, 2013).

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In sum, drawing on this developmental, psychological rationale, parenting is understood as the source of, and solution to, a whole range of problems—at both individual and societal levels. The transformative potential of parenting to solve what might better be called structural social problems (such as poverty), means parenting has been the subject of much policy intervention in recent years, especially under the auspices of ‘early intervention’ in deprived communities (Gillies et al., 2017; Jensen, 2018). Scholars of ‘parenting culture’ observe that the task of raising the next generation has become highly fragmented and detailed, with a keen focus on the everyday practices of daily life (such as practices around eating or sleeping). Further, rather than ‘socialising’ children into a set of shared social values, a more individualised perspective means that the aim is to raise ‘successful individuals’ who are able to ‘be themselves’, at the same time as fulfil adult ‘lifestyle projects’ (Faircloth, 2013).

Parenting, Gender and the State The American author Judith Warner (2006) has written about her experience of motherhood in Paris (as has, more recently, Druckerman, 2012). On her return to her native country, Warner noticed how distorted the culture around mothering had become. Where in France women were encouraged to lead a ‘balanced’ life to avoid falling into ‘excessive child-­ centredness’ (Warner, 2006, pp. 10–11), in the US she saw mothers who had ‘turned into a generation of perfectionist control freaks, more concerned with creating the perfect playgroup or tracking down the last gram of trans fat in their kids’ crackers than in running or changing, or even participating in, the larger world’ (Warner, 2006, p. 4). Warner diagnoses this as a problem of control—echoing work on risk consciousness (see Lee et  al., 2014, for a fuller discussion) that positions women as ultimately responsible for harm to their children. Yet as she puts it, ‘It’s about how that feeling of being out of control drives them to parent in ways that are contrary to their better instincts, their deepest values and the best interests of their children’ (Warner, 2006, p.  7). That is, while mothers perhaps recognise that this overscheduling, hypervigilant culture is not necessarily ideal for children, there is a sense of motherhood as a ‘winner takes all’ game. Certainly, the traction of this more individualised and competitive approach to parenting is intimately linked to wider cultural norms as well as state infrastructures around the world, which differ dramatically in terms of welfare and resources for education and care (Lareau, 2003).

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With the expansion of college education in the US, for example, places in good schools have become ever more competitive, meaning that parents do not want to be the one not to put their child in music or swimming class, for fear of jeopardising their chances of getting into that school, college, job and so on. This in turn chimes with Lareau’s idea of concerted cultivation (2003). One solution to the ‘problem’ of excessive pressure on women (bar just telling them to ‘relax’ and not be ‘helicopter parents’ (Bristow, 2019) comes from feminist academics, such as Hochschild (1989), who see that the answer lies in getting fathers and partners more involved in childcare, thereby easing the intensive burden that women largely shoulder alone: Why has the cultural revolution that matches women’s economic revolution stalled? When rapid industrialisation took men out of the home and placed them in the factory, shop or office, a corresponding ideological revolution encouraged women (middle-class white women, especially) to want to tend the home and care for the children (cited in Hays, 1996, p. 5)

Hochschild argues that we now need a new ideological revolution encouraging men to want to cook, clean and nurture children, and encouraging employers and the state to want to provide for childcare, job sharing and parental leave. (Hays, 1996, p. 5; see discussion of this in the UK in Chap. 2). Hays, by contrast, remains unconvinced that ‘involving’ fathers further would be a solution to a much broader social contradiction between the worlds of work and home. Rather, she—somewhat provocatively—proposes that we radically rethink the way we see children: [W]hat Hochschild suggests—that we shift the focus from intensive mothering to intensive parenting—is only a partial solution to the contradiction between the demands of home and work, and one that does not begin to address the larger cultural contradictions. If men and women shared the burden that Rachel [one of her interviewees] now bears primarily, the larger social paradox would continue to haunt both of them and would grow even stronger for men. Given the power of the ideology of the marketplace, a more logical (and cynical solution) would be an ideological revolution that makes tending home and children a purely commercial, rationalised enterprise, one in which neither mother nor father need be highly involved. Why don’t we convince ourselves that children need neither a quantity of time nor ‘quality time’ with the mothers or their fathers? (Hays, 1996, p. 5)

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As Lee et al. (2010) indicate, most strategies, which encourage individual parents to find ways of resisting the excesses of intensive parenting through relaxing, or building ‘resilience’ in children, or reorganising gender roles so that fathers can take more of the burden of childcare, all implicitly endorse the core message of intensive parenting culture: that parental actions should be organised around what is presumed to be best for the individual child, in isolation from wider family or social considerations. By a similar token, these strategies endorse the conceptualisation of childrearing as a highly privatised, rather than a generational, responsibility. As I explore in the book, this does not seem to be helping.

So What Does Equality Mean in Practice? These changes in parenting culture have been explored at length by numerous authors in a range of global locations (see, for example, Faircloth & Rosen, 2020) but, as noted, attention to how this affects couples is more rare (though see Miller, 2017). I want to return at this point to our couples who are making the transition to parenthood and, theoretically, the move to a more ‘permanent’ relationship. What does it mean to approach this as ‘equal partners?’ The concept of equality in the social sciences has had a long history (Kuper & Kuper, 2003), and it is clearly beyond the scope of this chapter to give a full review of that here. Instead, I confine myself to drawing on work in the field of family and relationship studies as it pertains to (gender) equality and parenting, noting in particular relevant trends within feminist theory. Wollstonecraft famously grappled with the ‘dilemma’ for feminist thinkers in considering how to achieve equal rights for men and women at the same time as recognising the specificities of their different needs and circumstances (Wollstonecraft 1995, pp. 87–108 in Armstrong, 2002). These differences are perhaps most pronounced in the perinatal period. Doucet and McKay note that feminist theoretical debates have been dominated by two understandings of the concept of equality: formal equality, which refers to ‘sameness of treatment’ for all, including women and men (a position associated with liberal feminism and liberal individualism); and substantive equality, which describes ‘special’ treatment for some and the need to recognise and accommodate differences—thereby considering outcome as well as treatment (Doucet & McKay, 2020).

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Recent work has attempted to move beyond this dualism, especially when referring to the issues of care and work, not least because of the implicit assumption in both positions that men’s lives (and therefore our concepts of citizenship and individuality) serve as the standard by which all lives are measured. One ‘solution’ has been proposed by Walzer, in his theory of ‘complex equality’ outlined in Spheres of Justice (1983, in Armstrong 2002) and more recently expanded upon by Armstrong (2002). This is part of an argument that, rather than the mode of analysis favoured by liberal egalitarianism, which focuses on abstract individuals, there is a need to ‘widen the scope of inequality and situate it in the context of concrete and historical relationships’ (2005, p. 68, emphasis added). This can more easily take into account the disparities in social and economic well-being amongst various groups in society, as well as the interdependency and ‘multiple relational matrices’ that constitute daily practices’ (Doucet, 2017, p. 22). To cite Eerola et al., it is particularly apt in a discussion of parenting practices: Parenting practices…are not only negotiated between the partners but also in relation to the labour market, social policies and cultural values, and are also entangled with power, intimacies and affects. (2020, p. 4)

Doucet and McKay also advocate a relational concept of human subjectivity: not one based on the liberal and independent subject that underpins formal equality, but rather, ‘a more complex legal and political subject’ where ‘vulnerability is recognised as the primal human condition’— encompassing not only the vulnerability and dependence of children, but also the vulnerability of parents who need access to state support whilst they care for them (Doucet & McKay, 2020, p. 466). As is reflected in my methodology, I find this approach productive in my own research. But what does this mean in practice? Even if a more relational approach is valuable in mitigating the formal/ substantive dualism, the question of how equality is measured remains difficult. As Doucet (2017, p. 17) says: ‘a recurring challenge for researchers who study gender divisions of labour is the issue of how to effectively measure change and to define and assess issues of gender equality in domestic life.’ To this extent, she calls attention to the importance of distinguishing between housework and childcare, too often rolled together in analyses of domestic labour (though see, for example, see Sullivan, 2013). Furthermore, the relationship between caregiving and equality

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itself is not straightforward. As O’Brien and Wall note, ‘involved fatherhood and gender egalitarianism may emerge as different dimensions and have to be conceptualised and analysed separately’ (O’Brien & Wall, 2016). Similarly, she says that close attention to what parental responsibilities are, and how these are understood by couples is key (i.e., not just who does what, but who is understood to be responsible for what). This could be said to be part of a wider ‘post-feminist’ turn in the sense that it marks a shift away from a focus on equality towards debates about differences, and ‘away from structural analysis and meta-theorising towards a more ‘pluralistic conception of the application of feminism’ (Brooks 1997, p. 4, in Gill et al., 2016). As Doucet says (2017, pp. 22–23): My own approach, informed by the assumption that it is difficult, if not impossible, to measure parental responsibilities, has been to argue for a shift from measuring gender equality in parental caregiving responsibilities towards making sense of gender differences in these responsibilities (Doucet 2013, 2015). Shifting from equality to differences would mean, as Barrie Thorne (1993) has argued, looking at “how, when, and why does gender make a difference—or not make a difference” and “when gender does make a difference, what sort of difference is it?” (p.  36). As Deborah Rhode (1989) asked many years ago, in her reflections on gender, law, and the interplay of gender differences and gender equality in specific contexts, it is important to ask, “What difference does difference make?”

In this book, I therefore pay close attention to how parental responsibilities are narrated by my participants and how they understand them to be distributed. In particular, what I attempt to do is explore how ideals of (gender) equality are understood, defined and mobilised by couples, and how these compare with their accounts of the distribution of parental responsibilities within their specific family set-ups. This is important: In family research, negotiation has been understood as both explicit and implicit communication about the kinds of actions people regard as reasonable for themselves and other people (see, for example, Finch & Mason, 1993). While negotiation can take the form of open discussion, other types of communication may also occur over time, such as gradually developing agreement or shared understandings and practices that may later seem obvious and unquestionable, as if they had needed no negotiation at all (Finch & Mason, 1993). (Eerola et al., 2020)

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Doucet (2017) notes, there is a large area of research into changing father involvement as it relates to gendered divisions of labour and changes in domestic time, tasks and responsibilities. A large subfield of family and feminist sociologies has now emerged (see, for example, Bianchi & Milkie, 2010; Sullivan, 2013). The overwhelming consensus from many of these studies across many countries in the global North is that men’s participation in housework and especially childcare have increased gradually, in terms of time and tasks (Doucet, 2017, p.  2). Indeed, the majority of studies on heterosexual households have observed little change from the mother/carer, father/provider roles described by Parsons in the post-war years. Gatrell notes: ‘despite recent transformations in the women’s labour market, many married/co-habiting parents of pre-school children perform parental roles along traditional gendered lines, mothers fulfilling children’s material and emotional needs, while fathers remain work-­ oriented and distant from their children because they are ‘primarily anchored in the occupational world’ (2007, p. 355). Thus, it remains the case that women take on most of the responsibilities for care and domestic life (Fox, 2009). As Doucet puts it, ‘across time, ethnicities, social class, and culture, mothers overwhelmingly organize, plan, orchestrate, and worry about children’ (2017, p. 2). This is not without tension, of course, chiming as it does with Hochschild’s insight around the emergence of the ‘second shift’ for working women who continue to shoulder the main responsibility for childcare and household labour, despite their entry into the workforce. This resonates with recent work on the concept of the mental load (or ‘cognitive labour’, as used by Daminger, 2019), and is therefore not only about the tasks of running a household or parenting. Instead, it is about ‘anticipating needs, identifying options for filling them, making decisions, and monitoring progress’, with women tending to act as ‘project managers’ for the household (Daminger, 2019). Even when tasks are split 50/50 then, many women felt that they were still overseeing their management and delivery. As Doucet says (2015, p. 22): Over the years, many researchers have come to assume that a 50–50, “equal sharers,” or egalitarian division of domestic labor is the ideal or most successful model…yet there is sparse attention given to how responsibilities might be measured or how one might determine what “50–50” means (see Deutsch, 1999). Gornick and Meyers (2009) argued for “gender equality in parenthood and employment” (p.  3) but then conceded to critiques (see

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Orloff, 2009) that their version of equality does not “require adults in all dual-parent families to allocate the same time to market and care work”

As noted, it is evident that couples use various versions of ‘equality’— such as equality as ‘fair’ or ‘balance’, or as ‘breaking gendered roles’ as ‘50/50. I look in particular at how these are narrated before the birth of babies, and how this changes afterwards, therefore investigating how ideals are in a constant process of negotiation and how they map onto the realities of early parenthood. It is important to note here that the iterations are not exclusive; some couples aligned with one version but may also emphasise another at a different point in their interview.

Parenting Between Ideal and Reality The perception of what constitutes a ‘good relationship (or indeed a ‘good parent’) is largely culturally, historically and ideologically rooted, and thus in continuous flux. As Doucet (2017) argues, in relation to her longitudinal research on stay-at-home fathers and breadwinning mothers, sociological attention to the ‘shoulds’ is important: I maintain that one of the slowest gender changes in parental responsibilities has been in the moral responsibilities of parenting, which remain tied to the ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ of what it means to be a good mother or a good father as set against a persistent shadow of hegemonic ideals of the male breadwinner and female caregiver family (Townsend 2002). Social class matters in this articulation (Williams 2010); being a male primary caregiver without having achieved success as a breadwinner can conflict with what many communities consider a socially acceptable male identity. (Doucet 2006, 2017, p. 18)

This is where qualitative research is so valuable. In her research with dual earning professional parent couples, Gatrell found that around two-­ thirds of the men she was working with expressed ‘at some level, ambivalence towards mothers’ employment’ (2007, p.  360). This was due to fathers’ sense that ‘maternal employment impacted negatively upon the traditional patriarchal privileges they would have expected had wives/ partners been at home full-time, or employed in non-professional roles’. Gatrell includes this quote from one of her participants, Edmond, which chimes with the vignette from Anthony and Claudia presented earlier:

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There is conflict sometimes. And I know that intellectually I am supposed to agree with everything that is happening to me. And, you know, I do want a best-friend, not a housekeeper. But if I am honest, there are times when this equality thing is hard. And I don’t say this to her but I think: Well why haven’t my shirts been ironed, and why is there no food in the house? Why can’t [my wife] do it? (Edmond, doctor, in Gatrell, 2007, p. 360)

To this extent, the methodology here interrogates the difference between ideologies ‘on top’ and ‘underneath’ as discussed by Hochschild in her book The Second Shift (1989). Using the example of Nancy and Evan (one of the couples with whom she worked), Hochschild explores the tensions that arise for couples when one (Nancy) maintains an egalitarian ideology about marriage but is married to another (Evan), who holds traditional assumptions about household and childcare. Hochschild notes that an individual can hold three types of gender ideology: traditional, transitional and egalitarian. A person’s approach will ‘determine which sphere she wants to identify with (home or work) and how much power in the marriage she wants to have (less, more, or the same amount)’ (1989, p. 15). However, the gender ideology that a person holds, does not necessarily determine how they act: ‘Some men seemed to me more egalitarian on top but traditional underneath. Others seemed traditional on top but egalitarian underneath’ (1989, p.  16). This certainly resonates with Lamont’s observations about the role of egalitarian narratives in the identity work (or, ‘gender strategies’, to use Hochschild’s term) of men in particular who might ‘talk the talk’ but may not ‘walk the walk’ (Lamont, 2015, p. 287). To give an example, whilst both Antony and Claudia appeared to align with a view of equality as being about a 50/50 division, a deeper look reveals something else: for Anthony this appeared to be more of an ‘on top’ ideology than one ‘underneath’. In the end, he argued that he could not commit to a ‘symmetrical’ division in practice: when he enquired with his boss about working on a four-day-a-week contract (as per his agreement with Claudia), he was made redundant. When he manages to secure another job (on a five-day-a-week basis), he does not even enquire about the possibility of changing his hours, admitting that this actually suits him better, leaving Claudia accounting for this division by revising her original thoughts and relying more heavily on an idea of ‘fairness’. These ideologies (and the tensions they provoke) not only correlate with relationship harmony, but also with wider social trends. Indeed

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Hochschild sees this as critical to the ‘stalled revolution’ in gender relations. She notes that women have been affected by the ‘revolution’ of an increased blending between the worlds of work and home more quickly than men, and that this can ‘drive a wedge’ between couples, particularly if men remain ‘stalled’ in their willingness to take on unpaid domestic labour. Relatedly, she points to cultural ‘cover ups’ (in the form of advertising, for example) which disguise this being a societal rather than an individual problem, and can lead to feelings of guilt or shame on the part of mothers specifically, who are unable to reconcile their ideals around gender equality with the realities of working whilst caring for a family (Hochschild, 1989; see also Illouz, 2007). In sum, there is a contradiction between two ideals at play: couple relationships in which equality, intimacy and independence are valued and parenting relationships in which a highly gendered, ever present, embodied form of motherhood is valued. What implications does this have for couples themselves? Before that can be answered, it is important to consider the material frameworks and restrictions within which parents are working.

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Lee, E., Macvarish, J., & Bristow, J. (2010). Editorial: Risk, health and parenting culture. Health Risk and Society, 12(4), 293–300. Lupton, D. (2012). ‘I’m always on the look out for what could be going wrong’: Mothers’ concepts of health and illness in their young children. Sydney Health and Society Group Working Paper No. 1, Sydney Health & Society Group, Sydney. Macvarish, J. (2016). Neuroparenting: The expert invasion of family life. Palgrave Macmillan. Macvarish, J., & Martin, C. (2021). Towards a ‘parenting regime’: Globalizing tendencies and localised variation. In A.-M. Castrén, V. Č esnuitytė, I. Crespi, J.-A. Gauthier, R. Gouveia, C. Martin, A. M. Minguez, & K. Suwada (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of family sociology in Europe. Palgrave. Miller, T. (2017). Making sense of parenthood: Caring, gender and family lives. Cambridge University Press. Murphy, E. (2003). Expertise and forms of knowledge in the government of families. Sociological Review, 51(4), 433–462. Nelson, M. (2008). Watching children: describing the use of baby monitors on Epinions.com. Journal of Family Issues, 29, 516–539. Nelson, M. (2010). Parenting out of control: Anxious parents in uncertain times. New York University Press. NHS. (2020). What happens during labour and birth? Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pregnancy-­and-­baby/what-­ happens-­during-­labour-­and-­birth/ O’Brien, M., & Wall, K. (2016). Fathers on leave alone: Setting the scene. In M. O’Brien & K. Wall (Eds.), Fathers on leave home alone: Work-life balance and gender equality in comparative perspective. Springer. O’Reilly, A. (2009). Maternal thinking: Philosophy, politics, practice. Demeter Press. Oakley, A. (1979). Becoming a mother (later republished as From Here to Maternity). Martin Robertson. Ramaekers, S., & Suissa, J. (2011). The claims of parenting: Reasons, responsibility and society. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education 4, Springer, London. Reece, H. (2013). The pitfalls of positive parenting. Ethics and Education, 8(1), 42–54. Ribbens McCarthy, J., & Edwards, R. (2002). The individual in public and private: The significance of mothers and children. In A. Carling, S. Duncan, & R. Edwards (Eds.), Analysing families: Morality and rationality in policy and practice. Routledge. Rizzo, K. M., Schiffrin, H. H., & Liss, M. (2013). Insight into the parenthood paradox: Mental health outcomes of intensive mothering. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 22(5), 614–620.

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CHAPTER 3

Political and Methodological Context

This chapter gives an overview of the political context in which couples make their decisions (or, are compelled to make their decisions) around parenting in general, and parental leave in particular. The chapter also outlines the design of the study, and provides demographic information about the couples that make up the sample. At heart, the study is designed to investigate two contradictions: (1) the contradiction between ideal relationships and ideal parenting (as described in the previous chapter) and (2) the contradiction between expectation and reality before and after the birth of children.

Political Context Within the UK, there have been significant recent developments around gender equality, which has been concerned to protect individual rights in matters such as pay, political representation and family life (Browne, 2013). Parental leave has been one key area for the promotion of gender equality (Gornick & Meyers, 2009), partly on the understanding that extending leave to fathers promotes their involvement in childcare and housework (Kotsadam & Finseraas, 2011; Schober, 2014). In turn this leads to a higher participation of women in paid employment, with a requisite reduction in the gender pay gap (see Anderson, 2018). This resonates with the notion that if we are to end women’s disadvantaged position © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Faircloth, Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77403-5_3

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in social life we need to redistribute the responsibility for domestic work between men and women (Armstrong, 2002). As Twamley and Schober (2019) outline, so far, the UK’s parental leave policy has focused on long periods of low-paid leave for mothers, with less access for fathers. A 9-month-long maternity leave was introduced in 1973, and extended to 12 months in 2003, when a short two-week paternity leave was introduced for fathers. Maternity leave is currently paid at 90% of earnings for the first six weeks; a flat rate payment (in 2020 of £151.20 per week, Gov.co.uk, 2020) from week 7 to 33, and the remaining 13 weeks unpaid. According to the 2009–2010 survey, the mean length of maternity leave taken by women is 39 weeks—that is, the paid part of the leave. Just under half take the full 12 months, and they tend to be from more middle-class professional backgrounds (Chanfreau et  al., 2011). The two weeks of paternity pay are paid at £151.20 each. Some employers offer enhanced pay to their employees during leave—an estimated 28% top-up maternity leave pay and 20% paternity leave pay (Chanfreau et al., 2011). Since 2011, mothers have been able to transfer their maternity leave to their partners: first, through Additional Paternity Leave, where the transfer could happen from 20 weeks (this is relevant for my participants, as my longitudinal research with them started in 2011); then replaced in 2015 by Shared Parental Leave (SPL; relevant for those having second or third babies during this period). SPL allows mothers to transfer their maternity leave entitlement to the father/partner from two weeks after the birth or adoption of a child. Fathers taking SPL can have access to the maternity pay entitlement, but from six weeks only, by which time it is a flat rate and available only until 39 weeks. SPL can also be taken simultaneously by the mother and father, and/or in blocks over the course of 52 weeks. Evidence on employer enhancements to SPL pay is lacking (Twamley & Schober, 2019). ‘Shared Parental Leave’ has had notoriously low uptake amongst parents and it remains mothers who take extended periods of time away from work or move to part-time hours, with only 2–8% of parents taking SPL in 2016 (HMRC figures in Twamley & Schober, 20191). Baird and O’Brien (2015) argue that this is due to a historical emphasis on men’s breadwinning roles and women’s caring roles in the UK (see also Lewis, 1  The authors note that this refers to all fathers, rather than just those who are eligible to this leave, which is highly restrictive as it requires employee status.

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1997)—unlike, for example, the Nordic countries, where a long-term commitment to gender equality is reflected in a ‘use-it-or-lose it’ approach to parental leave, with specific leave earmarked for each partner. Couple’s accounts of parental leave and decisions around work are also affected by the cost of childcare provision in the UK, which stands at nearly £10,000/annum for a nursery place (Family and Childcare Trust (FCT), 2017, a figure taken at the end of the research period, 2011–2017) and is higher than most European countries. Childcare therefore represents a major household outgoing, second only to a mortgage or rent for most couples, particularly if they have more than one child. There are no government subsidies to assist with this until children reach the age of three (or two in means-tested lower-earning families), at which point children are entitled to a certain number of state-funded hours of care per week, but falling far short of full-time provision (FCT, 2017).

Methodology To explore the implications of competing expectations around personal and family life, this study was designed as a longitudinal one, which included repeat in-depth interviews with 30 participants (15 first-time parent, heterosexual, dual-professional couples) over a five-year period (2011–2017). Whereas parents of several children have prior experiences to summon up, the shock experienced by first-time parents at the moment of birth is understandably more powerful, as they find themselves at the centre of a fundamentally novel situation for which they can often feel emotionally unprepared. These interviews were part of a wider mixed-­ methods study into shifts in parenting culture, which also included interviews with a further ten participants (five couples who were lesbian, gay, and/or second-time parents, partly to contextualise the ‘shock’ mentioned above), and a survey with a sample of 125 parents (distributed via Qualtrics to a demographically diverse panel of parents in the UK with children under one year old), although the responses profiled here largely come from the interviews. Building on my previous research, the intention was to find parents who internalised the injunction to ‘parent’ intensively, and who consciously reflected on and articulated their decisions as an element of their ‘identity work’. In that research (Faircloth, 2013), I worked with networks of ‘attachment’ mothers in London and Paris who breastfed their children ‘to full term’. This meant that a mother breastfed until her child

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outgrew the perceived need to do so—which could be at any point between a year and eight years old, though was typically between two and four years. In line with the ‘attachment’ philosophy, which values long-­ term maternal–infant proximity as a means of optimising child development, other typical practices included breastfeeding ‘on cue’, ‘bed-sharing’ and ‘baby-wearing’. These mothers practised a form of infant feeding that was unusual, but validated by wider policy directives emphasising the risks associated with formula milk use. However, their ‘identity work’ was less straightforward than may be expected, as I explored, looking in particular at the kinds of narratives they drew on to rationalise their non-­conventional practices—various iterations of the ‘natural’, whether evolutionarily, physiologically or ‘intuitively’ (Faircloth, 2013). Whilst that work looked in-­ depth at the workings of motherhood, moralisation and identity work, what it did not do was explore the impact of this commitment to attachment parenting on the couple relationship. Thus, in this project, the aim was to work with couples, and particularly those who were committed to, and might technically be able to afford, an ‘equitable’ division of parental leave, even if they chose not to. Bringing together these objectives, parents were contacted through a range of antenatal education classes and courses in London—such as the National Childbirth Trust, recognised by a number of scholars (Thomson et  al., 2011) as being primarily made up of this higher-educated, dual-­ professional, middle-class and high-earning demographic. Analytically and methodologically, a largely narrative approach to research was taken. Whilst appreciating that narratives are not a straightforward reflection of experience (Craib, 2000), many scholars have emphasised the role of language in the constitution of personhood, and have argued ‘that human beings actually live out their lives as “narratives”, [and] that we make use of the stories of the self that our culture makes available to us to plan out our lives…to account for events and give them significance, to accord ourselves an identity’ (Rose, 1999, p. xviii; Riessman, 2008). Looking at how couples ‘accounted’ for the division of labour within their respective partnerships, and particularly the contradiction between ‘equitable’ relationships and unequal ‘intensive’ parenting, was the intention of the study, analysing both anticipation and outcomes before and after children were born. To quote Cannito, and to return to Doucet and McKay’s concern with relationality, it is crucial to pay attention to the accounts of both partners, and to do so over time when it comes to negotiations around parental

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leave and childcare because this is a ‘complex and dynamic’ scenario involving a process of negotiation to do with the way gender itself is performed (Cannito, 2020). Couples were interviewed in various areas of London. After meeting one or both of them at an antenatal group or similar, and a discussion with the aid of a study information sheet, they were asked to fill out a brief online survey (designed and administered via Qualtrics) to collect demographic data, using sections from the 2011 census as a template (e.g., age/marital status). These couples were then interviewed, usually in their homes, at times convenient to them. The first interview (both together and ideally also separately if time allowed) was before their child was born, and then jointly when their child was aged 6 to 8 weeks, 6 to 8 months, and then, finally, 12 to 14 months, when we also repeated the individual interviews where possible. Recordings were transcribed and coded thematically as a whole, with the aid of relevant software. However, to avoid fragmentation of the data too far, a ‘listening guide’ approach was adopted with a subsample of the transcripts (see, for example, Doucet, 2006) with a similar rationale to above. Couples were contacted again (by email) for follow-up questionnaires when their first children were two-and-a-half and five-years old. Eleven of the original 15 couples responded, by which point all of them had had at least one further child, and two of them had two more. The majority of the couples interviewed were middle class (in that they overwhelmingly had higher educational qualifications and professions), middle aged (between 45 and 29, though typically 34 or 35), white, heterosexual and married (all were living in long-term relationships, though if they were not married, ‘partner’ is used, rather than ‘husband’ or ‘wife’). None of the couples formally opted for the chance to share leave under the APL scheme on offer at the time (or SPL at a later point), despite several declaring an egalitarian outlook (see discussion below). The average household income for the group ranged between £30,000 (in the case of a couple where the wife was undertaking a PhD) and over £200,000, with the majority between £50,000 and £150,000. All interviews were conducted in English, though some participants were born outside the United Kingdom: Two couples were of South Asian origin, one couple was Chilean. One mother was Lithuanian and one father was Scandinavian. Participants are referred to by pseudonym and ethical approval for the study was granted by the University of Kent’s Review Board, in accordance with British Sociological Association (BSA) guidance.

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Clearly, interviewing couples together as well as apart presents some unique ethical challenges (Heaphy & Einarsdottir, 2012; Morgan et al., 2013; Twamley, 2012), not least because of the scope for participants to recognise accounts of their partner in any disseminated findings: whilst external confidentiality can be assured, internal confidentiality cannot (Tolich, 2004). However, joint interviews were felt to be critical to this study, for the scope they offered in analysis of how couples ‘co-produced’ knowledge, and to witness couples’ interaction in confirming or contradicting accounts. The interviews (particularly those analysed with a ‘listening guide’ which pays special attention to, for example use of pronouns like ‘I’ or ‘we’) therefore revealed interesting fault lines within couples, especially when read against accounts in solo interviews. Participants were reminded at the time of giving consent about the potential for recognition, their right to withdraw from the study at any time, and also the opportunity for debriefing or asking that particular sections of interviews were not mentioned in analysis. Interestingly, none took up this option, though many talked about how ‘useful’ they had found the interviews in helping them clarify issues that had been concerning them for some time; as is discussed further below, this was particularly the case when linking personal narratives with wider patterns of gender inequality in the division of labour (see, for example, the vignettes provided by Laura and Claudia below). Oakley (1981) famously noted in her reflections on ‘interviewing women’ the idea that our own subjectivity does not influence either data collection or its interpretation is a positivist fantasy, based on a particularly masculine paradigm of the research process. It is important to note, then, that my own position as a woman was clearly influential in the fostering of a closer relationship with many of the mothers in this sample than with the fathers, based on a kind of ‘disclosing intimacy’ and a sense of a shared experience; this was particularly the case in individual interviews, as detailed in Fig. 3.1 and particularly when discussing sensitive topics, like sexual activity. Even in joint interviews it was palpable that many of the women felt a sense of connection with me that their partners did not, and that is probably evident in the accounts which are presented here, where women regularly appear to be more forthcoming. In my previous research on parenting (Faircloth, 2013), I commented that not being a mother afforded me a productive ‘research space’ that allowed me to research freely, given I was not aligned with one ‘side’ of the ‘us’ (breast) versus ‘them’ (formula) debate. At the start of this project, and whilst I was carrying out the majority of the interviews with

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First time heterosexual couples Pseudonym Rada and Keerti, Charity Administrator and Post-doc Researcher Ellen and Max Digital Marketer and Designer/Bar Worker Isabel and Riccardo Language Student and PhD Researcher Jennifer and Matt Marketing manager and Business Consultant Phoebe and Michael Risk Management and Portfolio Manager Laura and James Teacher and Barrister Pearl and Tim Charity Administrator and Web Developer Ruby and Mark Educational Manager and Web Designer Lucy and Paul Trade Union organiser and Manager at Online Payments Company Rose and Jack PhD Researcher and Lecturer Eva and Mike Human Resources assistant and Restaurant Manager Heather and David Music teacher/Researcher and Web Developer Jennie and Ralph Solicitors Jacqui and Alan Charity Administrator and Solicitor Claudia and Anthony Lecturer and IT Manager

1st Interview (late pregnancy, 2011/2) In person, joint and individual with both

2nd Interview (6-8 weeks)

3rd Interview (6-8 months)

4th Interview (12-14 months)

Follow up (2.5 years)

Follow up (5 years, 2016/7)

In person, joint and individual with Rada

In person, joint

In person, joint and individual with both

Email from Rada

No response

In person, joint and individual with both

In person, joint

In person, Ellen only

In person, joint

Email from Ellen

Email from Ellen

In person, joint

In person, joint

In person, joint

In person, joint

No response

No response

In person, joint and individual with Jennifer

In person, joint

In person with Jennifer, Email with Matt

In person, joint and individual with Jennifer

Email from Jennifer

Email from Jennifer

In person, joint and individual with Michael, with Phoebe by phone Missed due to premature birth In person, joint

In person, joint

In person with Phoebe

In person, joint

Email from Michael

No response

In person, joint

In person, joint

In person, joint

Email from Laura

Email from Laura

In person, joint

In person, joint

In person, joint

Email from both

Email from both

In person, joint

In person, joint

In person, joint

In person, joint

Email from Ruby

Email from Ruby

In person with Lucy

In person, joint

In person, joint and individual with Lucy

In person, joint

No response

No response

In person, joint

In person, joint

In person, joint

In person, joint

By phone with Jack

Email from each

In person, joint

In person, joint

In person, joint

In person, joint and individual with Toby

By email with Mette

By email with Mette

In person, joint and individual with both

In person, joint

In person, joint

In person, joint

By email with Heather

By email with Heather

In person, joint

In person with Jennie, by email with Ralph In person, joint

In person with Jennie, by email with Ralph

In person with Jennie, by email with Ralph

By email with Jennie

By email with Ralph

In person, joint

In person, joint

In person, joint

No response

No response

In person, joint

In person, joint

In person, joint

In person, joint

By email with Claudia

By email with Claudia

Additional participants interviewed Pseudonym

Notes

1st Interview (late pregnancy)

Clare and Tom Teachers Jane and Catherine IT management

Heterosexual couple, secondtime parents Lesbian mother couple, second time parents

In person, joint

Dave and Chris Actor and Author

Gay father couple, second time parents

In person, with Dave (children 2.5 years and 2 months old)

Zahra and Adam Post-doc researcher and Educational manager/researcher Mary and Jake Bid Writer and Subeditor

First time parents of twins

In person, joint, (children 2 years old)

Couple planning for children

In person, joint

In person, joint

2nd Interview (6-8 weeks) In person, joint and individual with Clare Missed due to birth complications

3rd Interview (6-8 months) Missed due to work commitments In person, joint

One-off interviews

Additional material collected (not referred to in the book) Group interview with 3 first-time mothers

Pilot research

Survey research with 125 parents

Demographic ally spread sample of parents with children under 1 in the UK

Fig. 3.1  Study participants

4th Interview (12-14 months) In person, individual with Clare In person, joint

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couples, that was also the case when it came to parenthood; I was able to ask ‘obvious’ questions about parenting much in the style of a cultural novice. During the analysis period, however, that changed with the arrival of first my son in 2016 and then my daughter in 2019. Despite interviewing couples at length and over an extended period, it rapidly became clear to me that I had not really ‘heard’ what they were telling me in terms of the relentlessness of the demands of small children and the ways in which parenthood had pushed them to their physical and emotional limits. Similarly, I found it mortifying that I had at one point thought it would be a good idea to ask couples to keep a diary during the early weeks of parenthood, or that I regularly suggested meeting in the evenings (the so-called ‘witching hour’ for many babies). Analytically, however, and in the writing up of the research, questions around gender and equality become pressing issues to be debated in my own life, and this has undoubtedly influenced the final result—for better and worse. Introducing the Couples In 2016, more women in England and Wales became mothers over the age of 40 than under the age of 20. The average age of motherhood in England is nearly 30, with the majority of women becoming mothers between the ages of 30 and 34. This has risen steadily since 1968 when the majority of women were mothers before the age of 25 (ONS, 2017). Indicative of their broader class and educational capital (not to mention the availability of contraception and abortion), all couples in this sample reflected these trends, and were fully invested in their ‘decision’ to have children—none of the pregnancies were unplanned or unwanted (and one couple was open about seeking fertility treatment to this end). Furthermore, parenting was understood as a ‘fulfilling’ and ‘rewarding’ activity that both parents were looking forward to, with fathers committed to being as ‘involved’ in as possible. However, despite a discursive commitment to equality, of the 15 first-time heterosexual couples, none formally planned to split parental leave, and all stuck to the traditional division, with mothers taking longer periods than fathers. In fact, at the time of first interview, only three couples seemed to know about the possibility of splitting leave, but had decided against it as it would be financially too constraining for the family. This is curious, not least because these couples are those who are most likely to be literate about their own policy entitlements.

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As discussed, there are clearly many ways of understanding equality in couple relationships, especially as they relate to parenting, and not all will be a straightforward ‘50/50’ split of each task or activity (e.g., feeding, changing and scheduling activities), but take a more holistic approach to family contributions, more aligned to ideas of overall ‘balance’ over time. In this book, then, I look carefully at the ways our participants talk about equality and account for gendered practices, noting the typology explained earlier. I observe how these are narrated before the birth of babies, and how this changes afterwards, thereby investigating how ideals map onto the realities of early parenthood. Certainly, the findings from across the sample point to a gap between ‘ideals’ around equality (expressed in current policy discourses, and indeed by many couples themselves) and the realities of caring for a small child, and it is clear from the excerpts that some couples may disagree with each other as to which iteration should be prioritised. However, it was noticeable that even after the birth of their babies, whilst couples would continue to hold these iterations up as ideals, there was also a recognition that they might not be achievable in practice: something acknowledged with sadness and frustration. Perhaps not surprisingly, for those couples who were most explicitly committed to an ‘equitable’ division of labour, navigating this gap was harder than for those who had anticipated a more traditional gendered set up, and it was their accounts that revealed the most tension, as illustrated by the vignettes. Furthermore, in my study at least, where members of the couple seemed to hold conflicting views about either the version (or value) of equality, this seemed to lead to resentment. Indeed, whilst the majority of the 11 couples that I was able to follow up with remained together, two had separated (but one was making attempts to stay together). Whether or not their relationships had suffered, all of the accounts pointed to the extent to which having children had re-entrenched gendered stereotypes around the division of labour, and the unique kind of pressure that had created in the context of an ostensibly ‘egalitarian’ relationship. This study therefore provides empirical evidence for Collins’s assertion that equal partners can, in spite of their best intentions, become unequal parents (2003). Furthermore, the narratives highlight the danger of focusing too much on suffering as the result of individual ‘choice’ (Illouz, 2012), and rather show the need for a relational perspective on everyday constraints to combining partnering and parenting, which become far more enmeshed at the birth of a child.

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Characteristic of qualitative research, which is often exploratory in scope, the intention of this project was to dive deeper into the meaning attached to the experiences of a small number of couples as they made their transition to parenthood. Thus, all accounts are partial, and this one is perhaps more partial than others, given that it draws on the stories of a largely privileged group of informants. If anything, however, this highlights a paradox: if even those who have all of these resources at their disposal (material, cultural and social) cannot manage the contradiction between these two ideals (of good parenting and good relationships), then this is clearly worrying. On the other hand, it also prompts us to ask whether it might be because they have these resources, indicative of a certain demographic, that they hold such strong ideals both about relationship equality and about parenting. In the chapters which follow, I investigate further what categorical assumptions underlie these beliefs, and why they seem so incompatible.

Vignette 2: Laura and James My plan to meet Laura and James before the birth of their first baby was derailed by the baby’s early arrival, three weeks before his due date. Instead—emailing the day after he was born—Laura invited me to meet them when he was just three weeks old (an offer, having now had children myself, I am horrified to see that I accepted). This couple—Laura had recently retrained to be a teacher after completing her humanities PhD, and James was a barrister who also received an income from a large family Trust Fund—had been together since the age of 17. They were both at this stage aged 32, and had been married for four years. Having children was always part of their plan, ‘within five years’ of their honeymoon. As in the vignette that follows, based on three in-­ person, joint interviews, they were highly committed to ideals of equality in their relationship, and very reflexive about gender and feminism in particular. They took a hypnobirthing course in advance of their baby’s birth, although Laura said that she hadn’t really practised as much as she had hoped to when she went into labour. She felt that this might have been part of the reason that her labour did not get going as fast as she would have liked—after 24 hours of little progress, she was advised by medical staff to have an induction, due to the risk of infection, noting that ‘I think a real hypno-birther…would have said “can you give me some more

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time?” After her induction the pain of her contractions ramped up quite considerably (not surprisingly as her cervix went from 1 cm to 9 cm dilated within an hour) and ‘the hypo-birthing techniques weren’t working, so I ended up having an epidural’. In combination with a heart monitor around her abdomen, this meant that Laura was ‘strapped to a bed’, and unable to use the birthing pool or ‘do anything of the things I think you would do if you were having a hypno-birth’. When Laura began to push the baby out, it became clear that he had not had time to move into the correct position for birthing, despite her cervix being fully dilated. The medical team suggested an episiotomy and ‘that’s how he came out’. After a two-­ night stay in a private room at the hospital, the couple returned home, only to have to return shortly afterwards—Laura had a haematoma (a very painful blood clot) and an infection, and was in ‘the most pain I have ever been in in my life’. Their baby was left at home with James’s mother when she went back into the hospital, once as a day patient, once overnight. Breastfeeding also turned out not to be straightforward, in part because Laura’s nipples were apparently flat, which can make latching the baby on to the breast more difficult, not helped by the fact that the baby also appeared to have a short tongue. Unable to establish breastfeeding at the hospital, the baby was offered a bottle of formula milk ‘which got us into the bottle routine’, whilst Laura was encouraged to hand-express any colostrum2 or milk she could manage. At our first interview, James told me about the various specialists they consulted in those early days, and, even though it was only a matter of a few weeks ago, Laura could not remember these meetings, indicative of how much pain she was in and how little sleep she was getting. When asked for her take on the feeding, she said, ‘it’s been awful to be honest. I’m kind of wondering whether to throw in the towel.’ In the last few weeks she had been pumping as much milk as possible to keep her supply up, in consultation with a well-known breastfeeding consultant, although Laura remarked that the baby preferred bottles, as the flow was faster and he could finish them in 15 minutes, rather than breastfeeding which could take up to an hour. He fed at least every three to four hours (timed from the start of each feed, which, in combination with nappy changes often left only a gap of one-and-half to two hours before the whole cycle began again). Laura was dejected about the whole thing, 2  The highly immunological substance secreted by the breasts before the milk ‘comes in’, typically a few days after the birth.

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because she ‘had assumed that it [breastfeeding] would happen’, noting, ‘I hadn’t considered the emotional impact of it not working’. James comforted her by saying, ‘you’ve been through so much’, and said to me: ‘what I find difficult is seeing Laura in all this pain, that’s really the problem’. Together, discussing the merits of continuing with breastfeeding, they said: Laura: That’s why I can’t give up. If it was like 50/50 people were bottle feeding/breastfeeding… James: I think it probably is. Laura: …and I didn’t know anything about it I would just be like ‘sod this, I’d rather spend nice time with my baby’ and the formula is like so much easier and more efficient. But there’s this whole emotional thing around it and I know that if I give up there will be days when I’m kind of beating myself up about it and kind of feeling like a bad mum and stuff. James: It’s funny because I didn’t see it like that at all. Because I see how well, I see how happy he is and it makes no difference. Laura: I know but then I’m just concerned about when you read any of the baby books, like we’ve got What to Expect in the First Year upstairs and it’s just like pages and pages of the benefits of breastfeeding. James: Very unscientific I find. I haven’t found anything concrete. Laura: Well apart from the immunity. James: Some possible benefits regards immunity but that’s really…anyway. I’ve not been able to find a study that says there are clear differences in outcomes that can be differentiated from different socio-economic groups and so on. Laura said at that point that she thought she would set herself a deadline of six weeks for how long she would keep trying to breastfeed— although ‘that seems horribly far away right now’—and if it didn’t work, just move to expressing milk, in combination with formula. (I noted in hindsight that in an hour-long interview we spent at least half of our time discussing feeding issues.) At the time of this first meeting, both of them got up in the night with the baby when he needed feeding—this was for ‘moral support’, although this would change when James went back to work in a week’s time. Although this couple talked of equity in their division of household work (like laundry, shopping, cleaning and cooking),

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when Laura was ill and James was running the household, he said of that time, ‘oh my God, [I realised] I’m a housewife, it’s a full-time job!’ Just before I left, I asked about plans for parental leave—Laura mentioned she was planning to take eight months off, and James cut in saying that next time (they have a baby) they had a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that he was going to be the primary caretaker, so ‘I’ll take the bigger amount of time off work…because I think both of us kind of feel we both quite like our jobs’. Laura concurred, saying that this was a point of principle as well. I find it absolutely baffling…I suppose I’m not a kind of strident bra burning feminist but there are certain things that I’m probably less flexible about than some of my friends. For instance, I didn’t take James’s name when we got married. [Our son] has both our names. I find it baffling that it’s just completely accepted that the woman takes whatever—six months—out of her career every time you have a child and that that’s just normal…I suppose it’s something that I’ve struggled with. Also with the whole pregnancy thing is that I kind of see James and myself as completely equal and that’s how we’ve always been. Then suddenly there’s this new phase in your life where you’re kind of expected to revert to traditional male/female roles and that doesn’t sit well with me because I’m like, ‘no’. It’s a marriage of equals. It’s not like…that’s not how I see us. I don’t know if it’ll work but that’s the idea anyway if we have another child.

Indeed, because of James’s family’s money, he was candid about the fact that ‘we’re in quite a privileged situation…we can afford to do pretty much what we like… But the salary thing, I think it’s more about identity for us…I would feel like my identity would be damaged in some way if I wasn’t earning any money’. For this reason, he also felt that he could never be a stay-at-home Dad. Laura retorted, ‘But how is my identity…I had exactly the same education as you…I think maybe women of our education and background, maybe our identity is more similar to what we’re talking about as the male identity now?’ She continued: See that’s where it gets really hard because I have all these ideas but I don’t know how I’ll feel emotionally. I do look at some of my girlfriends who’ve got kids who work full time and I kind of think, I don’t know if I want that…bringing the child up and then you kind of think, well what’s the point both parents working five days a week, really knackered at the weekend? I don’t know what the answer is.

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At our next interview, when their son was nearly six months, we picked up on what had happened with feeding. The interview was at around six pm, and James was held up at work. Laura and I caught up on how things had been going, and she told me she pumped all of her son’s feeds until he was three months old (bar some top-ups with formula during a night feed), and then gradually phased out the pumping, such that her son was now on formula and some solid foods. She said she still felt ‘nervous’ about telling people how she fed her son—particularly an ‘evangelical’ NCT teacher, who then turned out to have done something similar with her own children, and linked Laura up to several online forums in the US for mothers who exclusively pump milk, something she wished she had known about earlier to make her feel ‘less lonely’. This arrangement was incredibly time-consuming, because not only did she have to pump milk (meaning she couldn’t pick up her baby) but she also had to sterilise every item of equipment, including the bottles—as she put it, the ‘worst of both worlds’. This was exacerbated by the fact that she was in a lot of pain, without realising that she had a serious nipple infection and, as it turns out, another infection from her episiotomy. As she said, because she was doing something ‘unorthodox’, she just felt she had to ‘put up with the discomfort’. However, on discovering the infection was in her lymph node, this was part of the decision to move towards formula feeding. This definitely ‘came between’ her and James: I don’t know if there’s a right or wrong…but it definitely didn’t kind of…yeah it was hard because we didn’t agree on it. But I think he even sort of felt left out when I…the few weeks when I was breastfeeding. I think was about maybe the feeling left out thing as well, like something he couldn’t help with.

Unprompted, she reflected at this point, on her own emotional state, saying ‘I feel like I’m having a bit of a kind of identity crisis of like…just kind of like, I don’t know, it sounds really stupid but before I got pregnant and had him I think I just thought of myself as a person. Then suddenly you’re a woman and a mother and I don’t know if I like all aspects of being a mother. I’m reading this really good book called Shattered (by the author Rebecca Asher): and she talks…she made this really useful distinction for me about it’s totally fine to say, ‘I love my son, but I resent some aspects of motherhood’. I think

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that’s where I’m at. I hope I can move on from it, but it’s kind of where I’m at, at the moment and I think it definitely relates to… Like James and I have been together for 14 years and we’ve grown up together, we’ve done everything together which may or may not be a good thing, but that’s been what we’ve done. We’re kind of intellectual equals, we’re roughly at the same stages in our career. Then suddenly, kind of almost without us realising, we’ve made a mutual decision to have a child and now I feel like we’re on these different paths, at least I guess until I go back to work. I think I probably talked a little bit about this last time, but I guess we didn’t really kind of drill down on ‘Laura’s going to be the primary carer and James is not.’ So he goes to work…and I know his life’s been turned upside down as well, but in terms of his identity he just goes to work every day, like normal. He’s probably a bit more tired…Whereas I feel like my identity’s been turned inside out. I’m sure it’s a lot to do with…I probably have pejorative feelings or had pejorative feelings about being a mum not [being] the same as work. I guess my identity was more bound up with my work than I realised or with that professional structure that my days had I suppose. I’m really grappling with these things. But it’s been really useful to read that book.

During her days, Laura tried to get to a baby class, such as sensory or baby massage, as she felt that her son needed ‘stimulation and entertainment’. But she reflected that this was often more as a ‘lifeline’ because so much of her time was spent doing things that ‘can’t be quantified as achievements. They’re like repetitive tasks that take up the day like cleaning, feeding, sterilising, and then like obviously the really fun bits as well like playing, going swimming together or whatever. But like I don’t…I probably am doing hundreds of things a day, but I kind of write it all off and I’m like, well I haven’t done [anything today]’. She noted that this is why she would like James to take on a primary caring role with their next baby because she wanted him to experience ‘the whole thing’—the good bits and the bad bits, and not always with someone in the background to help out if things were difficult (giving the example of holding the baby whilst James cleared up an explosive poo, which she would usually have dealt with alone). I asked her if she thought going back to work would help with these feelings, and she said that whilst it probably will, it might also just ‘mask all of this’ because she would still be the one running things in the background. Could they have done it differently? She responded:

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In an ideal world we would look after him together, but obviously that would be a world without money. I think I would have, I don’t know, like maybe ensured that he took more paternity leave.

This is interesting because, perhaps more than any other couple in the sample, this is a couple who could have had an ‘ideal world’ set-up. Whilst Laura recognised that would be difficult with the breastfeeding, ‘it kind of annoys me this biological argument because I think it’s an excuse for men not to kind of have a bash at being the primary carer because it’s like, oh well women are better, men just wouldn’t do as good a job’. In fact, James did look after their son fairly exclusively during the early days, but despite that, they seemed to ‘experience the baby differently’—‘I find I have all these like spasms of anxiety if we leave him for a night or something, whereas James is just like ‘whatever”. This made her quite angry, because she had grown up with the notion that “we could do anything” at school and at university, and now suddenly it was ‘yeah you can do anything boys can do until you have children and then it’s all different.’ At this point, she noted that her ‘personal story has become a bit blurred with my renewed interest in feminism’ (she had recently set up a feminism discussion group on Facebook with her friends), laughing about the fact that many of her older friends said, ‘You’ll accept the fact that it can’t be completely equal. That’s when I get angry because I’m like, no, why should I accept that?’ At this point, an apologetic James arrived home, at around 6.45 pm. We caught up, and he started making a bottle for the baby, who seemed to be hungry, before offering to take him for his bath, which he normally did at this time of day. Instead, Laura offered to do this, so that James and I could talk (again, looking back, I feel awful that her one patch of respite in the day was taken up by my questions), laughing that she had already bored me with her ‘soul searching’. James noted that, for him, things ‘haven’t changed that much’, though in an ideal world he’d like to work something like four days a week so that he could see his son a bit more— but that this was very difficult for barristers, who are driven by the demands of particular cases which change week to week. We ended our conversation on their plans for childcare—which was to be a combination of a nanny, who was already employed by next-door neighbours, and grandmothers, with Laura working four days. He said as a parting note, ‘I think it will be really good for Laura when she is back at work’, whilst also saying, ‘I think both of us feel that it’s not ideal to have a nanny bringing [our son] up more than is necessary’.

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At our final interview, when their son was a year old, Laura had been back at work for four months (three days a week in her teaching job, one day a week working on publications from her PhD), and the baby was being looked after by a combination of a nanny and his two grandmothers for four days (both of whom lived locally and did not work), whilst Laura looked after him on the fifth day. James continued to work full time. This childcare arrangement, although a little complicated (Laura attempted to set up an online calendar for them all, which did not end well), actually suited them both—Laura said it’s great just to be able to ‘trust’ that the baby will be fine with the grandmothers, though there were some concerns she has about how this reflects on her own parenting: And when they’re here, they’re just completely focused on him and then sometimes I feel like, oh God, I don’t give him that kind of undivided attention when I’m at home with him…like I do feel increasingly like on the days when I’m with him, I should kind of like put my phone away and kind of like focus on him.

However, they also felt that the baby would benefit from some more social interaction, so were looking into a nursery place at the local French nursery (James’s family were French) from the age of 18 months. They continued to employ a cleaner, and Laura continued to take the lead on household management, including shopping and laundry, whilst James continued to do the cooking. They had found the first year tiring (‘the first few months are like warfare’, said James), and had been very grateful to be able to go away a few times without their son, who had been left with grandparents; Laura had ‘never enjoyed a holiday more in my life’. On the other hand, their son had become more and more ‘fun’ to be with as he has got older. As for their plan to split things with the next baby: the agreement still stood that James would take on a ‘primary role’ in the early months, whilst Laura ‘might or might not’ also be off work during that time, expressing milk in a similar way to before, but perhaps at a lower frequency. This, she said, ‘will be really important for our relationship’, and ‘it’s important to have the principle laid out’. But again, this was not without tensions: I don’t think this idea that like they need to be with their mother is true, I think they need someone who will love them and feed them every three hours, whether that’s with breast milk or formula milk, but yeah, so

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r­ationally, that’s what I think, but emotionally, I think it’s very kind of ingrained in us, you know, what the kind of ideal mother should do.

In terms of plans for another birth, Laura was adamant about wanting an epidural this time round, and spent a long time talking about having an elective caesarean. Asked if she had any advice for people expecting their own babies, Laura said: I don’t know if I’m typical, like don’t kind of…(A), don’t think your maternity leave is going to be like a holiday’, [laughs], and (B), maybe don’t make it too long, ‘cause I definitely, like James says the first three months were warfare, whereas I kind of, I wasn’t thriving, like it was so hard, but kind of like got through them and then I had a real dip around like five, six months, when I was finding everything really hard and got very anxious again. I think that was more to do with, like there was some balance back in our lives but I was finding the equality between us really hard, so that was my really hard time…and going back to work, you know, ‘cause I obviously love [the baby], but I do love my job as well and that brought some much needed equilibrium back…joking aside, I’m less tired after a day at work than I am a day looking after [him] by myself. [Laughs].

In a follow-up email, when their first son was two-and-a-half years old and Laura was heavily pregnant with their second child, she replied to my email questions by saying that things were ‘pretty much back to normal’, and that things ‘really evened out’ when she went back to work. However: I do have the occasional gripe about how much more I have to think about regarding [our son] than James does (childcare arrangements, arranging classes, food, nappy, clothes, book and toy shopping are all invariably done by me). I think these damaging, gendered patterns are very much set during maternity leave which is why I feel really positive that with the new baby we are splitting eight months of leave equally between us. I will do the first 4 months and then return to work and James will then do the next 4 months. So the new baby will still have 8 months of parental time but without the stress for our relationship.

She did, however, note that this was not just a product of her relationship with James, but was exacerbated by wider cultural factors and social institutions (the nursery, for example, exclusively addressed her in their letters, and there were lots of comments from friends about the impact on

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James’s career of the plan to take four months off, and none about hers). This was something echoed by other participants in the study. In the last follow-up, when their first son was five, she wrote to me that the plan to split leave with the second baby did not materialise, as she had postnatal depression, and ‘this arrangement was not possible as I needed time to recover’. This was difficult, not least because it was on periods of maternity leave that things were most difficult and inequitable between the two of them, whereas ‘once I go back to work, our relationship improves and things feel more equal again’. She also noted that she was not able to breastfeed this time, so bottle-fed her second son, a combination of formula and expressed milk as planned. To my final question, Do you and your partner parent ‘equally’? If so, how? If not, why not?’ she referred to this comic, shown as Fig. 3.2 here, which had been recently published in a national newspaper: No! I read a great cartoon/article in the Guardian the other day about ‘mental load’. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/26/ gender-­wars-­household-­chores-­comic This basically sums up my life! James helps out (and to be fair he does most of the cooking for us, not for the kids) but I am the one keeping the show on the road and keeping a vast amount of plates spinning in terms of schedules and just remembering all the hundreds of things that need to get done every day relating to the kids (clothes, school stuff, health stuff—doctor, dentist, injections etc), the house, the dog, the car, birthday presents, family commitments, social life, holiday planning etc etc. This is of course on top of trying to keep two jobs going. Yes, you can call this a first world problem. I also have a nanny and a cleaner so I am not a domestic drudge but they also need managing and there is always extra housework to be done (which I invariably do). I am mostly happy with my life (although I am cutting back on my school teaching hours next academic year as the sheer volume of what I was trying to do became untenable this year) but we are VERY far from having attained gender equality in terms of parenting and domestic life in general in this country. I have thought a lot about this as James is a nice a man as you could meet and not sexist in any way BUT he was brought up in a very traditional household himself and I think this has affected him in terms of his outlook and how he approaches the domestic sphere. I hope that we are bringing our boys up in a less traditional way (yes it is unbalanced but I work and James is a hands on Dad in many ways) and that they will have different expectations and outlooks when the[y] come to have kids.

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Fig. 3.2  The mental load: A feminist comic

One interesting thing to emerge here is that, yet again, despite a strong commitment to the discourse of equality, this couple remain fairly ‘gender traditional’—James worked longer hours and earned more money, whilst Laura took more care of household tasks. Like other couples in the sample, these couples nonetheless argued that their practices were ‘equal’ overall because both took responsibilities for different aspects of relationship-­based tasks such as work and care, and things were therefore ‘balanced’—although it is notable in the case of Laura and James that it is James who considers things ‘balanced’, whilst Laura remains somewhat unsatisfied and seems more committed to a 50/50 iteration (again, this chimes with Hochschild’s ‘on top’ and ‘underneath’ ideologies). There is also the suggestion that this ‘balancing’ is interchangeable—that is, it may

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be in the future that the woman’s career becomes more important, at which point the man will take on more of the child-rearing. Indeed, until the postnatal depression disrupted plans, this couple had an explicit agreement that they would do this. As Twamley notes in her own study examining a similar subject, looking back at other transcripts it was interesting that it was more often the case that the male partner ‘happened’ to have better career prospects at the time of the birth of the first baby, or that the female one cared less about her career, or was in less of a rush to progress (Twamley, 2020). For Laura, who seemed aware that they were slipping into this more widely gendered pattern, this was difficult, particularly as in parts of her narrative there is a commitment to the importance of men taking on care-­ work, in line with a ‘breaking gendered roles’ iteration. Acknowledging later on (such as in her comments around the mental load) that the division of labour was unequal, and that things had not gone to plan, therefore had a correspondingly negative effect on relationship satisfaction (Piña and Bengtson, 1993; see also Ruppanner et al., 2018). Knowledge by participants that gender inequality exists, not only within their own relationships but within wider society, thus appeared to be both reassuring but also deeply frustrating, particularly when women (and it was usually women) felt that they were unable to do anything else but to fall into gender stereotypes. For Laura, who was a member of an online feminist discussion group which had shared this cartoon, this was particularly hard to account for, especially when she moved to part-time work. References Pina, D., & Bengtson, V. (1993). The division of household labor and wives’ happiness: Ideology, employment, and perceptions of support. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 55(4), 901–912. Ruppanner, L., Branden, M., & Turunen, J. (2018). Does unequal housework lead to divorce? Evidence from Sweden. Sociology, 52(1), 75–94. Twamley, K. (2021). ‘She has mellowed me into the idea of SPL’: Unpacking relational resources in UK couples’ discussions of Shared Parental Leave uptake. Families Relationships and Societies, 10(1), 67–82.

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References Anderson, S. (2018). Paternity leave and the motherhood penalty: new causal evidence. Journal of Marriage and Family, 80(October), 1125–1143. Armstrong, C. (2002). Complex equality: Beyond equality and difference. Feminist Theory, 3(1), 67–82. Baird, M., & O’Brien, M. (2015). Dynamics of parental leave in anglophone countries: the paradox of state expansion in liberal welfare regimes. Community Work and Family, 18(2), 198–217. Browne, J. (2013). The default model: Gender equality, fatherhood and structural constraint. Politics & Gender. Official Journal of the American Political Sciences Association (APSA)., 9(02), 152–173. Cannito, M. (2020). The influence of partners on fathers’ decision-making about parental leave in Italy: Rethinking maternal gatekeeping. Current Sociology, 68(6), 832–849. Chanfreau, J., Gowland, S., Lancaster, Z., Poole, E., Tipping, S., & Toomse, M. (2011). Maternity and paternity rights and women returners survey 2009/10. DWP. Craib, I. (2000). Narratives as bad faith. In M. Andrews, S. D. Sclater, C. Sclater, C.  Squire, & A.  Treacher (Eds.), Lines of narrative: Psychosocial perspectives (pp. 64–67). Routlede. Doucet, A. (2006). Do men mother? Fathering, care and domestic responsibility. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Faircloth, C. (2013). Militant lactivism? Infant feeding and maternal accountability in the UK and France. Berghahn Books. FCT (Family and Childcare Trust). (2017). Childcare survey 2017. https://www. familyandchildcaretrust.org/childcare-­survey-­2017 Gornick, J., & Meyers, M. (2009). Gender equality: Transforming Family divisions of labor. Verson. Gov.co.uk. (2020). Statutory maternity pay. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://www.gov.uk/maternity-­p ay-­l eave/pay#:~:text=Statutor y%20 Maternity%20Pay%20(%20SMP%20)%20is,for%20the%20next%2033%20weeks Heaphy, B., & Einarsdottir, A. (2012). Scripting civil partnerships: interviewing couples together and apart. Qualitative Research, 13(1), 53–70. Illouz, E. (2012). Why Love Hurts: A sociological explanation. Polity Press. Kotsadam, A., & Finseraas, H. (2011). The state intervenes in the battle of the sexes: causal effects of paternity leave. Social Science Research, 40, 1611–1622. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2011.06.011 Lewis, J. (1997). Gender and welfare regimes: further thoughts. Social Politics, 4(2), 160–177.

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Morgan, D., Ataie, J., Carder, P., & Hoffman, J. (2013). Introducing dyadic interviews as a method for collecting qualitative data. Qualitative Health Research, 23(9), 1276–1284. Oakley, A. (1981). Interviewing women: A contradiction in terms. In H. Roberts (Ed.), Doing feminist research (pp. 30–61). Routledge and Keagan Paul. ONS. (2017). Birth characteristics in England and Wales 2017. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/birthcharacteristicsinenglandandwales/2017 Riessman, C. (2008). Narrative methods in the human sciences. Sage. Rose, N. (1999[1989]) Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self. Routledge. Schober, P. (2014). Parental leave and domestic work of mothers and fathers: a longitudinal study of two reforms in West Germany. Journal of Social Policy, 43, 351–372. Thomson, R., Kehily, M. J., Hadfield, L., & Sharpe, S. (2011). Making modern mothers. Policy Press. Tolich, M. (2004). Internal confidentiality: when confidentiality assurances fail relationship informants. Qualitative Sociology, 21(1), 101–106. Twamley, K. (2012). Gender relations among Indian couples in the UK and India: ideals of equality and realities of inequality. Sociological Research Online, 17(4). https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.2756 Twamley, K., & Schober, P. (2019). Shared parental leave: exploring variations in attitudes, eligibility, knowledge and take-up intentions of expectant mothers in London. Journal of Social Policy, 48(2), 387–407.

PART II

Practice

Birth, Eating and Sleeping The following three chapters take as their starting point specific practices of parenting (birth, feeding and sleeping), and draw on accounts from the full sample of couples interviewed in this study, not only those who struggled with relationship difficulties. These practices are interwoven with decision-making around parental leave and working patterns, and feature heavily in accounts of the division of labour within relationships. In particular, the chapters examine in depth how ideals and aspirations around care for children match up to expectations, as well as what the costs of gendered patterns established in infancy are for couple relationships in the future. Concerns about ‘good parenting’ have arguably extended both forwards and backwards in time in recent years—now stretching from preconception well into a child’s youth, and into early adulthood (Bristow, 2019). For one couple I spoke with, Jake and Mary, making sure that everything was ‘in place’ was crucial before even trying for a baby. At this point, they were in their early-to-mid-30s and working as a magazine subeditor and a senior bid-writer respectively, each earning between £30,000–40,000. For them, being ‘ready’ included not only a healthy balance in their savings account to accommodate a lower household income, but both stopping drinking alcohol and making sure they were taking the right supplements before ‘beginning to try’ to have a baby (although they had no reason to think they would have trouble conceiving). Certainly, for them, and many other couples in the study, the

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preconception period was understood as something to be ‘prepared for’, in the form of the mother focusing on both her physical but also emotional health (Lee, 2014). As scholars of parenting have argued, this increased attention to the pre- and antenatal period might best be considered an extension backwards of a more normalised ‘parenting culture’, which focuses around the avoidance of risks to the child in utero and once it is born. Once pregnant, there was a consensus among the couples in this sample that this was something that should be carefully monitored, well regulated (in the form of maternal diet, exercise and wellbeing) and ‘supported’ by the partner. In line with a more intensive parenting culture discussed in earlier chapters, other examples, such as play, or indeed sleeping habits which focus around creating secure attachments and establishing ‘optimal neural pathways’ were also regularly mentioned by couples in this research, with many mothers, like Laura, attending classes such as ‘baby sensory’ or ‘baby massage’ under the same rationale (Macvarish, 2016). My previous work has explored the ways in which these discourses around ‘optimal’ or ‘natural’ care are highly gendered, or what the negative implications of that might be (Faircloth, 2013), and whilst I do not elaborate this here, it is worth noting how costly much of this investment is for women in particular, not only in terms of physiological demands, but also time, mental effort and therefore working patterns. As the longitudinal element of this study shows, the long-term implications of this on careers and couple relationships cannot be underestimated.

References Bristow, J. (2019). Helicopter parents’, higher education, and ambivalent adulthood. Revue des Politiques Sociales et Familiales, 133, 9–20. Faircloth, C. (2013). Militant lactivism? Infant feeding and maternal accountability in the UK and France. Berghahn Books. Lee, E. Bristow, J. Faircloth, C., & Macvarish, J. (2014). Parenting culture studies. Palgrave Macmillan. Macvarish, J. (2016). Neuroparenting: The expert invasion of family life. Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 4

Birth

Pregnancy and childbirth, as a ‘biosocial event’ (Jordan, 1996), and a time of exacerbated social and physical responsibility, are an excellent nexus through which questions of norms and values around ‘equality’ might be interrogated. Birth is certainly a ‘signal issue’ within the parenting spectrum, that loomed large in couples’ accounts, particularly because there were very few cases in which reality met with expectation. The large majority of couples in this sample hoped for a ‘natural’ birth, free from intervention, although only one actually ‘achieved’ this, and many spoke instead of their shock at the ‘physical onslaught’ (as Claudia, in the first vignette, puts it) of the immediate postnatal period. This was in spite of a high level of commitment in the sample to techniques like hypnobirthing (based around reinforcing positive affirmations about birth), reflective of a contemporary emphasis on self-management and control in securing this ‘fulfilling’ experience. Through couples’ accounts of birth, this chapter serves as a means of examining women’s confrontations with their gender, as one mother put it, ‘for the first time’. Whereas before they felt that they led relatively similar lives to their partners, reflected in the fact that many couples described finding out ‘we were pregnant’ during their narratives of parenthood, the physiological embodied fact of being pregnant and particularly birthing had ‘floored’ many of them, in ways that did not sit easily with their aspirations of equality. For many women, it was this experience, followed by the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Faircloth, Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77403-5_4

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fact of staying at home for an extended period to care for the child, that prompted them to ‘get’ feminism for the first time. In short, despite the talk of ‘equal’ parenting, pregnancy and birth were the starting points for a divergence in gendered parenting paths. There is plenty to be said about the emergence of this divergence during pregnancy, and of course many women talked about this retrospectively—some examples of which are featured here. However, due to the study design, which involved meeting couples late on in their pregnancy, the chapter focuses on the practice of birth more specifically.

Birth as an Analytical Object Birth, a fundamental element of the lifecycle, is an event in which society has a particularly vested interest. Indeed, practices of birth can be said to be indexed to values around women’s gender-specific identities, which are part and parcel of the smooth running of social reproduction more widely. In line with a more ‘deterministic’ understanding of infancy, this is also a practice understood to have implications not only for individual but also wider population level health. An academic look at childbirth necessarily implies therefore a discussion of social norms and values, both around birth but also around gender and equality. Within the anthropological discipline, Brigitte Jordan’s Birth in Four Cultures (1996 [1978]) heralded an interest in the systematic cross-­ cultural investigation of birth, since before the mid-1970s ‘Childbirth did not exist in anthropology’ (Jordan, 1997, p.  55). Today, there exists a large body of literature exploring reproduction, pregnancy and childbirth from social scientists such as Oakley (1980, 1984), MacCormack (1982), Davis-Floyd (1992), Davis-Floyd and Davis (1997) and Martin (1989), Ginsburg and Rapp (1995) and Inhorn and Birenbaum-Carmeli (2008), with the later contributions focusing on the rise of assisted reproductive technologies in particular. Jordan understands birth to be a ‘biosocial’ event: an approach I have used here, appreciating the universal physiological pattern, and the specific, culturally sanctioned, way of managing this. Clearly, the presentation of this very physiological process will itself change in time as new technologies become available, and perceptions (embedded in culture) about how to present ‘facts’ continue to shift. Yet her discussion clarifies that whatever the actual details of a culturally specific birthing system, the participants within that system will understand it to be the way to do it, so

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that practices come to be packaged into ‘relatively uniform, systematic, standardised, ritualised, even morally required routines’ (1996, p. 2). The way of doing birth becomes nothing less than hegemonically ‘obvious’: the definition of the event is of fundamental importance in that it informs participants regarding the proper who, where, and how of birth… each society produces a systematic configuration of birth practices which are mutually dependent and internally consistent. What makes them dependent and consistent, and furthermore morally right, is the local culture-specific definition of the event as, for example, a medical procedure (in the United States), or as a stressful but normal part of family life (as in Yucatan), or as a natural process (as in Holland), or as an intensely personal, and fulfilling achievement (as is the case in Sweden). This locally shared view of childbirth guarantees that, by and large, participants have similar views regarding the course and management of birth. It has ideological status…it serves as a guide for conducting the routine business at hand. At the same time, it furnishes the resources for dealing with ‘trouble’ by providing grounds for justifying obstetric procedures if and when they become problematic. (Jordan, 1996, p. 34)

Great Expectations Undoubtedly, my informants shared (implicit) assumptions about ‘the way’ of doing birth—it would ideally be one without ‘interventions’ including induction, acceleration or (much) analgesia. More specifically, it would be one that avoided the use of forceps, ventouse or C-section. This is reflective of a policy context which stresses that these procedures, particularly the latter, should only be used when medically necessary, and after full discussion of their ‘overall risks and benefits’. Furthermore, an implicit message about the importance of ‘attachment’ and ‘bonding’ is evidenced in the information, with practices such as skin-to-skin contact immediately after the birth encouraged (NHS, 2020, and see Faircloth (2013) on the increasing influence of these gendered discourses in medical literature). In Great Expectations (1998), Green et al. found that the better educated women were about pregnancy and childbirth, the higher were their expectations of birth, and I suggest that this is characteristic of the women in my study. I draw on the example of Rada and Keerti here, an American-Asian couple, who were fairly typical in terms of their hopes for the birth of their baby. At the time of meeting, whilst Rada was eight months pregnant, they were working freelance in a charity and as a postdoctoral researcher

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at a London university respectively, earning a total household income of £50,000–60,000. Rada planned to take at least six months to a year off work, and ‘may not return at all’, despite the fact that this will make things quite tight for them moneywise. She was also the one who took the lead on cooking, shopping, cleaning and so on. Like some of the other couples discussed, this is not equality narrated as either ‘breaking gendered roles’ or ‘50/50’, but rather as overall ‘balance’. Certainly, despite an acknowledgement of difference, ‘equality’ remained key to Rada and Keerti’s narrative about their relationship. As the pregnancy progressed, what this actually meant in practice had changed—in recognition that negotiations around ‘equality’ are fluid, relational and in flux. For example, Rada’s inability to do as much as she used to (in terms of shopping and carrying bags) had prompted a discussion about the fact that running the household was a joint enterprise. As Keerti said, notably using ‘we’ to describe the pregnancy: Well what I’ve noticed is that, well before we were pregnant we were trying to have a plan for our week’s meals and stuff like that and really I would leave almost all of this to Rada. I would try to help but what’s become more clear as the pregnancy has progressed is that it’s too much to leave all of that for Rada so I think in the last month, maybe in the last month, she has really been expressing that, ‘We have to do this together. I cannot do this alone.’

For the majority of couples in this study, birth was something that both members of the couple were expected to ‘work at’ in advance—by attending antenatal classes, reading books or internet resources. Nevertheless, whilst Rada said that ‘we’ do a lot of research about birth, telling me about the resources she had drawn on, she later admitted that it is she who was driving this and who tried to encourage Keerti to do some research about the various options, whether about birth or the kinds of baby equipment they might need. She said that she has also been seeing a counsellor about the birth, as she was anxious about it, in addition to attending a hypnobirthing course. When I ask what an ‘ideal’ birth would look like, Rada said: Well we’ve been talking about it a lot more now because I was just telling Keerti that these Active Birth Classes [a form of birth-preparation classes focussing on breathing and yoga based techniques] are really great because I feel like over time they are exactly what I was wanting, just to build my

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confidence that I could deliver a child. However it goes I think we are trying to stay open to it being a natural birth; then if not, that’s fine but yes, I think preparing and knowing the positions and how to breathe…and then taking the hypnobirthing class which is also great. So hopefully we can draw on that too. [We’ll be in] the birthing centre at [the hospital; the midwife led unit, as opposed to on the labour ward, which is where consultant led cases take place, including those that require most interventions]

Importantly for this chapter, there was an assumption amongst all participants in the study that the partner would be present at the birth; indeed, this was so common sense as to not even be discussed by the couples I spoke to, although historically this is relatively new. Today, over 90% of fathers are present at the birth of their children compared with 0–13% in the 1950s (RCM, 2010). For Rada and Keerti, it was a given that he would be present, and they were still debating whether her mother would be there at the hospital, or just await them at their flat (she planned to fly in from America to be there around the time of the birth). I draw on a further example from the study here, who were interviewed only once. This couple, Zahra and Adam, were an interesting case in terms of their professional orientations. Zahra, on a temporary academic contract, was informed during her pregnancy that she would not be entitled to statutory maternity leave payments. Adam, by contrast, was at this point writing up a PhD, whilst training to be a psychotherapist and working for an educational company. Zahra had come forward after hearing about this study, to offer her perspective as a parent of twins: a valuable addition to a research project exploring the parameters of ‘intensive’ motherhood. At this point, the twins were nearly two years old. This couple, of Anglo-­ Indian heritage, were living in accommodation subsidised by the husband’s family, and at this point had a household income of under £30,000. From the outset, whilst the pregnancy was welcome, being pregnant with twins was a huge surprise to this couple—having twins threw any budgeting and housing calculations wildly out. Furthermore, a (twin) pregnancy had a dramatic effect on their relationship. Zahra suffered badly with severe pregnancy symptoms, including nausea and high blood pressure, meaning she was unable to cook food, or assist with their house move, for example. Because of this, there was no other option but for Adam to take the lead in terms of domestic responsibilities; something which continued well after the birth of the babies, as becomes evident.

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There was, then an expectation of fathers’ involvement, and an anticipation that birth was something ‘we’ were both ‘working on’ and ‘preparing for’. At the same time, there was a contradiction, in that it was clearly assumed that women would be ‘doing more’ not only in terms of educational preparation but quite clearly when it came to the actual physicality of labour, a fact often tied to a reiteration of the ‘natural’ capacities of female bodies. This contradiction raises some questions for couples committed to ‘equal’ parenting.

…Shattered Women’s actual experiences of childbirth, particularly if they had hoped for an ‘intervention free’ experience, often led them to feel guilty and unhappy about what ends up happening during birth. Explicitly or otherwise, as the literature around intensive motherhood has argued (Hays, 1996; Wolf, 2011), it is women to whom the majority of messages about ‘good parenting’ (and by extension, the importance of a good birth for infant and maternal health) are directed, not least because there is a physiological element to so much of what is considered appropriate care. It is therefore women’s bodies (and women’s minds) which are ultimately held accountable. Rada’s experience of birth was not the one she had either hoped for or anticipated. Her waters broke before she had reached full term (at 37 weeks) so she was automatically assigned to the Labour Ward at her hospital, rather than the Birth Centre, meaning she was under the care of obstetricians rather than midwives. She was asked to come into the hospital on the Friday and then not allowed to leave, despite the fact that labour had not really begun, as there was a risk of infection to the baby. Keerti, on the other hand, was not allowed to stay overnight, as he was considered a ‘visitor’ rather than ‘birth partner’ before labour was established. Rada’s contractions increased, and the baby was eventually born 36 hours later, on the Sunday. Keerti was allowed to be with her overnight on the Saturday. Rada said: Yes, it was a 36-hour labour but it wasn’t all that bad but then after the first 24 hours is when they put me onto the labour ward. Yes, they had to induce me because my waters had broken and I had to have epidurals and spinal block and they were thinking about doing a C-section and then they didn’t so it was forceps delivery with an episiotomy. It was every intervention that

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you could imagine, but it was good. I think everyone was really good as gold, it was fine.

They then had to stay in the hospital for another five days because of concerns about infection that staff wanted to monitor. Keerti was allowed in for ‘12 out of the 24 hours’, otherwise Rada was there on her own with the baby. This was narrated as hard by both members of the couple— although both also said that it ‘made sense’ so that he could get some sleep and communicate with family members. Coming home was ‘great’ because they finally felt more at ease and had a few days to themselves before Rada’s mother arrived from the US (having booked a flight to coincide with the original due date) and Keerti went back to work after his statutory two weeks of paternity leave. For the parents of twins, it was a similar story. The experience was not as Zahra had wished—ideally it would have been a ‘natural’ delivery, but having read up on the relative risks of vaginal and caesarean section for twins, they opted for an elective C-section. However, this also turned out not to go as planned. In fact, Zahra’s waters had actually broken ten days in advance of her going into early ‘established labour’, which posed a serious danger of infection for the babies, but this was not picked up. This was despite being in and out of hospital for a number of nights complaining of labour pains, bleeding, and having had numerous ‘painful’ internal examinations from junior staff. When labour was finally acknowledged as being ‘active’, she was admitted to the labour ward and had an epidural. She was taken into theatre for the C-section, but by this point it was too late as the first baby, the boy, was already too far down the birth canal to be delivered anything other than vaginally. However, after his arrival, it emerged that the second baby, a girl, was in a breech position, and despite trying to ‘grab her legs’, the decision was taken to do an emergency C-section as her heart-rate was dropping rapidly. As Zahra put it: ‘If they hadn’t been able to do a caesarean we would have lost her, it was a real emergency for us.’ While this decision was being taken, the alarm bell went off, which meant that there was another emergency in the next-door theatre. Zahra continued: So literally half the team went [out of the room] before they had taken [our daughter] out. And then it wasn’t long after that, about an hour I think that we all got moved into the recovery room and that’s when they changed [our son’s] nappy and it was full of blood and he was coughing up blood and

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then he got taken off to Intensive Care and then they booted Adam out because it wasn’t visiting hours at this moment. So all in all it was a complete trauma…I didn’t actually know what was going on with [our son] and I didn’t know he had gone into Intensive Care and I had just had major abdominal surgery and I had another newborn who was trying to latch on and I had real difficulty with that…and it was not actually until 24 hours later, the following day that I got to see [our son], and…I don’t even know how that happened.

In the immediate perinatal period, the different birth outcomes of the babies led to each child having very different trajectories: after being admitted into Intensive Care, the little boy was tube fed with formula milk, despite the mother wanting to express colostrum. The girl was breastfed after initial difficulties, but then had trouble with reflux (meaning that she would not take formula milk in later months, as this seemed to exacerbate the problem, so she was breastfed until weaning onto solid foods). Zahra had huge trouble establishing breastfeeding with her son, and she described him as somehow being ‘damaged’ or ‘untrusting’ after the experience of having feeding tubes inserted. (This was coupled later with a botched operation to rectify tongue tie, which left him bleeding excessively and in a lot of pain, after which he refused to breastfeed at all. After four months of breastfeeding and expressing for two babies of low birthweight, the little boy was moved on to formula milk.)

Birth Stories, Identity Work and Relationships Reflecting on her experience of birth, Rada said she felt a little short-­ changed by her preparations. Of her NCT group, she noted: Yes and in my group, there might be two I’m not sure, I think we had out of nine women I think there were like four or five C-sections, two assisted deliveries, maybe one or two natural childbirths but with like second or third degree tears. Then there is mastitis, urinary tract infections, abscesses on the breast, everything…Somebody had an anal fissure. Our group…it’s been wonderful support but very difficult. When we were just talking about the class compared to our experiences do not match up. I don’t know if you can really be prepared for that because, like I said many people say just be prepared for anything.

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Clearly, accounts of birth are not just reflections of a series of events— they are stories which ‘do something’ in terms of how couples account for the gap between expectation and experience, as well as come to terms with making the transition to parenthood. They are also a ‘family practice’ in terms of how they enact their newly gendered roles as parents, an argument made by McInnes-Dean (2021). As she puts it, ‘Perhaps this is in part why births become stories; even when participants attempted to minimise their expectations, birth was a point of potential fracture between expectations and experiences’ (2021, p. 99). It was certainly the case that this was considered women’s story to tell; many women had clearly rehearsed their version of events, whilst men often held back in our second interview. This is clear in the case of Keerti and Rada—he spoke often of ‘us’ or ‘we’ being pregnant, and was much quieter about the birth itself, deferring to Rada. Reading the transcript more closely, it is also clear that there is a huge amount of moral work going on in these stories, where women are established (by themselves, or by others) as ‘good mothers’ who are willing to endure hardship to ensure the safe arrival of their babies. Rada noted, ‘It was every intervention that you could imagine but it was good. I think everyone was really good as gold, it was fine.’ Her repeated insistence that everything was ‘fine’ belied a different reality in which she was still emotionally sore and disappointed—but also unable to appear concerned with anything other than the health and safety of the baby. This ‘identity work’ was also visible in the narratives of couples for whom things had gone more to plan. Eva, a human resources assistant in a security firm, and Mike, a restaurant manager, said in advance of the baby arriving that an ideal birth would be one that was ‘on time and with no pain’ (with some amount of laughter). Reflecting on how things had gone, Eva spoke about the birth of their daughter as being quite ‘straightforward’ in that it was quite fast, about three days after her due date, and that she ‘didn’t have any painkillers’. Interestingly, however, she hinted at how moralised these kinds of discussions could be, particularly amongst new parents, by adding at a later point, ‘not that there would be anything wrong with having had [painkillers], of course, I was just lucky’. Through such examples, women position themselves as ‘good mothers’ in their narratives, something evident in the accounts from Claudia and Laura too. This works in both directions: both by emphasising the ways in which the arrival of their baby was a ‘struggle’ that they had overcome through, for

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example, selflessly ceding to medical direction as Rada did, and by being careful not to be seen as gloating or taking credit for positive experiences of birth, like Eva (McInnes-Dean, 2021, p. 117). For Rada and Keerti, the birth was in some ways a bonding experience that brought them closer as a couple—and this was true for many in the sample. At the same time, particularly with the restrictions on visiting hours, it was clear that Rada was understood to be the primary parent, right from the off. It was ‘common sense’ that Keerti went home to sleep, and ‘natural’ that she would be the one feeding the baby through the night. So whilst many couples said that ‘we’ were pregnant, not one said that ‘we’ were giving birth, denoting a deferral of authority to the woman’s experience. Men were instead ‘in awe’ of their partners, venerating their ‘super-human’ abilities. As McInnes-Dean notes, fathers’ part in these narratives was not so much about establishing themselves as good fathers but rather as good partners (2021, p. 118): Birth stories are therefore not only about kinship but actually help in the formation [of] specific kinship roles and structures, in which mothers are the parents with primary parenting authority (and responsibility), and fathers take secondary, supporting roles to ‘amazing’ others’. (2021, p. 121)

In the case of the twins, things were a little different. This was in part because they had two babies, and in part because of their different work set-up. As noted, Adam was working ‘flexibly’ during the first year—as Zahra said, she would not have coped otherwise. As such, this couple did not talk about Adam being ‘involved’ (with the implication that child-­ rearing was something Zahra was otherwise ‘in charge’ of). Instead, and perhaps more than any other father in the sample, he was considered by both members of the couple to be a primary carer. As a prelude to the next chapter, it is important to reiterate how certain practices flowed from the differential birth stories of each twin. At the time, for example, formula feeding was clearly seen as suboptimal for their son, although both parents recognised the potential for ‘bonding’ that this brought for the father and son. In part the decision to stop breastfeeding the boy was because Zahra found the experience of ‘tandem’ feeding (both children at once) in the early days ‘awful’ because she was ‘essentially naked’. She therefore moved to feeding them sequentially, but because this was each of them every two hours, she was too exhausted to continue. The immense efforts she went to in order to provide breastmilk

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for her children was nothing short of extraordinary—as she put it, ‘That was my life.’ However, in retrospect (at the time of our interview) she did wonder why she had ‘made it a kind of endurance test’ which drove her to the point of illness through exhaustion. These post-partum, early decisions (or rather, strategies for survival) had longer-term implications: not only did their son move into his own room earlier than their daughter, who stayed in a cot by the mother’s side of the bed for the majority of the first year until they did some sleep training, it also had implications for each parent’s relationship with their children. When present, Adam took primary responsibility for the son and Zahra for the daughter. Certainly, being on a limited income put huge pressure on them, not least because they were living in central London, albeit with the assistance of his parents—a dynamic which caused a certain amount of stress for the couple. Nevertheless, because he was around, and because there were two infants to care for, the father was absolutely indispensable in this parenting set-up. Indeed, this couple had a deep and profound understanding of their relationship with each other, and spoke about it in quite reverential terms. Where there would have been scope for them to become frayed, not least due to tiredness, they talked about how they had cleaved together in this time of adversity, particularly the birth and its immediate aftermath, and how they had a sense that their lives were ‘profoundly shared, on every level’. As Adam put it, he had a sense that their ‘individual boundaries were much more permeable’, and they had a ‘complete mutual understanding’. (I return to this sentiment in the chapter on sleep, as it chimes so closely with Fox’s typology of relationship patterns and the notion of mutual support and understanding being critical to relationship harmony.) This was not a couple who talked about the need for ‘equality’ in parenting—it was, almost by default, much more equitable than couples with one baby. It is probably also related to their respective earning capacities, which were better matched than other couples in the sample whose earnings more quickly siloed into the breadwinner/homemaker model. As becomes clear, this is quite unlike the stories of the majority of heterosexual couples of single babies, in which fathers take a short period of time off work (two weeks) when a baby is born, leaving the mother to take sole charge of the infant. As a lesbian couple (Jane and Catherine) interviewed for the research put it, the idea that women somehow know more about what to do with a small baby is a complete ‘myth’—when Catherine went back to work after their first son was born, she was left with an overwhelming sense of Jane’s loneliness and lack of knowledge, because she

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herself also felt ‘clueless’ about what to do. At least in the case of the twins born to Zahra and Adam, there was no (or less) sense that the mother could be left to ‘get on with it’, but rather that all hands were needed on deck to cope with even the most basic daily requirements.

Conclusion For couples who understood equality as a 50/50 division of tasks or ‘breaking of gendered roles’, it was particularly difficult to reconcile this with their experience of birth (see Twamley, 2020; Faircloth, 2020). This is evident, for example, in the accounts from Claudia and Laura in the vignettes above. For these couples, the ‘warzone’ of birth and the early postnatal period was completely ‘shocking’ and almost harder to reconcile than for those couples like Rada and Keerti, who were more accepting of gender difference and who held onto the idea of equality as about overall ‘fairness’ or ‘balance’—or indeed for our parents of twins, for whom there was a stronger rationale to have both parents fully engaged in the task of parenting. But for all couples in the sample there is some evidence of ‘shock’, with narratives relayed in such a way to validate ‘good motherhood’ through motifs of maternal effort and sacrifice. The same stories establish men as good partners, in a supportive role to this primary mother–baby dyad. Finally, it is also clear that the physiological ‘fact’ of birth sets the tone for a whole host of parenting practices which seem to cascade from this physiological rationale, something explored further in the next two chapters.

References Davis-Floyd, R.  E. (1992). Birth as an American rite of passage. University of California Press. Davis-Floyd, R., & Davis, E. (1997). Intuition as authoritative knowledge in midwifery and home birth. In R. Davis-Floyd & C. Sargent (Eds.), Childbirth and authoritative knowledge: Cross-cultural perspectives (pp. 316–349). University of California Press. Faircloth, C. (2013). Militant lactivism? Infant feeding and maternal accountability in the UK and France. Berghahn Books. Faircloth, C. (2020). When equal couples become unequal partners: Couple relationships and intensive parenting culture. Families, relationships and societies, Online First.

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Ginsburg, F. D., & Rapp, R. (Eds.). (1995). Conceiving the new world order: The global politics of reproduction. University of California Press. Green, J., Kitzinger, J., & Coupland, V. (1998). Great expectations: A prospective study of women’s expectations and experiences of childbirth (2nd ed.). Books for Midwives Press. Hays, S. (1996). The cultural contradictions of motherhood. Yale University Press. Inhorn, M., & Birenbaum-Carmeli, D. (2008). Assisted reproductive technologies and culture change. Annual Review of Anthropology, 37, 177–196. Jordan, B. (1996 [1978]). Birth in four cultures, a crosscultural investigation of childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden and the United States. Eden Press. Jordan, B. (1997). Authoritative knowledge and its construction’ and Browner, C. & Press, N. ‘The production of authoritative knowledge in American Prenatal Care. In R.  Davis-Floyd & C.  F. Sargent (Eds.), Childbirth and authoritative knowledge, crosscultural perspectives. University of California Press. MacCormack, C. P. (1982). Ethnography of fertility and birth. Academic Press. Martin, E. (1989). The woman in the body: A cultural analysis of reproduction. Open University Press. McInnes-Dean, H. (2021). Making parents: Expectations and experiences of the transition to parenthood in Edinburgh. Unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. NHS. (2020). Caesarean section. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https:// www.nhs.uk/conditions/caesarean-­section/ Oakley, A. (1980). Women confined: Towards a sociology of childbirth. Martin Robertson. Oakley, A. (1984). The captured womb: A history of the medical care of pregnant women. Basil Blackwell. Royal College of Midwives. (2010). ‘Nine in ten fathers to be present at birth’ Miwdives 1. https://www.rcm.org.uk/news-­views-­and-­analysis/news/nine-­ in-­ten-­fathers-­to-­be-­present-­at-­birth2 Twamley, K. (2020) ‘She has mellowed me into the idea of SPL’: Unpacking relational resources in UK couples’ discussions of Shared Parental Leave uptake. Families relationships and societies, Online First. Wolf, J. (2011). Is breast best? Taking on the breastfeeding experts and the new high stakes of motherhood. New York University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Feeding

Feeding is one of the most conspicuously moralised elements of contemporary parenting culture, particularly in infancy when the ‘breast vs. bottle’ debate looms large. As my work has explored in the past (Faircloth, 2013), infant feeding intersects with maternal identity in unprecedented ways in the contemporary ‘breast is best’ era, which has huge implications for women’s (and men’s) sense of personhood. Because of its vital importance for the survival and healthy development of infants, feeding is a highly scrutinised domain where mothers must counter any charges of practising unusual, harmful or morally suspect feeding techniques (Murphy, 1999). Powerful feelings about feeding are derived from the fact that it operates as a ‘signal issue’ which boxes women off into different parenting ‘camps’ (Kukla, 2005). This chapter profiles couples’ accounts of infant feeding, to explore how the ‘breast is best’ message intersects (or otherwise) with narratives around the importance of equal parenting and involved fathering (Tomori, 2015), drawing on accounts from couples who adhere to varying iterations of equality. It therefore explores how messages about parenting are gendered and internalised differently by men and women, and how this can cause a ‘deadlock’ in terms of intimacy and support. In this chapter, in addition to heterosexual couples in the wider sample, I draw on the accounts of a lesbian mother couple who each birthed and breastfed a child during the course of the research period, to complicate theoretical discussions around gender, bodies and equality. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Faircloth, Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77403-5_5

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Infant Feeding and Moralisation Certainly, the ways infants are fed (breastfeeding, bottle feeding, partial breastfeeding and so on) has a major impact on how daily family life unfolds as well as on roles that parents take: when and where the family members sleep (in the baby’s room, parents’ bedroom or with the parents in their bed, for example). Perhaps more than any other practice, feeding moulds parental lifestyles, personal space and daily rhythms. It is a complex routine with profound ramifications on well-being, self-image and interaction among family members, even affecting fundamental categorial assumptions around gender and personhood. For that reason, the discussions and debates revolving around the theme of nutrition are complex (Harman et  al., 2018). The practices are generally discussed not only within the family, but also with physicians and other health professionals, among friends and with other parents, relatives and even publicly in mass media. Lee and Furedi (2005) note that in policy terms, infant feeding is generally presented as part of wider debates about health, showing how in the last few decades, a huge amount of attention has been paid to the promotion of ‘healthy living’ (Choosing Health was the name of one Department of Health White Paper in 2004). Part of the new paradigm of health is an imperative on the individual to minimise risk from the consumption of the so-called ‘bad’ substances (whether food, drink, drugs or otherwise). This carries particular moral baggage for mothers: ‘The health of children in particular has been identified as a potent site for risk consciousness in this regard because of their presumed innocence and vulnerability…and for this reason, it has been argued that, because mothers have a particular responsibility for feeding children, the moralisation of eating intersects with the social construction of motherhood’ (Lee, 2007; see also Lupton, 1996). New mothers in the UK can expect to hear a strong ‘breast is best’ message from a range of governmental and non-governmental agencies (Lee, 2007). This message to breastfeed exclusively for six months and ‘for anything up to two years or beyond’ (WHO, 2003), is based on evidence from clinical studies which show significant benefits to infant (and maternal) health, largely due to the immunological character of breastmilk (Hoddinott et al., 2008). The presentation of this evidence is not entirely straightforward, however. Knaak notes, for example, that whilst breastfeeding is healthier than formula feeding, the differential outcomes

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between formula-fed and breastfed babies are often ‘on balance, considerably less pronounced than the [pro-breastfeeding] discourse portrays’ (2006).1 Current policy around infant feeding is best represented by UNICEF’s Baby Friendly Initiative (BFI), a programme drawn up in 1992, and active in the UK since 1994, currently endorsed as the ‘gold standard’ of maternity care by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the Department of Health. With the aim of addressing the infant feeding ‘problem’ and increasing the numbers of women who breastfeed, maternity facilities can be accredited as ‘Baby Friendly’ if they adopt the BFI’s 10 Steps to Successful Breastfeeding. This includes having a written breastfeeding policy that is routinely communicated to all staff, informing all pregnant women about the benefits of breastfeeding and helping women initiate breastfeeding soon after birth (UNICEF, 2005). Under the BFI programme, hospital staff must not provide infants with any food or drink other than breastmilk, ‘unless medically indicated’. Similarly, there is to be no group demonstration of how to formula feed a baby—only to be supplied if specifically requested by a mother. Group demonstrations are reserved for information on how to breastfeed. If mothers do decide to use formula milk, they must only do so ‘after being fully informed of the benefits of exclusive breastfeeding and the risks of supplementary feeding’ (UNICEF, 2005). It is arguable that in this context, enacting an ‘informed choice’ means choosing to breastfeed. Indeed, Murphy has written about the experiences of British mothers who use formula milk in the early months of their child’s life (1999). In a culture where ‘breast is best’, her work addresses the moral work a woman has to undertake, if, as she puts it, she is to respond to the charge of being ‘a ‘poor mother’ who places her own needs, preferences and convenience above her baby’s welfare’ (Murphy, 1999, pp. 187–188). Mothers faced what Murphy refers to as ‘interactional challenges’ (1999, p. 187). They felt a need to justify why they were doing something they perceived was ‘wrong’. Typically, they had used formula milk to address quite pragmatic issues, such as fatigue, a need to return to work, a wish to share feeding 1  She refers to the paper by the American Academy of Pediatrics,‘Report of the Task Force on the assessment of the scientific evidence relating to infant-feeding practices and infant health’. Pediatrics 1984 74 (4): (supp): 579–584. Hoddinott’s paper gives a useful appraisal of the evidence available.

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with another person or the pain that can be associated with positioning the baby on the breast. Yet, like Claudia and Laura in the vignettes above, they frequently felt defensive, angry, guilty and anxious at having to respond to what they perceived as criticism. As Lee and Bristow comment, it is interesting that women who use formula milk feel that they are ‘breaking the rules’, since statistics show that they are in the vast majority. The 2010 Infant Feeding Survey (the most recent available after it was discontinued) shows that by six weeks 77% of women are not breastfeeding exclusively—meaning that a majority of women at this point are feeding their baby with some amount of formula milk. Certainly, mothers who do not breastfeed in the early months must engage in ‘identity work’ to create themselves as moral citizens, in the face of ‘deviance’, yet they do this from within the comfort of a statistical—and cultural—norm to formula feed.

Physicality and Embodiment of Intensive Parenting As Gatrell notes, women’s ability to give birth and to breastfeed is cited by both mothers and fathers as providing mothers with what one father described as an ‘inbuilt advantage’ from the outset (2007, see also McInnes-Dean, 2021; Twamley, 2020). Twamley and Schober note, for example, that 24% of couples in their study said that they would not share parental leave because of breastfeeding. This was certainly an important rationale in this study, usually used to explain why mothers were the ones taking longer periods of leave—interestingly, this was the case even in instances when mothers did not end up breastfeeding. That is to say, all mothers intended to breastfeed or combination feed and take long periods of time away from work, but even if breastfeeding was not established, this was not seen as a reason to alter the leave arrangements. What emerges here is that ‘feeding’, as a practice with variable physiological implications (i.e., whether full breastfeeding, expressing, full bottle feeding or some combination) therefore becomes a proxy for other issues in couples’ negotiations around parental leave and childcare. In terms of how couples talked about (breast)feeding, it was generally the case that they acknowledged that women would take the primary role with this task, but that men would be there to ‘support’ them. This was illustrated in the interviews with Pearl (36, working as a web developer) and Tim (44, working as a programme administrator for a charity). In terms of their relationship set-up, this was again ‘traditional’ in that Pearl

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was taking 12 months of leave and planning not to return or reduce her hours significantly afterwards, whilst Tim was seeking extra hours to his already-full-time job to cover the upcoming shortfall in income. Nevertheless, ‘sharing’ and ‘fairness’ was key to their narrative in terms of how they approached the tasks of parenting, particularly around feeding: Charlotte: Have you…thought about when the baby is six months old, who is going to get up in the middle of night? Tim: I think we are kind of thinking and talking to other people about how they did it, during the week you’d get up and during the weekend I’ll get up. Pearl: Yes and after a month or two when I can just rest then Tim can get up and do the feeds on weekends so I can catch up. Tim: She can sleep through and I can sleep through when I don’t have to go to work in the morning. We will share it out. I know it’s five to two days but… Pearl: If I’m having a rough night and I really need the support then that’s different. Tim: It’s a general rule, rather than a rigid one. If someone’s [I’m] awake and they hear the baby crying and she is out sparko and there is a bottle in the fridge then I can go and do it. We are definitely going to share it. In the first vignette, it was evident that Claudia felt that the way she fed her children had a lot to do with the division of labour between her and her husband, and played a part in their relationship breakdown after her second child was born. In this culture of ‘breast is best’, many women felt that they were in a bind, in that they were on the one hand encouraged, as per the NHS guidance, to ‘breastfeed exclusively for six months and for ‘anything up to two years, or beyond’, whilst at the same time aspiring to an equitable (and intimate) relationship with their partners. For many couples, these two things were difficult to combine, as feeding a baby had knock-on implications for other activities of care. Many women in the study who breastfed commented, for example, that even if the partner was able to feed the baby with a bottle of expressed milk (itself sometimes a struggle, both for mothers to produce and for babies to accept), breastfeeding meant that they were never ‘really free’ (Pearl) as they always had to ‘think’ about feeding, even at a distance. This included continued

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monitoring of their diet, as well as the logistics of expressing milk either in advance or whilst away from their babies.

Material Barriers to ‘Equal’ Parenting Of course practices of care, including feeding, are not just about embodied practices or intimate relationships. They also link to wider social structures and state infrastructure, as discussed in Chap. 3. In only one case in this sample was the female partner out-earning her male partner, and in no instance would it have made financial ‘sense’ for men to take longer periods of leave than women, particularly because at this point it was rare for the father’s employers to offer enhanced APL or SPL packages (meaning they would be only eligible to statutory pay).2 This is indicative of a gender pay gap across society as a whole, which becomes notable around the time that men and women become parents (FCT, 2017). Heather (29) was a PhD student and freelance teacher and David (44) a freelance web developer. They were expecting their first child, and at our first interview after the birth of their first baby, talk about how they would have liked to have divided childcare: I mean our original plan…I seem to remember as saying, ‘wouldn’t it be good if I worked two days a week and looked after the baby for three and [you] did the other way round’. Because I couldn’t really imagine not working.

Unfortunately, this was just not financially feasible, in part because if David were to take any leave (which would have to be unpaid due to the restrictions on APL), Heather would not earn enough to cover their outgoings—unlike other couples in the sample, who may have been able to afford it for a few months at least. She would therefore be looking after their child indefinitely, with some support from grandparents—something she described as a bit ‘demoralising’ having just finished her PhD.  This couple went on to have two other children within the next three years, all of them breastfed for a period of up to one year. Whilst Heather talked 2  See, however, Twamley (2020) who comments on the ‘surprise’ that some couples express each time they ‘realize’ that there would not actually have been a financial penalty if the father had taken a longer period of leave. In her study Twamley notes that one couple who did this several times over the course of her interviews with them, insisting that they would have organised things differently ‘if they had known’ (pers. comm.)

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about the way in which David ‘carries them’ financially, he spoke about finding this responsibility a ‘strain’ and in a ‘money-no-object’ world would like to have more time with the children, although he felt very grateful to be able to work from home so much. Many critics point out that despite the ideological emphasis on equal parenting, the financial backing to make that a reality for couples is simply not there, particularly given the restrictions on SPL (Twamley & Schober, 2019). Instead, there is a tendency to advocate the importance of what Dermott (2008) calls the ‘caring about’ activities of childcare to men— swimming clubs, reading classes and so on—rather than actually facilitating the ‘caring for’ activities such as feeding or cleaning that children require. Whilst discursively fathers may be encouraged to be ‘involved’ in parenting and take more of an equal load of childcare, in reality it is women who continue to shoulder most of the responsibility for care (Dermott, 2008; Gillies, 2009). This has knock-on implications in that male caretaking has a low social visibility. This was echoed by many men who felt uncomfortable when looking after their children in public—at the lack of changing facilities in male toilets, for example, or at being the ‘only man in the room’ at children’s activities. There was also a recognition that childcare challenged traditional assumptions about masculinity, in ways very different to femininity, which instead was bolstered by the activities associated with parenting (Manny, 2015). As Anthony, from the first vignette, put it: What I’m trying to say is I want to be able to do that [look after my son] and for society to afford me the same ‘man’ status. And I think society doesn’t have a place for men who look after children full-time, it’s more seen as ‘soft men’ or men who are actually doing ‘women’s work’.

At the same time, of course, there were also certainly cases where fathers would say they would like to spend more time with their children (e.g., if facilitated by paid parental leave) but, when pushed, admitted that, as James put it, ‘just something like a month might be nice…but I couldn’t be a stay-at-home Dad’ and that ‘my kind of work doesn’t really allow [part-time working]’. It was also noticeable that many couples justified the mother’s decision to work by their ability to pay for childcare with their own salary. In one case, Pearl retrained as a childminder, to make work financially ‘worthwhile’ given that she could look after their child and another at the same

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time. This accountability strategy was notable by its absence in men’s accounts. This yet again reflects Baird and O’Brien’s (2015) assertion around the residual stereotypes around men and women’s roles in society, such that caregiving and homemaking should be a woman’s first priority, and if not, her responsibility to ‘outsource’, rather than a cost for the household.

Rethinking Gender Roles: Gay Couples and Parenting Culture For most couples in the sample, there was a link between the physicality of breastfeeding being tied to the female body, which was then cemented as a rationale for extended periods of leave and caregiving on the part of women by the material structures of the UK parental leave system (and the gendered expectations of a wider intensive parenting culture). To complicate this a little, I draw here on the accounts of two gay families who agreed to be part of the research. The first are a lesbian couple, Jane and Catherine, each of whom bore, birthed and breastfed one of their two children, conceived with sperm from the same donor, two years apart. The second are a gay father couple, Dave and Chris, who were parents to two children with a ‘single mother’, Ann (a friend, who became pregnant using sperm donated by Dave) in a co-parenting relationship. They draw on several iterations of equality—of ‘50/50 but also ‘taking turns’ and ‘fairness’ as well as (of course) breaking gendered roles to challenge our ideas about gender, the body and parenting. Jane and Catherine, when I first met them, already had one son (aged one and a half), who had been born to Jane. Catherine was expecting their second child, conceived through in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Conception for Jane with their first son had been a long and complicated affair, involving several rounds of inter-uterine insemination (IUI) and IVF, as well as attempts with a private donor. Eventually, after nearly two years of trying, she gave birth shortly before her 40th birthday. Catherine’s experience of conception with their second child, by contrast, was a lot smoother, conceiving during her first round of IVF. Our first interview took place whilst Catherine was pregnant, whilst subsequent interviews took place when their second son was 5 months and 13 months old. (See Fig. 3.1, in Chap. 3.) The interview planned at six weeks was missed due to a complicated delivery, as Catherine suffered

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serious nerve damage during labour. Both women breastfed the children they gave birth to for ‘extended’ periods (at least two-and-a-half years in the first instance and 13 months in the second, with plans to continue). This couple had been together for several years and were in a registered same-sex civil partnership. From Australian and Irish backgrounds respectively, they both had higher degrees, successful professional careers (in IT), owned their own house (with a mortgage) and had a household income of over £200,000. They had chosen the UK as their base partly because of the more liberal regulations around legal recognition of civil partnerships and parenthood compared with Ireland and Australia at the time. It was interesting that although in many ways this parenting set-up looked as physiologically ‘equitable’ as possible, this was not entirely by design. Catherine agreed to IVF in an attempt to have their second child only because the process had been so difficult for Jane the first time around—she did not, as she put it, have any desire ‘be pregnant’, and ideally it would have been Jane having the second child too. Another interesting observation to emerge from our discussions was the ambivalence these mothers felt around parenthood. There was an open acknowledgement that having children would ‘ruin’ their ‘lovely life’, which until this point included holidays, spontaneous evenings out, lie-ins and so on. This is perhaps only curious against the backdrop of such concerned ‘trying’ on Jane’s part to conceive. On the other hand, and linking to the themes above, they also acknowledged that as lesbian women there was less pressure to follow a ‘heteronormative’ reproductive script, and perhaps more ability to be openly ambivalent about their decision-making.3 During our first interview, Jane (the ‘first’ mother) was still on maternity leave, with a plan to return to work when the first son was around 16 months old, and their second around six weeks old, such that there would be a good period of cross over whilst both mothers were at home with the two children. As she put it, she was the one (at this point) who did the bulk of the domestic ‘drudgery’ (the laundry, cooking, cleaning and so on, as well as getting up at night with their first son if necessary). This 3  This is a fascinating area of research, as many scholars have pointed out that with the advent of reproductive technologies there has been a move away from what might once have been compulsory heterosexuality towards something that might be called compulsory reproductivity, whereby reproductive technologies continue to ascribe and reinforce the importance of (biogenetic, physiological) reproduction in the life course, regardless of sexual orientation (Gabb, 2017; Smietana, 2019).

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would then shift when Jane went back to work, and it would be Catherine, the ‘second’ mother on maternity leave, until the newborn was around a year old (although this would involve her looking after both a newborn and a toddler). The plan was that when both mothers were back at work, they would each work four days a week, so that the children were in childcare (ideally with a nanny or preschool) only three days a week in total. By the time of our final interview, both mothers were still breastfeeding the child that they had given birth to (i.e., a two-and-a-half-year-old in the first instance and a 13-month-old in the second). Although they were well versed in the literature around infant feeding (benefits and risks of formula milk use, approaches to weaning and so on), this was not spoken about as a decision with a strong philosophical orientation towards, for example, attachment parenting (see Faircloth, 2013), but rather as a pragmatic solution by which each mother could not only sustain their child nutritionally (when young) but reconnect with them once back at work (when older) and soothe them back to sleep as quickly as possible. Interestingly, however, whilst this might have presented an opportunity for a real ‘splitting’ of care, the mothers never fed the sons which they had not birthed. When I probed this a little further in interviews, this appeared to be down to an anxiety around bonding (expressed in previous interviews) as well as a concern that it would just be too exhausting for each mother to have two children to nurse: Charlotte: And you never feed [the younger son], do you, or vice versa? Jane: No. Catherine: No. Charlotte: You’ve never done that. Catherine: No. Jane: No. I mean, people have suggested it to us, but I said to Catherine, imagine having [the first] trying to get milk off you all day as well as [the second] trying to [defend it]. Charlotte: Yeah [laughs] … Jane: It’s just not worth it. Charlotte: You’d never leave the [sofa], yeah. [laughter] Catherine: Yeah. Jane: It would just be really hard, I think, so…it would be like, just don’t even go there. Catherine: So it’s very clear, even from [the first’s] perspective, like he’ll walk past and pat and go, that’s [my brother’s] milk, very

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clear, and this is my milk. And he knows the difference— there’s been a few times when I was like, do you want some milk, and he’s like, this milk. He knows the difference between, very clearly.

Clearly, unlike most other mothers interviewed in the study who were having their first baby, having two children to take care of was a huge task, involving a lot of organisation. Caroline talked about ‘managing’ two children, she described it like a ‘really complicated game of chess every day’, with the following example of trying to coordinate the feeding and sleeping times of their two sons: Yeah. And you’re always trying to think ahead, cos you’re like, right, it’s 11.00 o’clock now, and if he falls asleep now, he won’t wake up until half past 12, which means lunch will be late, which means [the other one] won’t be [sleepy], because he won’t have lunch, which means I should give [that one] something now, so that he can sleep—no, but he wants…and then you’re like, OK, er, oh, now, it’s 20 to 12—oh, and he is asleep.

Interestingly, however, whilst this couple did talk about the importance of ‘time alone’ and ‘looking after each other’, they also said that it was rare that they didn’t spend time together as a foursome, and had only used babysitters on a handful of occasions. This was remarkably different to Dave and Chris, a gay couple who had two children in a co-parenting relationship with Dave’s friend, Ann. There Dave felt that their set-up was optimal, because he was so anxious about everything to do with pregnancy and infancy (and took a very ‘intensive’ approach to reading up on all the expertise he could) that he found having a break from it absolutely essential, not only for his own health and happiness but also for the sustainability of his relationship with Chris: ‘boy do you need it’, was how he put it. I return to this in the next chapter. At the time we were talking, Dave was referring to the later stages of infancy (post–six months) as before then the breastfeeding meant that the baby would be based at Ann’s house, with Dave and Chris visiting during the days. After this point, the baby would start to spend nights at their house to the point that they split things in a more 50/50 basis in terms of time as they grew up. Again, this comparison is interesting not only in terms of how it relates to wider ‘norms’ of parenting, which typically see the biological, heterosexual parents taking responsibility for care, but also,

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specifically, in comparison with a lesbian mother couple for whom a ‘break’ is not possible but also seemingly not desirable. One might expect that, given the gendered dimension of the intensification of parenthood (i.e., it is usually mothers who are more ‘intensive’ and ‘anxious’), the presence of two mothers might increase the pressure somewhat. This may, of course, be a good warning about generalising from a single case study (of either lesbian mothers or gay fathers), but does perhaps also relate to Jane’s comment about freedom from normative scripts, relating not only to sexuality but also to gender and expectations of parenthood. The key theme of our interview to emerge, then, was not how anxious or stressed Jane and Catherine were, but rather how they differed (or otherwise) from—as they put it—‘normal’ couples. As Catherine said: Or if you’re a parent who’s doing most of the caring [and at this point she was implicitly talking about breastfeeding], I can really see how women choose to go back to work if they’re in a relationship where their male partner kind of carries on going to work as they did before the child was born, and sort of goes out with mates drinking, or doing whatever it is they were always doing. I can really see how women would decide to go back to work in order to sort of force them to do more, like saying, well I’m at work too, so…cos it’s a bit of, oh, well, you’re at home anyway—how come you can’t polish the, all the shelves and clean all the whatever is on…

Instead, they spoke proudly of how considerate each of them were towards the other (‘not like some of the guys at the office’). So, for example, if one was leaving for work that day, they made sure that both children were up and had breakfasted, with meals prepared for the day or similar, rather than simply walking out of the door. Whilst on maternity leave the roles adopted by each partner fell into very stereotypical homemaker/ breadwinner ones, in that one of the mothers took on the role of carer, whilst the other engaged in paid work (see also Gabb, 2017). There was therefore not a radical redefinition of equality in terms of gender roles by any means. However, in this ‘taking turns’ there was a much deeper level of understanding of what each of those roles entailed, and therefore, like the parents of twins, more scope of support across them. Again, this provides an interesting reflection on wider norms of parental leave and childcare, which typically do not see fathers taking an extended period of time away from work. In some ways, the narrative of these mothers does not challenge the idea that it is the physiological/birth

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mother who takes primary responsibility for childcare, but of course, in a couple where there are two mothers this presents a more open landscape, both for couple equality and indeed intimacy where experiences can be shared (Collins, 2003).

Breastfeeding, Relationship Deadlock and the Impossibility of ‘Support’ Feeding therefore looms large in accounts about parenting, decisions around work and care and accounts of relationship satisfaction (or otherwise). Whilst it was not typical of the majority of the responses, the response below comes from Ellen, 45. She is the mother who features in the third vignette, below, who eventually separates from her partner. She spoke about breastfeeding in ways which magnify several of the issues other couples mentioned: Breastfeeding was extremely satisfying, fulfilling and comforting to me. I felt I was doing the best for my babies. It did serve to widen the divide with my partner. He felt I should wean earlier than I wanted to because he was pressuring me to find work and have the baby sleep through the night.

There are several interesting points to emerge from these reflections. One is that breastfeeding (like other embodied forms of care, such as co-­ sleeping) can cause tension and division in relationships, not least because breastfeeding is so much more than about providing nutrition for a child, but has cascading effects on all sorts of parenting practices, including couple intimacy and an individual’s sense of personhood (Tomori, 2015). Second is the assumption that because men cannot breastfeed, there is no option but for the father or partner to do less in terms of caring for the child, particularly in the early days, although this also sets up patterns further into children’s infancies. Many couples claimed that mothers were ‘better’ and ‘quicker’ at settling children at night, even once they had stopped breastfeeding, and even when both had returned to work. As we see in the vignettes from Claudia and Laura, this will clearly sit uneasily with couples committed to the fourth iteration of equality as ‘50/50’ parenting (and, of course, those who are committed to ‘breaking gendered roles’). As the accounts here indicate, the emergence of a more ‘intensive’ mothering ideology has some negative implications for couples,

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particularly as it relates to feeding and the ‘gauntlet’ that this lays down for many women, as Zahra described it. In Ellen’s case, above, the husband is arguably trying to ‘de-intensify’ his wife’s mothering, in ways that he presumably believes to be beneficial to her, or them as a family (e.g., ceasing breastfeeding to make it easier to go sleep through the night and be able to work). In an intensive mothering culture which puts the child’s needs at the centre, however, this can be read as undermining her very identity— breastfeeding is extremely ‘fulfilling’ for this mother. A partner who is committed to ideals of ‘good parenting’ (i.e., breastfeeding) is meant to be ‘supportive’ of what his partner decides to do, and suggesting otherwise is a threat to her bodily rights and therefore ‘pressuring’ her. Indeed, even when men did try to ‘help’ with feeding, this only seemed to re-­ establish the mother as the one with managerial oversight, often doubling her labour, particularly in the case of using expressed milk (as Ellen elaborates further in the next vignette). As such, intensive parenting culture has the potential to displace men and make it harder for them to know how to be ‘involved’ (and easier for them to ‘check out’, as in the example of Claudia and Anthony), at the same time as heaping demands on women and leaving them overwhelmed. The next chapter looks at the issue of sleep in more depth, delving further into the issue of intimacy and equality.

References Baird, M., & O’Brien, M. (2015). Dynamics of parental leave in anglophone countries: The paradox of state expansion in liberal welfare regimes. Community Work and Family, 18(2), 198–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/1366880 3.2015.1021755 Collins, M. (2003). Modern love: An intimate history of men and women in twentieth- century Britain. Atlantic Books. Dermott, E. (2008). Intimate FATHERHOOD: A sociological analysis. Routledge. DH. (2004). Choosing health. London: Department of Health. Retrieved March 23, 2009, from www.dh.gov.uk/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/ PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4094550, now http://webarchive. nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/dh.gov.uk/en/publicationsandstatistics/publications/publicationspolicyandguidance/dh_4094550 Faircloth, C. (2013). Militant lactivism? Infant feeding and maternal accountability in the UK and France. Berghahn Books. FCT (Family and Childcare Trust). (2017). Childcare Survey 2017. https://iris. ucl.ac.uk/iris/publication/1418363/16

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Gabb, J. (2017). Unsettling lesbian motherhood: Critical reflections over a generation (1990–2015). Sexualities, 21(7), 1002–1020. Gatrell, C. (2007). Whose child is it anyway? The negotiation of paternal entitlements within marriage. The Sociological Review, 55(2), 352–372. Gillies, V. (2009). Understandings and experiences of involved fathering in the United Kingdom: Exploring classed dimensions. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 624, 49–60. https://doi. org/10.1177/0002716209334295 Harman, V., Cappellini, B., & Faircloth, C. (Eds). (2018). Feeding children inside and outside the home: Critical perspectives. Routledge. Hoddinott, P., Tappin, D., & Wright, C. (2008). Clinical review: Breastfeeding. British Medical Journal, 336(April), 881–887. Knaak, S. (2006). The problem with breastfeeding discourse. Canadian Journal of Public Health, 97(5), 412–414. Kukla, R. (2005). Mass Hysteria: Medicine, culture and women’s bodies. Rowman & Littlefield. Lee, E. (2007). Infant feeding in risk society. Health, Risk and Society, 9(3), 295–309. Lee, E., & Furedi, F. (2005) ‘Mothers’ experience of, and attitudes to, using infant formula in the early months’, School of Sociology, Sociology and Social Research: University of Kent at Canterbury. Retrieved 4 September 2006, from http://www.kent.ac.uk/sspssr/staf f/academic/lee/infantformula-­ summary.pdf Lupton, D. (1996). Food, the body and the self. Sage. Manny, D. (2015). Achieving respectable motherhood? Women’s Studies International Forum, 53, 159–166. McInnes-Dean, H. (2021). Making parents: Expectations and experiences of the transition to parenthood in Edinburgh. Unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. Murphy, E. (1999). “Breast Is Best”: Infant feeding decisions and maternal deviance. Sociology of Health and Illness, 21(2), 187–208. Smietana, M. (2019). Procreative consciousness in a global market: Gay Men’s paths to surrogacy in the US, In: M. Smietana & C. Thompson (eds.), Making families: Transnational surrogacy, queer kinship, and reproductive justice. Special Issue of Reproductive BioMedicine and Society, vol. 7, Nov. 2018, pp. 1–160. https://www.rbmsociety.com/issue/S2405-­6618(18)X0003-­3 Tomori, C. (2015). Nighttime Breastfeeding: An American Cultural Dilemma. Berghahn Books. Twamley, K. (2020). ‘She has mellowed me into the Idea of SPL’: Unpacking relational resources in UK couples’ discussions of shared parental leave take-up. Families Relationships and Societies. Online First (Get full ref), 10 (1), 67-82

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Twamley, K., & Schober, P. (2019). Shared parental leave: Exploring variations in attitudes, Eligibility, knowledge and take-up intentions of expectant mothers in London. Journal of Social Policy, 48(2), 387–407. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0047279418000557 UNICEF. (2005). The baby friendly initiative. Retrieved December 3, 2006, from http://www.babyfriendly.co.uk, now Retrieved November 16, 2020, from http://www.unicef.org.uk/babyfriendly/ WHO (World Health Organization). (2003). Global strategy on infant and young child feeding. Geneva: WHO.  Retrieved September 27, 2007, from http:// www.who.int/child-­adolescenthealth/New_Publications/NUTRITION/gs_ iycf.pdf, now http://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/global_strategy/en/ index.html

CHAPTER 6

Sleeping

I open this chapter with an excerpt from the pre-birth interview with Rada and Keerti, the couple we encountered in Chap. 4: Rada:

Yes we have been thinking a lot about it [where the baby will sleep]. We were thinking that he would sleep in that little cot but I have a feeling that he will end up sleeping in the bed as well. Keerti: It’s not like he’s just going to crawl into the bed! We have control of this! Rada: I know but you can’t predict. Keerti: Yes, I’m sure that he’ll sleep with us sometimes. I don’t think he will sleep with us every night. He should certainly take a bunch of naps with us. We haven’t really talked about this but I imagine that we are going to breastfeed him and I don’t know if we are going to get an expresser. Rada: Well I am going to breastfeed, I don’t want formula. Keerti: Yes, I think we should. If you are going to put some breast milk in a bottle I am happy to feed him but I can’t feed him from a breast though. I expect if it’s crying in the middle of the night and it’s going to be breast to mouth I am sure that I will go right back to bed.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Faircloth, Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77403-5_6

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Rada:

Well I think that’s something we can talk about too because you can bring the baby, if the baby needs changing… Keerti: I can bring the baby and I can change the baby and then whilst he is eating I am sure that I will be able to get right back to sleep with no problem. Rada: That’s true, you sleep well. Keerti: I think the sleeping is going to be very difficult for Rada. As may not be a surprise, when I spoke to them when their son was around two months old, they said: Rada: The only other thing is that he sleeps between us, he sleeps in our bed…Well we don’t have the energy and commitment to make him sleep in his cot but I think I feel like he is also still young. He’s nine weeks and I don’t feel that he needs to be on a strict routine. If there is another issue in contemporary parenting culture that causes heated debate—and parental exhaustion—it is sleeping practices. As Tomori (2015) notes, questions about where, when, how and with whom infants are left to sleep directly relate to our ideas about personhood, which is why they cause such vociferous commentary. In particular, whether babies are left to ‘cry it out’ in settling themselves, or whether parents co-sleep with them, have become poles within a moralised spectrum, and have knock-on implications for all aspects of family life, including couple intimacy and ideals around family life. Of course, in examining the accounts given by parents, the reality is more mundane than the cacophony would suggest, with the majority of parents doing ‘what works’ to get the most sleep for the most number of people in the household. This chapter draws on couples’ accounts of the first year to flesh out the reality of infant care, with its relentless demands. At the same time, I discuss narratives of sleep as they related to ‘sleeping together’, with sexuality and intimacy as one barometer of couple harmony. Overall, the chapter points to some of the difficulties faced by parents to maintain a balance between optimal childcare and optimal couple relationships. Taking the longitudinal perspective allows us to explore how patterns established in infancy can have long-term implications for couples in terms of who is designated the primary carer, even when both members of the couple are back at work.

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Thinking About Sleep Advice to new parents in the UK from the National Health Service (NHS) is to ‘Place your baby on their back to sleep, in a cot in the same room as you, for the first six months’ (NHS, 2020), in part to reduce the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and avoid risks of co-sleeping like suffocating. In her ethnographic study of night-time breastfeeding in the US (where the same advice prevails), Tomori (2015) discusses the ways in which sleep has become a further pressure point in contemporary parenting culture. For many of the couples she worked with, having the baby sleep in the bed not only facilitated breastfeeding more easily, but also meant that the baby would settle for longer periods, whereas sleeping separately in a crib beside the bed meant more frequent wake-ups. Although this was a pragmatic solution to everyone involved getting the most sleep (and was considered by many a critical way to bond and establish stronger family relations), this was not something that the couples spoke about particularly enthusiastically. As she puts it: Initially motivated by their desire to follow medical recommendations for the best way of feeding babies [breastfeeding], many of the couples in my study found themselves at odds with medical advice about safe sleep [separate sleeping in a cot], which promoted questions about endangering or even killing their child. (2015, p. 3)

These issues are not only about pragmatism, of course—they are, like breastfeeding or bottle feeding—taken to be ‘signal issues’ which indicate which parenting ‘camp’ parents adhere to. Whereas advocates of attachment parenting and ‘bonding’ tend to support the idea of parents and child sleeping together in one bed, pointing out advantages of evolutionary adaptation (see, for example Sears & Sears, 1993), representatives of the so-called sleep ‘training’, at the more ‘structured’ end of the spectrum discussed above, emphasise the necessity of early training and education even in this early infant phase (such as Gina Ford’s Contented Little Baby Book, 1999). As such, although sleep practices technically do not relate to the physiology of each parent—unlike birth or, to a lesser degree (breast) feeding—they are of course part of a wider matrix of intersecting bodily practices, which, particularly if the parents advocate a more attachment-­ based approach, will be linked to feeding practices, as in the opening quote from Rada and Keerti.

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Certainly, questions around sleep involve issues that get to the heart of the intensive parenting paradox: Are these practices in the ‘best interests’ of the child? And at what cost to the parents? It therefore drives at issues of not only division of labour, but also gender roles and the requirements of each parent, particularly if breastfeeding is involved. Furthermore, it has important implications for sexual intimacy between the couple. In this study, the majority of participants tended towards the ‘attachment’ end of the spectrum, with a concern about establishing secure relationships and ‘cocooning’ their children from the world. At the same time, after many months of broken sleep, several of them took what they described as ‘drastic action’ to establish longer stretches of separate sleeping, in part driven by their need to return to work.

The Sleep Diaries Jack and Rose had been together for a long time before having children. At the time that I first interviewed them (in person, together) before the birth of their first baby, they were both 33, living in their own home in London and working as a lecturer and a PhD student and research assistant, respectively. They each earned between £30,000 and £49,000, with Jack at the upper and Rose at the lower end of this spectrum. Their first baby, a little girl, was followed by another two years later. Rose breastfed both children for about ten months, and took seven months of leave with their first baby, and eight with their second, while Jack just took two weeks of statutory leave each time. Before their first baby was born, they said that the plan was for her to sleep in their room in a Moses basket. This was the ‘sensible’ thing to do, according to Rose. She did not consider it practical to have the baby in the bed, as there was a ‘risk’ with this. When I asked about the plan for the nights, she said that as a couple they are ‘quite into equality—but that at the same time if I’m not working and he is, I don’t mind doing more at that stage’. Overall, they would probably be aligned most to the ‘balance’ iteration outlined earlier. In our second interview, when the baby was two months old, Rose told me that at the hospital a midwife helped her to ‘co-sleep’ with the baby, which stopped her crying, and that sometimes this happened at home, but she tried to get the baby to sleep in a crib, if at all possible. She had recently started sleeping in five-hour stretches, falling asleep at about 8 pm downstairs with them and being put in a Moses basket, and then fed when

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they all went upstairs to bed in their room at about 11 pm, and put in a side-by cot. The baby then usually woke up at about 4 am, and would not settle unless ‘she is on one of us’. Rose tended to take the lead on this in the night, as she was breastfeeding, and was ‘by nature’ a lighter sleeper, whilst Jack was a ‘heavy sleeper’. He, however, took the baby in the morning if it had been a particularly bad night so that Rose could ‘catch up’ a bit. Rose was not able to nap in the day, and found it hard to just ‘switch off when the baby does’ (as she had been advised to by her health visitor). Whilst before having children participants said that they were ‘used’ to having ‘bad nights’, many of them said that nothing had prepared them for how gruelling the first few weeks, indeed first few months, were. As Rose put it, there was no moment to recover or ‘strategise’: it was just about coping and getting through as best as possible. At our six-month interview, the baby was apparently not sleeping well at night. Rose thought it might be down to ‘teething’, but could not really be sure. The only thing that she was sure about is that ‘she really wants to be on me the whole time’. She said she was exhausted. She acknowledged that the breastfeeding made her more ‘tied’ into this dynamic than her husband, but at the same time she very much enjoyed breastfeeding and didn’t like all the ‘hassle’ of preparing bottles. By the time I saw them when their baby was over a year old, she was sleeping through the night. They put this down to their nanny, who they hired when Rose went back to work: And then with the sleep, we used to cuddle her to sleep and we liked it but we also knew we can’t do this forever, like the first week, little baby rocking and then putting them down, but we knew, ‘oh god how are we going to transition to just putting her down when she is awake in the cot’ and the nanny just did it, really gradually while we were at my mum’s and one day she said, oh by way you know you can just put her in the cot and she usually won’t cry but if she did cry, it would be over within less than a minute and ever since then we just put her down, sometimes even after an hour she is chatting to her little toys there and we hear it on the monitor like this funny chatting, so that is really great.

Rose said that this was actually something of a ‘lifesaver’ for her, as before then she was existing on broken nights and felt that the effect on her mental health over the long term was a very negative one.

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For several other couples in this sample, the effect of broken sleep also became too much to bear, and they decided to carry out some ‘sleep training’, a method which involves ‘encouraging’ babies to learn how to self-­ settle, and therefore be able to settle themselves through the various ‘sleep-cycles’ they move through during the night (Ford, 1999). The idea is that without needing to be held, rocked or fed to do this, babies are able to sleep for longer stretches. Having ‘always said I wouldn’t leave my child crying’, one of the other mothers in the study, Ruby, said that she and her husband did some sleep training with their son when he was around six months old. She said it was ‘horrible’, and she worried about it giving him ‘anxiety’ issues, but at the same time she felt it was ‘absolutely necessary’ so that she could properly relax in the evenings, as otherwise she was always on ‘tenterhooks’. In a similar vein, having more of a routine of feed times and nap times gave her a sense of ‘control’ over her days, which she realised she had been missing. To return to the story of the twins again, it is perhaps this issue that yet again shows the limits of ‘intensive’ forms of parenting, which are clearly a much less feasible prospect than with a singleton. In terms of having a more ‘structured’ approach to things, this was something that both Adam and Zahra appreciated (in some ways just having to have some boundaries in place, such as simply not being able to pick up each child as soon as it was crying), and they saw this as beneficial in the long run as it helped the children learn to self-soothe. On the other hand, they were conscious that they were probably not able to provide as much one-to-one care for their children as singletons would usually have, and Zahra wistfully said that trying co-sleeping might have been ‘lovely’.

Taking Turns The previous chapter discussed accounts from Pearl and Tim about taking a ‘fair’ approach to feeding the baby and taking turns to get up in the night. This was a huge issue for many of the couples in this study, particularly those where the mother was breastfeeding and on an extended period of maternity leave—both of which seemed to naturalise her role as the primary carer throughout the night. Some couples, such as Heather and David, did have ‘a rule that if she needs attention for more than an hour we wake the other person and the other person takes over’. This was, however, related to the fact that Heather had long-term health conditions which were exacerbated by lack of sleep.

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The effect of broken nights on many women was long-lasting, not only in terms of their own mental health (Rose said, ‘I was pretty down to be honest’) but also in terms of setting up gendered patterns which ended up continuing well into the child’s youth. Even though Rose stopped breastfeeding when their babies were ten months old, she continued to be the one to attend to them at night, partly because she felt she ‘wanted’ to, especially if she had been at work during the day (see Duncan et al., 2003). She was also ‘more effective’ at it. Yet again, the example of non-traditional family forms can be useful in thinking through the relationships between the body, gender and care. In the gay father family mentioned earlier, Dave (the genetic father) tells me that actually the presence of Ann, the mother, seemed to be a barrier to ‘good sleep’ on the part of the baby: She’s [the baby] always slept better at our place actually, I don’t know why, right from the moment that [my husband] and I started having her at our place on her own, she would sleep through the night with us, and at [her mother’s] always wake up in the night, wake up early, wake up distressed, and we’ve never known the reason for it. We made sure that our bath time routine—[her mum] came around and watched us doing our night-time routine once just to see if there was anything we were doing differently. We did everything the same, the story time, the bath, the milk, everything was the same, the heat in the room, the amount of light, for some reason she’s always slept better at our place and I think it may just be simply the fact that she knows that there’s only [her mum] there. And they know the difference between their parents at an early age. I don’t know, maybe she knows that she’ll get more of a response from [her mum], who knows what the reason is?

As previously discussed, the unpredictable character of babies seemed to be a surprise to many parents. Furthermore, as noted, for this couple, the parenting set-up they had was described as ‘ideal’ because they had a split custody arrangement, in that they would have the children for half the week, and then be ‘free’ the other half. Dave said quite clearly that this was ‘essential’ to his relationship in that it gave him time to focus on his partner, and indeed, time for sleep—and sex. The following section explores in more depth the relationship between sleep, sex and intimacy.

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Intimacy and Sex Much of the literature within sexuality studies concerns desire or sexual identity, and there is limited work on changing patterns of sexual activity over the life course. As such, this part of the book—like Van Hooff’s work (2011)—contributes to what Jackson (2008) calls the ‘everyday’ aspect of studying sex and relationships. In particular, these findings reveal the importance of sexual intercourse for couples as a means of assessing the strength of their relationships (Weeks, 1995). It therefore maps the ways anticipations around sexual intercourse matched up (or not) with realities once children were born, as a lens on changing understandings of intimacy and equality. These accounts are foregrounded as evidence of a cultural contradiction between the competing ideologies of intensive parenting, gender equality and fulfilling intimate relationships. In short, how do parents keep all the plates spinning, through one of the most exhausting periods of their lives? Clearly, there are limitations to the interview method when talking about sensitive issues, particularly with couples involved. The intention was to study intimate practices generally but not necessarily sexual practices. As a rule, I did not ask couples directly about their sex lives, but rather, would open the space for them to address this, either together or separately (on the whole, this topic was easier to broach with mothers in one-on-one interviews, rather than with couples or with fathers). Typically, this would involve asking a question such as ‘Given this study is titled “Gender, intimacy and equality” could you tell me what those terms mean to you?’ It was interesting, however, that for most couples the word ‘intimacy’ was taken as an invitation to discuss sex, even though this was not directly intended. Again, this points to some interesting assumptions around what sex is taken to stand for in relationships, as is discussed further below. Providing a useful introduction to this subject is Clare, one of the few mothers in this research to have had a child already. She worked full-time as a secondary school teacher, having taken six to nine months of leave with each child, and talked about how important sex was for her and her husband—not only in the sense of being a physically pleasurable sensation, but more for what it represents for them: It’s so important to have sex in a relationship. You just always come back to it because if you don’t you are very, very good friends and there’s that

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i­ntimacy lacking. [My husband] and I get scratchy with each other and we lose our connection when we don’t have sex frequently and regularly for me. If we manage once a week I’m really proud of that and that’s pretty good, that’s what we do. I’m really quite…I feel quite proud of that. Sometimes it goes down to every couple of weeks but if it’s not every couple of weeks then we both get really sad.

In what might be referred to as a hierarchy of intimacy, sex with a partner has come to symbolise the pinnacle of intimate relations—as opposed to, say, cooking for each other, sleeping in the same bed or massage, which might be other sorts of ‘intimate’ activities (Weeks, 1995). Clare continued—with the benefit of hindsight, as a second-time mother—to talk about how this changes over a couple’s relationship: It comes to symbolise such different things, like when you first meet somebody you’re at it all the time and it’s a kind of bonding, it’s a really fun thing as well. Then when you move in together you’re very cosy and settled. Then maybe when you get married it will happen more. Then when you want to have a baby you will have sex all the time and it will become a military procedure but [then] you will probably start enjoying it again.

It was certainly true that having children meant a major shift in sexual practices for most couples in the sample. This was something that was anticipated (albeit without much clarity as to what these changes would actually be) during pregnancy by many first-time parents. Interestingly, many were confused as to how to negotiate actually having sex either whilst pregnant, or with the physical presence of a new baby in their bedroom—the ideal sleeping arrangement parents are advised to adopt for the first six months. Like Lucy, below, couples often spoke about the importance of maintaining their regular patterns of sex, which they hoped would get ‘back to normal’ after the disruption of pregnancy, birth and/or breastfeeding. Already on her anticipated year-long maternity leave from work at a large trade union, Lucy was speaking a few days before she gave birth to her first baby: you were asking about how you think it’s going to affect your relationship, one of the reasons I was saying about the bed and sharing thing is the sexual aspect of it and I don’t want that to get lost although it has recently, he’s been really worried about hurting me or the bump, he’s been a bit put off things, and I guess that’s one of the things that worries me most about

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breastfeeding is your breasts going from being this sexual thing to a feeding practical thing for the baby, so I think that’s one of my worries about our relationship and about breastfeeding…So we want to try and make an effort…That’s the other thing…you shouldn’t even like leave the baby on its own in the room, not even to have a shower, I mean I don’t know what you’re supposed to do, but if you want to have sex or whatever, are you supposed to have the baby in the room? I haven’t thought very hard about it but…I’m sure you can leave the baby to have a shower for 10 minutes.

Despite some awareness about embodied changes, the experiences of post-baby sex were worse than expected in some cases, and many women I spoke with expressed shock about what their bodies had undergone during pregnancy and birth, in ways they felt totally unprepared for.

Intimacy and Inequality: Embodying Difference Like Clare, many couples spoke about how often they had sex with their partner as a barometer for the relationship as a whole. This points to the way in which a ‘good sex life’ is linked to notions of a ‘healthy relationship’. Like Woodiwiss’s research, then (2015), the discourse of ‘compulsory sexuality’ can be very powerful for individuals, at all stages of the life course. Parenthood, however, can complicate intentions towards sexual activity. In the first vignette, for example, Claudia and Anthony talked about the physicality of motherhood (and breastfeeding, in particular) coming as a shock, putting a limit on her ‘intimacy time’ with her husband, which made her feel less desirable—something many women reported as a problem of the ‘mother/lover’ division. Claudia described the shift from bodies being conduits of pleasure to being sources of nutrition particularly graphically: Yeah. My body was alien to me for a period of time. I embraced it more when I was pregnant, I was annoyed by it but after, particularly with the breastfeeding, you can’t take your bra off ever. With mine, because I had such a milk supply and I’d have to wear those breast pads all the time and how many would I get through in a day, six or seven?…So we were buying stacks and stacks of them and as soon as I’d take my bra off, I’d go into the shower, I’d just be squirting everywhere so it makes physical intimacy very difficult.

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Claudia talked earlier about not having time for intimacy because this would ‘distract her from the task at hand’ (caring for the baby). As such, given that they were so busy, Claudia and Anthony talked at length about how important it was for them to schedule other sorts of ‘intimacy time’, including, but not limited to, sex, particularly because they could no longer be spontaneous in spending time with each other, and that their son would otherwise ‘take all of their attention’: [Speaking to her husband] But even with [our son], if you were with him, I could quite easily come into the room at the end of the day and just give [our son] all of my attention and not even kiss you hello. And it would happen the other way round too. He takes all of our attention, you have to remind yourself that the other person is right there and needs to be greeted and made into a person by actually being recognised!

As is evident in these accounts, yet again, new parents often find themselves at the juncture of several competing cultural discourses: one around the importance of intensive, embodied care carried out by biological mothers, particularly as it relates to feeding; another about the importance of gender equality at home and work—all the time maintaining a healthy couple relationship, particularly as it relates to having regular sex. If there was a ‘typical response’ amongst this group of new parents, then, Pearl and Tim probably best expressed it. Tim said (by email): Well, we don’t have as much sex as we would like. [My wife] in particular is always tired, and I am pretty tired too so am often easy to put off! However we try to schedule sexytime so that it doesn’t fall off the radar, as it easily could. We both realise the importance of this, as when we didn’t have sex for some time after the birth of [our daughter], we felt that our relationship changed. I wouldn’t call it deteriorating, but we just didn’t feel as close to each other in a way, which we missed. Maybe we felt too much like a ‘team’ and a little less like lovers! So we are less impulsive, but if it was left to chance it wouldn’t happen! We are getting more time on our own recently, due to family members taking her away for weekends and longer, so that too is changing.

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Mutual Understanding In her study When Couples Become Parents, based on interviews with couples in Canada, Fox also observed that there was a ‘dramatic change in sexuality’ during the first year of parenthood for most of her participants (2009, p. 249), a loss that was more keenly felt by men. Women’s need to recuperate, their tiredness and the fact that they were breastfeeding reduced their desire for sex. And even when they did have sex, it was different to before, clearly chiming with the set of accounts here around expectation not matching up to reality. Developing a useful typology, Fox (2009) notes that these changes in sexual activity were indicative of other kinds of changes that occurred in couples’ relationships as they negotiated the first year of parenthood. In the first pattern (around 30% of couples) the relationships deteriorated, and were ‘riddled with tension and worn down by the upset and anger of one or both partners’ (Fox, 2009, p. 252) In these cases, she describes relationships on the brink of divorce, or ‘non-existent’. In the second pattern, made up of around 25% of couples, the relationship was marked by tension between the partners, but ‘there was no noticeable weakening of the relationship over the year. Often the anger was about the men’s avoidance of the newly expanded housework, for example, and it created tensions that were new to these relationships. Nevertheless, these couples’ happiness about being parents sometimes meant that they—especially the men—felt closer to their partners’ (Fox, 2009, p. 252). In the third pattern, which comprised a further 25%, the relationships neither seemed to weaken or strengthen, but ‘clearly suffered from the absence of time for intimacy’ (Fox, 2009, p. 252). ‘In these relationships, there was only minimal tension between partners—usually blamed on tiredness—but both people found the year to be difficult emotionally, given how little time they spent together.’ The remaining 20% were couples whose relationships were improved by parenthood, and experienced it ‘largely as an addition to their relationship’ (Fox, 2009, p. 252). What Fox notices, and in line with Collins’s general thesis (2003), is that in those couples that displayed the first pattern, there was considerable anger and resentment. This was ‘fostered by the gender-based divisions organising their daily lives and sometimes enhanced by the insularity of their families…men’s detachment from the care of their babies and the dramatic differences in the men’s and women’s daily experiences—especially

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when the women were home full-time—were usually what undermined mutual understanding and often support. When both parties were stressed by the high demands of their daily work, that stress could further erode empathy, negate any hope of mutual gratitude, and produce considerable anger’ (Fox, 2009, p. 265).

Less Equality, Less Intimacy? Fox’s typology is useful in understanding the accounts presented here. The issue of ‘resentment’, and feelings of inequality and unfairness, were demonstrated by many participants, and sex featured as a barometer in their accounts as to how ‘close’ or intimate they felt with each other. Where, before, sex is something that is ‘kind of fun’ and ‘bonding’ for couples (as Clare puts it), afterwards, Ellen, who features in the next vignette, talks about it like more of a gendered currency, or something she feels she ‘owes’ her partner. Furthermore, many couples are simply too tired, or physically uncomfortable to resume a ‘normal’ pattern of intercourse. These observations back up the shift described by Giddens (1992) and other theorists of individualisation, as discussed in the introduction, in that the contemporary cultural focus on female sexual pleasure, and the fact that many women were able to talk about their sexual needs and desires so openly, indicates a more equitable focus on mutual pleasure in relationships than in the past. In a similar vein, recent research by Carlson et al. in the United States (2016) has challenged a long-held assumption that sexual frequency is lower in partnerships which express a preference for egalitarian unions, and where housework is shared (as opposed to higher in more traditional partnerships where housework is not shared). Instead, their work indicates that the way in which housework is organised mattered more for sexual satisfaction for contemporary couples than in the past, pointing to the importance of interpersonal negotiations in the calibration of equality, and therefore intimacy: Couples who reported more egalitarian divisions of routine housework fare better with regard to sexual intimacy today than they did 20 years ago. Whereas egalitarian couples had the lowest sexual frequency and satisfaction in the early 1990s, today they have the highest sexual frequency, although it is not significantly greater than conventional couples. One possible explanation for this change is a shift in desired sexual scripts. An assumed preference

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for gendered sexual scripts historically has benefitted conventional couples in terms of sexual frequency and satisfaction…Today, the majority of young adults express preferences for egalitarian unions in which both partners share household chores and financial provision (Gerson, 2010). Although the proportion attaining such a division remains in the minority, those who do attain it find it satisfying and view it as fairer than any other arrangement. This seems to have led to more frequent and more satisfying sex among peer couples, relative to their conventional counterparts. (2016, p. 989)

However, rather than moving in a progressive fashion from patriarchal to companionate relationships to more ‘plastic’ intimacies, there appears to be some movement backwards and forwards between these various arrangements, with parenthood often pushing couples back into a more traditional set-up (at least financially, if not ideologically). Clearly, this shift is exacerbated by a lack of resources—for many couples, there is no choice but to opt for more gender-segregated roles, which then has a resulting impact on a sense of equality and, relatedly, intimacy. As this research has shown, however, even in the case where a couple has a joint income of nearly £150,000 (such as Claudia and Anthony), there still seems to be a ‘pull’ towards more traditional patterns. Similarly, there is clearly a tension between a more ‘plastic sexuality’ and the transition to parenthood. Whilst Giddens’s theory of a more ‘pure’ relationship might have some purchase on how sex is at least imagined prior to the arrival of children, the idea that the couples here are only in relationships for as long as they are individually satisfying is not substantiated by the accounts here: parenthood creates demands and necessities that they view as valuable, beyond their own individual sexual pleasure (Jamieson, 1998). Most couples acknowledged that the first year of parenthood was a particularly tough time for their relationship, but it was, essentially, a temporary state of affairs that would eventually pass— although some recognised that if they did not take steps to reintroduce ‘sexytime’, as Tim put it, their relationship would deteriorate. Yet again, wider social forces (such as policy frameworks and therefore material resources) shape even the most intimate of our interactions as we go about negotiating competing ideals.

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Equality, Individualism and Intimacy In her later work, Illouz (2012) notes that, ‘much of the anger or disappointment in marriage has to do with the way in which marriage structures gender relations and mixes institutional and emotional logics: say, a desire for genderless fusion and equality, and the distance that inevitably emanates from the performance of gender roles’ (Illouz, 2012, p.  12). She sees this as linked to our inability to reconcile an abundance of choice in partner, with ideals of romance, not least because these ‘choices’ are increasingly reversible ones: where once these decisions were influenced by wider, shared moral communities, backed up by external structures, they are more lonely and unstable now than ever. Furthermore, our ‘choice’ in relationship partner has become an ‘interminable process of ‘validation’, part of the ‘demand for recognition’ and ‘reconfirmation of one’s own individuality and value’ (Illouz, 2012, p. 119), an ‘anchor’ in an individualised era. This is gendered since women are more likely to engage in ‘exclusivist’ strategies of marriage (Illouz, 2012, p. 74), such that the pressure for their chosen partner to ‘reflect back’ their sense of self-worth becomes almost untenable. This leads to what Illouz calls romantic suffering: we are told we are equal, but women are still expected to find solace in a market where men retain more power and control. Relationships are therefore inevitably about transactions (ensuring the ‘best deal’) and calculated in ‘cool’ terms (see also Hochschild, 2003). Thus, an increasingly economic rationale of bartering and exchange has entered intimate relationships under the auspices of securing ‘equality’. However, whilst this analysis offers much in understanding the case studies of romantic disappointment presented in this chapter, it does not help us understand the way in which parenthood complicates the notion of suffering as a product of individual ‘choice’ alone. The suggestion here is that a more relational perspective is required which foregrounds the fact of infant dependency, thereby understanding that couple relationships are not (only) about individual choice. The precarity of the relationships highlighted here is not necessarily to do with the idea of finding a better romantic partner then, but rather about not being able to reconcile the tension of balancing ideal partnering with ideal parenting in material realties. The suggestion is that the kinds of investments and commitments of parenting, which endure beyond individual self-reflexive choices, create novel kinds of tensions not accounted for in theories of romantic suffering per se.

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Conclusions These accounts show how couples’ experience of changing sleeping and sexual practices can offer us a lens on the relationship between gender equality and intimacy. Far from being a straightforward correlation between them, they are, in fact ‘uncomfortable bedfellows’, fraught with frustrations from all sides (Faircloth & Twamley, 2015). The sheer exhaustion that usually entails caring for a new baby, evident not only in the accounts here but also in the vignettes, takes most couples by surprise, and has implications not only for ideals of equality but also for well-being, often tied, as we have seen, to a body-based rationale in a ‘matrix’ of care practices. In contributing both to the literature around changes to intimate relations and parenting culture, this part of the research provides evidence that whilst our gender roles are less and less scripted before children arrive, they are very often thrown back into traditional models once they do. Tim and his wife talk about feeling more like a ‘team’ of partners, rather than ‘lovers’, as they have little space to think about themselves as a couple beyond being parents to their daughter—a formulation that raises its own interesting considerations around how sexual desire intersects with ‘gender equality’, and indeed ‘good parenting’. How ‘equality’ and ‘intimacy’ work themselves out in a couple’s practices is demonstrably deeply uncomfortable for their identity work as gendered beings, in negotiating dissonance between expectation and outcome. For many parents in this study, struggles around how to negotiate competing cultural discourses—about good parenting, about good relationships and about gender equality—are indicative of an interesting historical moment in social life. Rather than showing a straightforward correlation between (or continual progression towards) greater intimacy and equality, these accounts show the two are in a state of flux. As this demonstrates, attention to these ‘everyday’ experiences provide interesting intellectual reflections, far beyond the bedroom. I turn now to the final vignette, before bringing the themes of the research together in the conclusion.

Vignette 3: Ellen and Max Unlike many of the couples in this study, Ellen and Max were in a more precarious situation in terms of their finances and living arrangements. Ellen worked as a digital marketing executive (earning around £30,000),

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whilst her partner, Max, was a self-employed fashion designer, who supplemented his income by working behind the bar in a private members’ club (which amounted to around £10,000, though if his fashion business took off they anticipated him earning much more). When we met they, were living in a one-bed flat on a housing estate in central London, near Victoria. Having recently started a new job, Ellen was entitled to statutory maternity leave from her post, but as a self-employed partner Max was not be eligible for any ‘additional’ paternity leave (beyond the statutory two weeks) available to couples at this point. This appeared not to trouble them as it was Ellen who wanted to take ‘as long as possible’ off work, so long as it was financially affordable: she did not like her job (which was ‘brain dead’), but worried that any more than nine months to a year out would also be dangerous in terms of getting her post back, as ‘some 20-year-old’ would come along and take it. Max was Scandinavian, and so much of their discussion around their finances was coloured by comparison to Scandinavia, where childcare is far better subsidised than in the UK. Ellen was heavily pregnant at our first meeting, and, in an individual interview, opened by telling me about the unlikely story of how she came to be expecting a baby. She was several years older than Max (39 to his 32), and told me that they had been trying for a baby since she was 35 and came off the Pill—including going through several rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF) (at Ellen’s behest, rather than Max’s). After a miscarriage during this period, she said that they resigned themselves to not having children, and decided to take a holiday before starting a new job. Much to their surprise, she conceived whilst they were away. Before this first baby has even been born, Ellen was hoping that she would have time to have another, so there will be siblings. Max had a brother and said several times in our joint interview how nice it was to have a sibling. Ellen was an only child who grew up in a foster family, so she does not have (as she puts it) ‘real’ siblings. She talked about how the baby would take Max’s name, because hers ‘doesn’t mean anything’ to her. She also said in the individual interview that ‘hopefully one day we’ll get married’—when they could afford to do it—which was another reason this baby (and any others) would only take Max’s surname. When she finally arrived, their daughter was also given a Scandinavian first name. In terms of feeding and sleeping, the plan was for the baby to sleep in the Moses basket next to their bed. Ellen said (in the joint interview, which took place the same day) that she would breastfeed—‘hopefully’—adding:

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It’s not something I want to do but I just…just feels like…not that you have to do it but when you read all the benefits and the cost, it feels like there’s no choice really…[but] I don’t want to put pressure on myself.

The couple agreed that Max was ‘very supportive’ of the plan to breastfeed, adding that he was ‘a bit hippy like that’. They also seemed quite aware of the time commitment this would take, telling me about a 24-hour clock that they filled in at their NCT antenatal course, which had every hour in three rubbed out—to indicate the time it takes to feed and change a baby. When I next visited them, their daughter was two months old and we had a joint interview. Ellen was six days overdue when she went into labour, but it was not a straightforward delivery. She said that although she was fully dilated and pushing for two hours, ‘nothing happened’ because the baby’s head was in the wrong position. She was eventually given an epidural and had a forceps delivery. During this process, she had an episiotomy, and afterwards used a catheter. This area then became infected. She talked about being very sore, due to the infection and the stiches from her episiotomy, as well as being very constipated during these early days. (One of the conditions of being discharged from the maternity unit is having had a bowel motion, something she said she was terrified about for fear of splitting her stiches—she was eventually given some laxative, which was unpleasant in a different way). Because of the infection, she ended up staying in hospital for a week. The baby also appeared to have a heart murmur, which turned out to be a chest infection, and was on antibiotics via a cannula for 48 hours. As the baby had low blood sugar, she was given top-ups with formula from a bottle as well as being breastfed in the early days. Indeed, breastfeeding appeared to be off to a good start in the hospital, but once Ellen came home she realised that the baby wasn’t actually taking that much milk, despite being attached to the breast for long periods of time; this prompted her to do some reading about correct latching positions, as poor positioning had left her feeling very sore. She therefore pumped milk for a period to give her nipples a rest, which helped with the engorgement she also faced due to the baby not feeding that well at the breast, though happily taking a bottle. In a bid to establish breastfeeding properly, they cut out bottles at this stage, which worked well and breastfeeding has been more straightforward since. However, the baby then refused the bottle, or at least it is ‘a struggle’ to get her to take it. This had a knock-on effect on

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Ellen, who was very tired as they could not share feeding duties. As she said, the breast is ‘definitely’ something more than feeding to the baby— ‘she uses me to fall asleep…the midwives say she is using me as a comforter’. But she felt conflicted about this: you read books that say that they’ve been inside you for nine months. They want to be close to you. And in other books say they need to learn to be independent.

Originally, Ellen had anticipated that she would want to follow a routine with the baby, but this was not the case. The baby did not have set nap times, but was ‘quite regular’ with her feeds which were at least every three hours—although often only two at night because Ellen struggled to keep her awake and feeding efficiently during this period. At first, the system had been that Ellen would feed her and Max would change her and settle her, but soon they realised that was ‘stupid’ so then Ellen did it all, and unless she really could settle the baby on her own and would wake Max to help. Ellen also suffered from bad night sweats every night at this stage, such that they had to change the sheets very regularly. Space was an issue, and they both felt like they are ‘living in a laundry’ as there were so many clothes constantly being washed and dried. But more than that, there was ‘no semblance’ of their old life, where it was possible to plan a day ahead, but rather everything was reactive, ‘slow and kind of unpredictable’. Yet amidst this chaos, Ellen talked about the love she felt for her baby, unlike anything she has felt before: I think it is probably the first time in my life that I’m happy in the present. ’Cause I think…I was saying to [my sister] yesterday, you always project into the future, even if you’re just thinking next week is payday or next month you go on holiday. Just thinking that I can’t wait for that to happen. But now she’s here, I just kind of…every day is just really nice. I don’t want it to change.

As a couple they were conflicted about what an ‘ideal’ sort of parental leave would look like. As before, Ellen said she would like ‘at least’ a year with the baby if money was no object—indeed, she’d rather ‘not work at all now’, though she also said she would be happy to leave the baby with Max after she reached six months old. Max was more unsure. He did not see himself wanting to work full time or be at home full time, but liked the

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combination of the two—his work at that time was quite flexible so he was around a lot during the day, which Ellen found helpful, though she often had to do ‘the bedtime routine’ (giving the baby a bath before feeding her and putting her down to sleep, which could be a lengthy process) on her own, which was tiring, especially after a full day of childcare. Unlike other couples in this sample, Ellen and Max were quite explicit about the changes to their sex lives having had a baby. Ellen said, ‘I feel like I am neglecting [Max]’, to which he said quickly, ‘No, you’re not’. Ellen was ‘really scared’ about having sex, particularly since the episiotomy, which was still very uncomfortable. Again, space was an issue here: I am scared. It feels like it’s going to be months, if not years. So…so yeah. But even the thought of having sex because she’s in the bedroom, I don’t even know how it would work really. Seems a bit weird. So, yeah that’s a bit strange. And yeah it does just feel like you don’t get any time together. You’re just talking about what you going to have to do now. Do you want to cook dinner? I’ll wash up. That’s it really. Do you want to change the baby’s nappy? Do you want to hold the baby?

Parenting expertise came up again, and I noticed that it was a prominent theme throughout later interviews too, particularly its effect on their relationship. Ellen regularly read books and websites about baby care, whilst Max did not. Talking about her sister, who warned her about nagging, Ellen said: our partners are similar as well. And she did say, “Oh you will be telling him what to do and all the time” And then I kind of tried to leave him to bath her alone and massage her, so I’m not saying ‘don’t do that’ or…But then because I’m reading things at the same time and sort of changing, and I’ll say “Oh no don’t do that.” So then Max’s like, “Well what shall I do? Shall I…should I pick her up? Should I go in to her?” And I’ll say, “No, I’ve just read this and I’ve just read that”. [To Max] But it’s not too bad is it? Sorry.

I asked Max whether he had been reading any of these books, and he said no, he just prefers to do ‘whatever’ and ‘takes it in his stride’, much as his own Dad did with him and his brother. It occurred to me that, having been fostered, this experiential aspect of parenting may not have been a resource Ellen had to draw on in quite the same way. She instead was much more ‘up’ on the books—one of which was about being able to read

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a baby’s cries, and this was something Ellen spent a lot of time in our interview doing (‘I think that’s a tired not a hungry cry’). We next met when the baby was six months old, this time just with Ellen as Max ended up having to work at short notice. Things were going well—the baby had started weaning and seemed happy with a range of foods in addition to breastfeeding. Ellen was a little concerned because the baby’s weight seemed to be dropping down the percentiles, but she hoped it would ‘even out’ eventually. The main issue was sleep. As Ellen put it, ‘she goes down perfectly well but then wakes up throughout the night, but I don’t know if it’s hunger or if it’s comfort.’ Being in a one-bed flat, with the baby in their bedroom and surrounded by neighbours, Ellen felt unable to let the baby cry for any length of time (‘I can’t listen to her screaming so I gave in’), and is the one who got up throughout the night to settle her as she needed breastfeeding to fall back to sleep. It was ‘quite full on’, she said. She had hoped to start pumping enough milk in the week so that Max could feed the baby with a bottle over the weekend and discourage her from waking up so much, but ‘today’s Wednesday and I haven’t pumped any milk so far so I might not be able to pump enough’. She often brought the baby into bed at around 5 am in the hope of a few extra hours of sleep. On the rare nights that the baby has slept through, Ellen had ended up with engorged breasts, and one time, a lump in one of her armpits. This managed to clear, but then it was still very painful to feed on that side. She spoke to a local La Leche League leader (a breastfeeding support group) who told her it was related to a ‘bleb’ (a blister on the nipple) and that she needed to position the baby differently to make sure she was effectively draining the breast. She ‘dreads’ feeding on that side. However, she also said that breastfeeding was one of the ‘nicest experience[s] ever’—before these most recent problems ‘I was just loving it, even during the night when you’re really tired, you’ll just look down and it’s amazing and you see the [baby’s] body getting longer.’ The baby still did not have set nap times, but would have a long sleep either in the morning if they were not going to a baby class or in the afternoon if they were not meeting up with friends—the two main activities of Ellen’s day. Max was still working evening shifts in a bar, so unless Ellen was at home in the day with the baby, it was unlikely that he would see the baby except for at breakfast time. At this point, Max was in a work ‘slump’—he had anticipated being part of a newly launched menswear initiative at Fashion Week in London, and to help him prepare, Ellen had

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taken the baby to her sister’s for a week. In the end, he was not selected, much to his disappointment (although he still wanted to prepare his collection as he had some people interested in it). When she returned to the house after a week away, Ellen told me that the bathroom had not been cleaned and no cooking had been done for the baby: she had hoped he would prepare some small portions of food for the freezer. She said: ‘I had to clean the bath before I gave her a bath and that’s just…just me moaning, [but] I think it’s just that difference between men and women.’ I asked her to elaborate a bit more: Charlotte: Have you found that since [the baby’s] been around that those differences have been more accentuated or you’ve noticed them a bit more? Ellen: Yeah, definitely. Because when I was pregnant, we got on really well. Even in the beginning, it was fine but as she’s got older, I’ve felt more pressure. I think he thinks I’m on maternity leave and not doing anything, whereas he’s trying to do his collection and work part time to support himself. So even though he’s here every day, he’s not really here and even at weekends, he’s trying to do his work and then he wants to do things like go to the gym. She said she felt resentful because she had hoped that when his show was over she would have some more time to herself, because Max would be able to watch the baby while she went swimming or to a yoga class or similar. But this hadn’t happened—‘So I haven’t really done anything for myself.’ This sense of resentment was exacerbated because Ellen felt that it was she who took full responsibility for parenting—again, that was, not only in the sense of ‘doing’ it, but also ‘thinking’ about it. What was interesting in this quote is that she said she ‘doesn’t mind’ how Max chose to look after the baby, before immediately saying that he had left giving her lunch too late: Ellen:

And I’ve been reading a lot about Montessori, just about child development and he hasn’t taken any interest in anything and I’m like, ‘Please read these books,’ or, ‘Please just have a flick through.’ It is because he’s busy, he’s not one to

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just sit around and do nothing. But it’s just our priorities are different. Charlotte: So is there also that sense that if he was looking after her whilst you went off to do yoga or swimming, that he wouldn’t be doing it quite how you would want him to be doing it? Ellen: I don’t mind how he does it, he can do whatever but I think I came home once and it was almost lunchtime and I would’ve made her some food by then because I was feeding her at twelve o’clock at that point. And he’d done nothing, he’d just looked after [the baby]. Charlotte: So there’s no tidying or not cooking, cleaning you mean…Do you see this changing if you go back to work? How would that work out, do you think? Ellen: The plan is when I go back, I’ll go back four days and he’ll look after her two days so she’ll be in day care for two days. I don’t know, I would hope that on those two days he’s looking after her, he does do a bit more. Ellen was still reluctant to go back to work at all—she had plans to look for something else in the long run, but perhaps after (hopefully) having another baby so that she did not miss out on maternity pay. I asked her how she was enjoying being a mother, and she said it is ‘much nicer’ than she anticipated. But this did not mean it was without worries, particularly around whether people thought she was coping well or not: I feel so guilty for last night [when she left the baby to cry in the hope that she would go back to sleep, but then ‘gave in’], that I let that go on. I always feel like I’ve abused her and sometimes, I don’t know, I don’t see other Mums doing it but I do lose my patience. I was changing her today at the baby group and she was just reaching for everything and she was reaching for her dirty nappy and I said, ‘Oh, for goodness sake, [baby],’ and then a Mum said, ‘Do you need a hand?’ and I thought, oh no! I’m not coping!

She was also concerned about her relationship with Max. When I asked how things have been between them, she immediately (again) referred to their sexual relationship: We’ve only had sex three or four times since she’s been born and I didn’t think that would fall apart the way it has. But it is just timing and opportu-

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nity and not feeling tired and being in the same room. If we had our own room, it might be different…And the episiotomy is quite painful…I think all those things have contributed to…and that really worries me because you need that for a healthy relationship…I think I knew that it would put a strain on the relationship but you can’t really imagine it happening until it has happened. And my sister just kept saying everything that’s wrong with the relationship is magnified when you have children and she’s going through a really bad patch with her husband. So I did know to expect it and I don’t know, it is good and it isn’t good. But I think it’s not helped by Max’s working pattern and that situation, by him being around but not really being there to help, it’s made me a bit resentful…And we just have no money because of what he’s doing and I can’t really pay for a babysitter, to go and swim or to go and do some yoga.

Again, this was exacerbated by the fact that she felt it was she who ‘called all the shots’ with parenting. On the breastfeeding issue, she said she was keen to reduce it to just mornings and evenings soon, but that this was very much her decision, as Max ‘doesn’t really know that much about it, so if I said I wanted to stop now, I could say everyone stops now or they recommend that you stop now and he hasn’t read anything’ (see also the quote from Ellen in the chapter on feeding). I asked if she wished he were more actively interested. She used the example of the MMR vaccine (a combined vaccine usually given to babies in the UK to protect against Measles, Mumps and Rubella), which can also be given separately, but outside the National Health Service and therefore at a cost to the parents. Some circles of parents in the UK worry about the high load of vaccine being given to babies in a combined shot, and have absorbed (discredited) claims about links between MMR and autism, so the vaccination decision can cause anxiety (see Faircloth, 2013). Ellen said: It’s like the MMR, I don’t want to do the MMR or I want to do it separately and he’ll just be like, ‘Yeah, whatever, I’ll be paying for it so it doesn’t matter.’ But I would like him to read and understand and make that joint decision with me because if anything did come up…I read that when you do MMR the first one or the ones you do after are not quite as effective. So if anything happened, I don’t know how it can’t be effective but…or if I decided against it altogether and she got mumps, then he’d just blame me. But I would like that to be a joint decision and I’ve asked him to read it but he hasn’t read it.

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Our final interview, with both parents in a joint interview, was when the baby was 14 months old. Ellen was back at work and, after a negotiation with her employer, worked three days a week (Wednesday to Friday) in a role with a much better remit: it had ‘turned into exactly the role I would want it to be’. Max looked after the baby the three days that Ellen was at work, as he had lost his bar job over the summer so they had been unable to afford nursery. He used Mondays and Tuesdays to work on his design work, which seemed to be picking up after some profiles in prominent magazines, but he was limited by lack of resources in the amount of clothing he could add to his collection. They were very pressed for money, but whilst Ellen had the option of working full time, she did not want to do that until the baby was at least two years old. She had stopped breastfeeding (when the baby was 13 months), and the baby was now on solid food and goat’s milk. She still did not sleep brilliantly—sometimes she slept through, but Ellen said she still could not leave her to ‘cry it out’ as she worried about ‘doing permanent damage’. Despite the tiredness, Ellen said again how grateful she was to have had a baby and she was never resentful of her—‘I think in my twenties I would have lost patience, but it’s like, I really wanted this.’ The baby was still in a cot in their room, but they would shortly be moving to a two-bed flat nearby, slightly further out of town, via an intermediate rent scheme. They were really excited about having some more space, which would be like ‘proper living’, rather than the current set-up which has been ‘mental’. When Max had the baby during the week he took her to a variety of classes, as he liked to see her socialise with other children. He liked one of the groups in particular—in part because the woman who ran it is friendly and said he was excellent with children, to the extent that she encouraged him to train as a childcare worker, which he said he ‘might look into’: he was more keen to pursue his design work and had recently done some freelance work for a colleague, but committing to anything more was difficult with childcare responsibilities. Ellen had made friends with one local mum, and Max got on well with her partner so the four of them spent time together regularly and swapped babysitting sessions. They again lamented that if they were living in Scandinavia, they would have had much more flexibility as there you were given a financial benefit either to stay at home and look after the child yourself or to pay for childcare (which was heavily subsidised, so a lot cheaper than the UK). Their relationship, when I asked about it, was ‘a lot better’ as they ‘don’t bicker that much anymore’, and many of the pressures of last year

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had lessened somewhat. But all the same, Ellen said she was sad about it being unlikely that they would have another child, because the cost of childcare in London was just so high (at this point around £1400/month for one child in a nursery): It does feel awful, like I would love to have another child but realistically I cannot see how we can possibly afford having two children, childcare and everything they need, and that feels really, really unfair.

They talked explicitly about moving to Scandinavia, where their quality of life would be somewhat higher: Ellen: I’d go tomorrow. Max: It’s just that I need to be here though that’s the problem, because there’s not really an industry there for what I’m doing. So, it’s quite frustrating because it would be so much easier over there. At a follow-up interview via email with Ellen (Max unfortunately did not respond), she told me that the couple had indeed had another baby (a boy, born two and a half years after the first baby) and that they had moved to Scandinavia. However, they had separated. Ellen said that things had been ‘awful’ since she became pregnant again, and they had had some ‘big disagreements which have affected our relationship…he lets it be known now and again that he resents [having to help out more]’. This seemed only to have escalated as that second baby got older, and she linked this in part to breastfeeding: as in the chapter on feeding, Ellen talked about breastfeeding being ‘extremely satisfying’ and feeling resentful of Max ‘pressurising’ her to find work. They moved countries when their second baby was eight months old, as living in London seemed ‘impossible’ on a low income with two children. It took Ellen a year to find work, which was then only on short contracts with breaks in between. She said, ‘I am now on a year-long contract but I have had to abandon my chosen field and return to secretarial work which I find frustrating and unsatisfying.’ Her son had been in fulltime childcare since he was 18 months old, which she found upsetting: ‘I was extremely reluctant to leave him as part of the reason for the move was to ensure I could be with him more.’ Whilst Max had found a job as a senior designer at a menswear firm, she said that she felt short-­changed by the promise of freedom the move had seemed to offer:

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Having moved to [Scandinavia] ALL children are in daycare by a year old and the mothers are back at work and this is not how I wished to raise my children. The UK makes it hard for women to return to work because of the cost of daycare but here it’s the opposite and I believe both are wrong and the choice of the woman should be supported. In [Scandinavia] it is much more equal and some men do take parental leave…but I believe the bond with baby and mother is strongest and it should be her decision whether to split the leave with the father…I am not ambitious and would have loved to raise my children full time until school age. The pressure of working full time and needing children to adhere to our schedules is unfair and a lot of pressure on both them and the parent. It takes away much of the potential enjoyment and replaces it with stress and worry.

This sense of stress and worry was obviously exacerbated by the fact that Ellen had no network of friends or family to draw on in helping her raise the children: Since we split we have ‘9 days with me and 5 days with him’ arrangement. We have been through court as I wanted to return to England but as I have now found a job and place to live I have conceded to stay here and luckily the judge decided the children should legally live with me. I have nothing around me, no network, friends or family so I want to be with my children as much as possible but this makes it hard too. Unfortunately I need to work full time to afford to live here so I have to have someone collect the children from daycare and I meet them at home. My ex-partner will soon be fighting me for a 7/7 division as this means he no longer has to pay any child maintenance. I’m stuck in a system I don’t agree with or understand the logic of but I have to live with decisions I made when I feel I was under extreme hormonal stress.

I asked her a final question by email. ‘Given this research was originally titled “Gender, intimacy and equality”, how would you say having a baby has changed things between you and your partner, if at all?’ She responded: It has ended our relationship. Having children made clear to both of us how different we are and how we are complete opposites when it comes to raising children. Before children I had no idea about how I felt about parenting and I’m surprised at the path of parenting I prefer (respectful). On top of this I believe I suffered a huge mental breakdown after my second child with moving country (the loss of family, friends, support), lack of secure employment and money. I do not recognise the man I spent 12 years together in a relationship with.

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References Carlson, D. L., Miller, A. J., Sassler, S., & Hanson, S. (2016). The gendered division of housework and couples’ sexual relationships: A reexamination. Journal of Marriage and Family, 78, 975–995. Duncan, S., Edwards, R., Reynolds, T., & Alldred, P. (2003). Motherhood, paid work and partnering: Values and theories. Work Employment and Society, 17(2), 309–330. Faircloth, C. (2013). Militant lactivism? Infant feeding and maternal accountability in the UK and France. Berghahn Books. Faircloth, C., & Twamley, K. (Eds.). (2015). Gender, intimacy and equality: uncomfortable Bedfellows? Sociological Research Online, 20 (4) Ford, G. (1999). The Contented little baby book. Vermillion. Fox, B. (2009). When couples become parents: The creation of gender in the transition to parenthood. University of Toronto Press. Giddens, A. (1992). Transformation of intimacy: Sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. Polity. Hochschild, A. R. (2003). The commercial spirit of intimate life and the abduction of feminism: Signs from women’s advice books. In A. R. Hochschild (Ed.), The commercialization of intimate life: Notes from home and work (pp.  14–29). University of California Press. Illouz, E. (2012). Why love hurts: A sociological explanation. Polity Press. Jackson, S. (2008). Ordinary sex. Sexualities, 11(1/2), 33–37. Jamieson, L. (1998). Intimacy: Personal relationships in modern societies. Polity Press. NHS. (2020). Reducing the risk of cot death via. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pregnancy-­and-­baby/reducing-­risk­cot-­death/ Sears, W., & Sears, M. (1993) [1982]. The baby book: Everything you need to know about your Baby. Little Brown. Tomori, C. (2015). Nighttime breastfeeding: An American cultural dilemma. Berghahn Books. Van Hooff, J. (2011). Rationalising inequality: heterosexual couples’ explanations and justifications for the division of housework along traditionally gendered lines. Journal of Gender Studies, 20(1), 19–30. https://doi.org/10.108 0/09589236.2011.542016 Weeks, J. (1995). Invented moralities, sexual values in an age of uncertainty. Polity Press. Woodiwiss, J. (2015). Negotiating intimate and (A)sexual stories. Sociological Research Online., 20(4), 186–199.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

The impact of parenthood on most couples was not—of course—as calamitous as it was for Ellen and Max; the majority of couples did not separate but were still together at our five-year check in (and presumably beyond). But the account in that vignette—and the other vignettes—points to tensions faced by all couples, in how best to balance the pulls of parenting and partnership. As such, this chapter sums up the argument of the book, making the case that there is an inherent paradox at the heart of many contemporary family set-ups. On the one hand, couple relationships are idealised as ‘loose’, equitable and intimate; on the other, parenting relationships are idealised as ‘permanent’, intensive and highly gendered. The incompatibility between these ideals is brought home to many couples when they become parents, in that their worlds become more divided and the prospect for ‘mutual understanding’ is curtailed. This lack of shared experience appears not only to be a problem in a practical or material sense—for example, due to the well-documented constraints around men taking parental leave or working more flexibly to allow a genuine sharing of care—but extended into the cultural and interpersonal dimension of relationships, with many women pointing to the fact that their partners simply ‘did not care enough’ (as Ellen puts it) about the manifold decisions required in even the most basic of parenting activities. Taking a practice-based approach, the book has explored how these negotiations played out at material, physiological and cultural levels, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Faircloth, Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77403-5_7

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through a focus on birth, feeding and sleeping, three ‘practices’ which are by varying degrees linked to parental bodies. The examples here have shown some of the ways in which the pervasive culture around parenting is gendered, and pointed to some of the impacts of that on women—as well as on men who can be left feeling ineffectual in how best to ‘support’ their partners. But, more than that, it has also, I hope, shown the mental toll of this culture on couples, who struggle to reconcile their concern with doing things ‘equally’, and the obligation to do what they perceive to be best for their child. This appears to be particularly difficult to resolve for those couples who are most committed to ideals of equality and who might be said to be best placed to tackle the contradiction. This conclusion considers some of the underlying assumptions at the heart of these debates, and considers ways forward from here.

Equality and Intimacy: Uncomfortable Bedfellows? Collins (2003), writing about the emergence of the ‘companionate marriage’ (as opposed to the more traditional patriarchal one), notes, ‘The keywords of companionship were intimacy and equality. Intimacy was at once achieved and expressed through privacy, closeness, communication, sharing, understanding and friendship’ (2003, p. 24). However, he identifies a problem with this once children come along: parenthood catalysed the gendered division of labour and had the potential to divide companionate couples every bit as profoundly as their patriarchal counterparts. Whereas spouses were able to live ‘almost identical lives’ before they had children, the resulting intimacy came under pressure from the inescapable differentiation between the two sexes once there is a child. Particularly if they planned to breastfeed, and particularly if women were earning less than their partners before (which in all but one case they were), what usually emerged from the interviews in this study is that it made ‘most sense’ that they were the ones to take time off work, or stop work entirely. Many women accounted for this in an understandably contradictory way as they went about trying to narrativise it; it was both what they ‘wanted’ to do, and what they ‘had’ to do: they had an ideological commitment to equality in career opportunities, yet a gendered ‘pull’ towards a model of intensive parenting. It is important to contextualise these accounts in our particular historical moment. In line with much sociological and popular literature, the accounts here show that the transition to motherhood is felt acutely by

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many women today (e.g., Cusk, 2001; Miller, 2005). This is, no doubt, in part as a reflection of the shift Giddens and others identify—the period before children is, discursively at least, one of equality for contemporary men and women, particularly in the middle classes: women match their male counterparts through the education system and largely have professional opportunities unfettered by gender, being able to gain financial independence. Furthermore, they have freedom in romantic and sexual unions and are able to express disdain for housework and homemaking in ways unthinkable in the past (Bristow, 2008; Giddens, 1992). As the narratives point to, however, something happens around the time of motherhood that means that many women suddenly ‘get’ feminism, and indeed their biological difference to men in a more explicit way than in the past (Bristow, 2008). Bodies, which had so far been a marker of the self (and self-control), start to ‘betray’ them, as Claudia puts it. This realisation of biological difference is often accompanied by a shift from being financially independent towards dependence whilst on maternity leave. Similarly, when they do go back to work, many women see their careers fall more readily into the ‘mummy track’ of part-time working, where their partners continue with the same five-day pattern. Furthermore, housework is no longer a case of taking ‘turns’ to carry out chores, but a hugely expanded task which has to be carefully orchestrated to keep all household members fed and clean. The invisibility—and cultural devaluation—of this labour after motherhood is something many women in the sample expressed resentment about, feeling that their partners simply ‘didn’t see’ the extra work they were doing, often by virtue of being the ones at home more. These material and practical changes to women’s financial situation, despite being coupled with a policy emphasis on ‘equal parenting’, often serve to magnify this sense of injustice. And clearly, for many women, losing their previous identities as professionals creates its own kind of challenges here.

Iterations of Equality Throughout this book, I have looked at how couples deal with dissonance between ideals of equality and the realities of early parenthood. I have also looked at how they (re-)define notions of ‘equality’ in varying ways, in negotiation with one another and in reaction to their particular circumstances. As such, the book takes an in-depth, narrative approach to draw out four iterations of ‘equality’ in couples’ accounts: equality as ‘fairness’

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and ‘balance’, or as ‘breaking gendered roles’ and as ‘50/50’ (this is a typology in development with Twamley, see Twamley, 2020; Faircloth, 2020). Drawing on literature in the field of family and relationship studies (as they refer to concepts of gender and equality), in parallel with insights from the body of work known as Parenting Culture Studies, I have explored both the UK context (moving towards ‘shared’ parental leave) before providing extended examples from couples who subscribe to the various iterations. Pearl and Tim, for example, talked about equality as ‘fairness’ and the fact that Tim would get up with the baby at night during the weekend, whilst Pearl would take the lead during the week when he was at work. In the vignette from Anthony and Claudia, it is clear that she likes to think of herself as ‘breaking gendered roles’ (and insisting that the baby not be entirely dressed in pink if it was a girl) whilst also being a very strong subscriber to the final iteration of ‘50/50’—aspiring to the ideal promoted by policymakers and reflected in academic literature around work–life balance/gender and work, and each member of the couple doing the same thing to the same extent (on this, see Doucet, 2017). In the vignette from Laura and James, there is more of a sense of ‘balance’ where the two have an explicit ‘gentleman’s agreement’ as to who will ‘take turns’ with the baby in taking an extended period of time away from work (although this does not in fact come to pass, and arguably Laura is more committed to a ‘50/50’ iteration than ‘balance’). Overall, whilst all couples were ‘gender traditional’ to the extent that women took longer periods of leave than men in all cases, those espousing these last two iterations (of breaking gendered roles and 50/50) were the most likely to return to work earlier (as with Claudia or Laura), whilst those narrating iterations around balance and fairness were the most likely not to return at all (as with Pearl or Rada). Clearly then, this four-partite division was not mutually exclusive; couples might associate with more than one iteration, even within the space of the same interview; and it is clear from the excerpts that some couples disagreed with each other as to which iteration should be prioritised, if any. In line with Hochschild’s comments, this exposed those who ‘talked the walk’ with their ‘on top’ ideologies and those who ‘walked the walk’ with their ones ‘underneath’. However, it was noticeable that even after the birth of their babies, whilst couples would continue to hold these iterations up as ideals, there was also a recognition that they might not be achievable in practice—something often acknowledged with sadness and

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frustration. At this point, like Claudia, they might move from an ‘ideal’ of ‘50/50’ towards more of one of ‘balance’, using these iterations in their identity work as a way to rationalise inequality post hoc—still under the rubric of ‘equality’, and therefore a relationship which still had the scope to be both intimate and fulfilling. As Twamley observes, this is a sociologically interesting fact in itself: Why, when people are saying that they value equality in a relationship, do they work so hard to rationalise something which could just as easily be read as inequitable (2014, see also Van Hooff, 2011; Jamieson, 1998)? Secondly, as I elaborate in the section below, whilst the exercise of drawing out different versions of equality is analytically productive, it clearly troubles the idea of equality as a policy goal, if the concept is relational to the extent that a diverse array of set-ups can be rationalised as equitable.

Equality as Sharing the Worry? As numerous scholars have noted (see Collier & Sheldon, 2008), one of the consequences of a shift towards a model of ‘involved’ fatherhood is that breadwinning has been (ideologically, at least) downplayed as an important parental contribution. In its place, there is a greater cultural emphasis on the importance of ‘being there’ for the child. This ideological commitment to ‘being there’, however, has not been matched by men’s actions in terms of longer leaves or more flexible working, and breadwinning clearly remains central to men’s identity work (and indeed often crucial to family finances—see James’s comments in their vignette). As such, some critics have argued that current policy measures around work–life balance are less about trying to effect gender equality than promoting an intensive parenting agenda, and trying to encourage both parents to spend more time with their children (Faircloth, 2014). However, as the narratives here demonstrate, it is not entirely clear what this means in practice (Dermott, 2008). Indeed, what seems to emerge is that as much as splitting the practical tasks of childcare, women want their partner to share in the ‘thinking about’ (and accountability for) parenting. For example, in the interview when their child was a year old, Anthony and Claudia reflect on what ‘equality’ means, and Claudia notes that bringing in money is ‘not what matters to me’. Instead, what really seems to matter is an equal division of the increased anxiety about parenting, and sharing the worrying about a preferred parenting ‘path’—as with Ellen talking about the decision whether to go ahead with the MMR jab.

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Certainly, it was not unusual to encounter couples in this sample who had spreadsheets divvying up household tasks: Illouz’s (2012) comments around ‘emotional capitalism’ are salient here, notably the assertion that techniques of rationalisation and standardisation have entered intimate relationships psychologically as well as practically. So as well as these household tasks, it is in interpersonal negotiations and at the level of ‘thinking about’ parenting that battles over equality most seem to ‘matter’ (Faircloth, 2020, see also Twamley, 2020). Many men in the sample were, in general, aware of this imbalance in ‘thinking about’ parenting, but did not see it as either desirable or feasible to ape their partners’ intensive interest in their children. Jack says (in the five-year follow-up interview), in response to the question ‘Do you and your partner parent equally?’: Probably not—I imagine it’s [my wife] 60% and myself 40%…I am probably more willing to catch up with friends in the evening and at weekends, whereas [my wife] is often interested in spending every possible moment with the kids. I’d also say that [she] is more willing to assert her views and preferences when it comes to the children…whereas I am more agnostic.

This, of course, was the cause of some tension: on the one hand, a desire that fathers do more of the ‘thinking’ about parenting (part of the ‘mental load’ of running of a household), at the same time that there was a recognition that no one but the mother would do this well enough. This leaves men in a very difficult position. Michael (currently with one small son, and another on the way, his wife currently on maternity leave from her job in the city, where he also works) says, for example: I feel [she] watches me intent on spotting the smallest error or point of disagreement, when I am taking care of our son…and mainly talks to me to offer criticism. She tells me I am not involved enough as a father, which has some truth to it—though I also feel I don’t get enough recognition for the amount of cleaning and cooking I do.

To this extent, as well as a means of expressing genuine frustration about unequal division of a labour, there is suggestion here that for some women in the sample there was an element of ‘gate-keeping’ around the identity work of parenting, such that mothering provides a recognised social status that women are keen to protect. This is echoed by Twamley’s

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study with couples making the transition to parenthood where there was a fear on the part of women than men would take the ‘good bits’ of parenting, but leave tasks like housework largely for women (2019). Again, although the ‘thinking about’ of parenting technically does not relate to physiology, the embodied fact of being pregnant, birthing and potentially breastfeeding does mean that these practices of care weigh more heavily on women and become embedded into the matrix of care in highly gendered ways.

The Quality of Quality Time As observed by Neale and Smart (2002) in relation to fathers’ behaviour post-divorce, ‘involved’ fatherhood often encompassed only those tasks which concerned one-to-one contact with children. Fathers’ desire to ‘be equal’ did not extend to child-related domestic chores such as washing clothes or packing lunchboxes (see also Dermott, 2008). As Gatrell argues, this may be because ‘tasks which involved direct contact with children were regarded by men as a “worthwhile” investment because they strengthened the paternal sphere of influence, while indirect childcare was tedious and did not augment fathers’ situational power’ (2007, p. 367). This of course ties into a more ‘intensive’ discourse around parenting that validates a concerted optimising of children’s development. Mothers’ time with children was therefore interrupted by the requirements of child-­ related domestic tasks (something they felt ‘guilty’ about), while fathers created for themselves ‘quality time’ which was spent exclusively with children. Indeed, many couples, particularly those in ‘50/50’ category, noted after the birth of their children that even if each member of the partnership were doing the ‘same’ amount of time in terms of childcare, the quality of that time was different for men and women. We see this in Ellen’s account, when she talks about Max ‘only’ looking after the baby, rather than also getting on with cleaning or cooking. As Eerola et al. note in their study of Finnish couples’ negotiations around childcare, ‘shared parenting’ can mean different things for mothers and fathers: ‘mothers are expected to do care work simultaneously with their other duties whereas for fathers it is more acceptable to focus solely on care’ (2020, p. 9). This was certainly echoed by Clare, the mother from the second-time parent couple in the study:

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I think unfortunately…I don’t know if this is what the ultimate finding of your research will be—is men and women are so different. Every single couple I know the women are the ones that when they’re with the kids they’re with the kids and doing a hundred and one things at the same time and the men are purely with the kids. It’s just uncanny. It has to be a man-­ woman thing because it’s just uncanny because I’ve got friends with kids from lots of different backgrounds.

So for those couples, perhaps particularly those men who are outwardly committed to ‘equality’, it’s important to note the work that gender does in these narrativisations, as this is certainly not the same for the men and women I spoke to. Instead, it serves different functions in terms of their ‘identity work’, with pernicious implications. Echoing comments from several men that they at least did ‘more than my own dad’, as Lamont (2015) observes in her work on masculinity, again echoing the findings of Hochschild (1989): In this manner, I argue that egalitarian narratives serve as a form of identity work that allows men to think of themselves as better than the average man without having to fully challenge gender inequality. Consistent with previous research, privileged men continue to “talk the talk,” but fail to “walk the walk,” as progressive definitions of manhood remain compatible with male privilege (Bridges, 2014; Pyke, 1996). In particular, egalitarian narratives may actually serve to perpetuate gender inequality, demonstrating, as Messerschmidt (2010) argues, that progressive masculinities not only fail to challenge gender inequality, but allow it to function in hard to recognise, yet still pernicious, ways. (Lamont, 2015, p. 287)

Family Life and a Relational Perspective Throughout the research, there has been a ‘relational’ perspective taken— accounts are usually presented in conjunction with those of a partner to add context, for example. This is not only a pragmatic but also a philosophical decision. As Donati (2018, p.  433) puts it in conceptualising relational sociology more broadly: ‘Every social phenomenon arises from a relational context and generates another relational context.’ By this, he challenges substantivalism, and instead suggests that society or social phenomenon are social relations, existing only because of particular relations. In other words, phenomenon emerge from interdependences and interactions between situated actors and are based on broader assumptions and

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relations. In this sense, he pushes against the assumption that entities are bounded, given and self-sustaining, or that relationships are simply the result of individual interests or practices, as they appear in liberal theory. Instead, it becomes important to consider ‘what is required to make that specific relationship exist’ between a parent and child, or between partners, for example—‘its situated purpose, the means and norms to achieve it, and the latent value of the concrete relation’ (Donati, 2018, p. 436). ‘Equality’ was something that was constantly negotiated between couples and which shifted over time. This worked in an iterative fashion such that it fed into decisions around work and care. In the vignette, Laura said that despite being quite vocal about the importance of equality, she and James had not really ‘drilled down’ on the details of who would do what or when they would do it with their child—and that by the time they considered it, it was almost too late to change anything. (This is in part, of course, because no amount of preparation can really prepare anyone for life with the new baby.) Whilst Laura and James were quite explicitly committed to the idea of equality (and the importance of each of them ‘taking turns’ at being primary carer), and then shocked at how difficult this seemed to be to implement in practice, this was not the case for all couples, where there is a more gradual evolution into a traditionally gendered arrangement that they had both probably anticipated. However, it is worth reiterating the impressive power of the intensive mothering ideology in shaping women’s perceptions of themselves as good mothers, and working out how they ‘want’ to arrange their working and home lives even in advance of becoming parents. Jennie and Ralph (both working as lawyers in London when I first met them, earning between £50,000–99,000 each) provide a useful, final case study. The plan was that Jennie would take ten and a half months of leave with their first baby, five months of which was fully paid, with a plan to ‘ideally’ return to work for four days a week, and reduce her hours so that she can do ‘drop off and pick ups’. Ralph was going to take two weeks of paternity leave, or ‘maybe three’. He said during our first (joint) interview, when I asked him about if he had heard of the idea of shared parental leave ‘You sort of read about it and think “don’t think I’ll do that”. Jennie is planning on breastfeeding so…’ Jennie was outwardly committed to ideas of equality (in the sense of ‘balance’), saying that she had ‘worked hard to get where I am’ and wouldn’t want to ‘give that up’. At the same time, she was also already talking about giving up work ‘once the second comes along’.

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At our second (individual) interview, when the baby was still very young, Jennie said she is in too much of a ‘whirlwind’ to even think about it, but that she would be ‘cross’ with herself if she did not use her training to go back to work at ‘some point’. At this stage, in an ideal world, she said she might like to give up work to be ‘at home with the children for the first five years or so’. But she would plan to go back eventually as otherwise she would ‘go mad’, and said that ‘I haven’t had a really good education just to sit around at home or go to the gym or meet with friends for lunch every day of the week’. At the six-month interview, this was much the same. She could ‘definitely’ see herself being a ‘stay-at-home Mum’ for a bit, as financially they were ‘fine’ on Ralph’s salary. That would only be after the second baby was born though, and as planned, she went back to work after ten and a half months. She said that it was ‘great’ to be back at work, although her career felt very ‘secondary’ to Ralph’s. She was already trying to work out ‘when the right time to get pregnant’ would be, especially as they would like to have more than two children. At the five-year follow-up (via email with Ralph), this couple had had two further children. Ralph had been promoted to a partner in his law firm; Jennie was ‘not employed at the moment and likely to remain so until the nippers are all at school’. In this case, both members of the couple seemed (relatively) content with how things had worked out—they adopted a more ‘balanced’ approach to equality than couples who subscribe to the 50/50 ideal (although cynics would point out that yet again it is the woman who is rationalising her own ‘desire’ to step away from professional forms of recognition). As has been widely discussed in the social sciences, it has long been an issue for researchers to know how to take our participants in their own terms. Jennie said she would be ‘cross’ not to use her training, but at the same time, it is clear that she ‘wanted’ to be the primary carer within their relationship—in part chiming with the ‘resistance’ to the world of capitalism that Hays observes. Who are we, as researchers, to say whether this is ‘really’ what she wants, what she has been socialised into, materially constrained into, or what ‘really’ counts as equality? What can be said with more certainty is that it was in the couples where women who were most vocal about their desire for equality, and that it be in a ‘50/50’ model that there seems to be more tension and frustration than those who started with an idea of ‘balance’. What can a social science perspective say about that?

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Equality and Individualism At this point it is helpful to think about what categorical assumptions are made in our discussions around ‘equality’ at all. In The Force of Non-­ Violence, Butler (2020) makes the argument that an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality, making the case for what she calls ‘radical equality’. Speaking about the book in a recent interview, where she was asked about the relevance of the concept for feminism more widely she says: My point in the recent book is to suggest that we rethink equality in terms of interdependency. We tend to say that one person should be treated the same as another, and we measure whether or not equality has been achieved by comparing individual cases. But what if the individual—and individualism—is part of the problem? It makes a difference to understand ourselves as living in a world in which we are fundamentally dependent on others, on institutions, on the Earth, and to see that this life depends on a sustaining organisation for various forms of life. If no one escapes that interdependency, then we are equal in a different sense. We are equally dependent, that is, equally social and ecological, and that means we cease to understand ourselves only as demarcated individuals. (New Statesman 2020)

Butler is certainly correct that much social policy designed to foster (gender) equality relies on a promotion of ‘individualism’ as a key to this goal, particularly within the context of globalising policy-based discourses. For example, Davis and Williamson (2019, p. 1) say: We argue that individualism promotes gender equality. Individualist values of autonomy and self-determination transcend gender identities and serve to legitimise women’s goals and choices. In contrast, collectivist values may subordinate women’s personal goals to their social obligations, generating greater acceptance of gender inequality.

As Butler suggests, the ideals of ‘equality’ ostensibly promoted in policy around parenting (such as those encouraging paternal ‘involvement’) rest on an idea of the individual, who is posited in terms of their own ‘needs’ against those of others who have opposing ‘needs’. This then bring us back to the interesting contradiction at the heart of contemporary patterns of personal life and the ‘problem’ of how to reconcile individual

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desires (to be ‘oneself’) with a collectivist reality (of making a life with and in a family). Echoing the arguments made by Illouz (2007), Furedi recently commented on a study which paradoxically revealed that there were higher divorce rates amongst couples who share the housework (contra most empirical evidence, see Kluwer et al., 1996; Bird, 1999; see also Ruppanner et al., 2018), where the consensus is that an imbalance in the gendered household division of labour correlates with increased relationship dissatisfaction): The internalisation of an instrumental ethos into the institution of marriage means that negotiations between men and women acquire the form of a transaction that has little resemblance to the give and take of informal relationships…The real issue is not that of equality versus inequality but whether a marriage is regarded as a convenient contractual encounter or an intimate and inter-dependent relationship of love. What leads to divorce is not the sharing of housework [or not] but a pre-existing disposition to regard a relationship instrumentally and pragmatically. When contemporary culture continually incites people to put their “own needs” above everything else it is not surprising that it becomes more difficult to forge bonds of intimacy. (Independent, 2012)

Thus, whether or not couples share housework (or by the same logic, parenting) is not really the issue in terms of how content they will feel: instead, it is about how the relationship itself is envisaged. Again, this is echoed in Twamley’s work (2019) that this dilemma (of the desire for self-­ fulfilment vs. a desire for fulfilment via coupledom) is one that starts to affect all couples, even those who do not explicitly espouse equality per se, as each seeks to reconcile their personal goals with their commitment to others. To this end, even more ‘traditional’ women could be read as ‘cold’, in that they might keep their partners shut out of the caring relationship in some way, to protect their own status as primary caregivers. This points to the notion that this is not just a problem of equality being overly individualised, but a certain incommensurability of individuality with couple life more generally. Certainly, if maintaining a sense that relationships are fulfilling, equitable and intimate is not helped by an approach to intimate life which is individualist and transactional, it is certainly not made any easier by the arrival of children, who, as one mother said, turn your time as a couple

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into ‘a zero-sum-game’ (i.e., when her husband did something in the evening, it meant she couldn’t do something else, unlike their previous ‘independent’ socialising). To follow Furedi’s logic, in a contemporary culture of individualism which arguably devalues love and commitment to a partner (or children) in place of an orientation towards independence and self-reliance, there is a potential that the foundation for intimate relationships can be threatened—what Hochschild (2003) might call ‘cultural cooling’, or Illouz a threat to the ‘emotional glue’ of society (2007). Ironically then, a policy context with a focus on fostering ‘equality’ based on an individualised approach to intimate life might have the very opposite effect to the one intended. The couples who are the focus of this book (in the vignettes) are not entirely representative of the sample, and indeed that that sample is a highly privileged one, operating within a UK context quite unlike other international settings. Many other couples did weather the ‘ebb and flow’ of day-to-day life without suffering from relationship breakdown, and spoke about the maintenance of family life in ways that were more affectionate—and possibly more ‘warm’ or ‘relational’—in their narratives, seemingly without the threat of a more collectivist understanding ‘subordinating their personal goals to their social obligations.’ (Davis & Williamson, 2019, p. 1). Instead, ironically, it seemed to be those couples who were most highly committed to ideals of equality who struggled the most. It is worth, then, thinking about what vision of the individual underlies this vision of equality, for it seemed in these accounts to be a more individualistic understanding of subjectivity that gave rise to this ‘tit-for-tat’ calibration of equality and a sense of justice. Certainly, the idea of the individual has had a long history—as old as social theory itself. This sovereign individual, or a Lockean subject, is one who has ‘property in himself’. It is at the heart of (Western, liberal) schools of thought not only within the academy but also as a structuring category for wider state projects. But how might life look if we were to take Butler’s invitation seriously, and imagine a more ‘dependent’ system of selves? Anthropologists have long been familiar with such a proposition, which, at the same time, also forces us to think about the question of power. In her critique of work by the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern in Papua New Guinea, Josephides (1985) claimed that Strathern had failed to ‘see’ exploitation of women by their husbands in Melanesia, who assumed possession of their labour in order to gain prestige from it in

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exchanges. Rebutting this, Strathern (1988) says that in fact, when understood contextually—and therefore relationally—women are not ‘exploited’ in the Marxist sense and do indeed have power in Melanesia. This is because they do not see the world in the same terms as we do. Power here is considered the power that enables others to do things, rather than that which prevents them. To take this perspective is, she argues, what it means to take another culture seriously ‘in its own terms’. In Melanesia, there are extremely different ways of conceiving personhood, action and agency to ‘the West’. As such, the idea that people could be anything less than other people (like a ‘second sex’) does not apply here. Likewise, the idea of persons having unitary identities does not make ‘sense’ in this context—they are not individual, they are ‘dividual’. The attributes of persons as property, such that labour can be ‘extracted’ and ‘alienated’, also does not follow—things are instead seen as having an intrinsic value, and are somehow always ‘yours’. As such, ‘domination’ in this setting does not equal ‘control’. There is no sovereign individual. In sum, she says that this critique, which relies on Marxist concepts, is inherently ethnocentric, based on idealised, conceptions from different cultural contexts. This is not therefore ‘exploitation’ when understood more relationally. Asking ‘how do we know as human beings that actions have had effects?’ she makes the case that in the West this is about ‘dominance’ but in Melanesia it is about ‘relations’. Using the example of a baby, she talks about how in the West we speak of ‘having’ a baby (with the notion of ownership of that property), whereas in Melanesia there is no property metaphor, but more the idea of a relation that has been affected by two people. As such, people are seen as a result of agency of their kin. A more relational approach to family life is one which now has a wide following within various sociological schools, particularly those concerned with family relationships (Donati, 2018; Doucet & McKay, 2020). It is a highly productive, and alluring, model through which to analyse some of the accounts presented here, in that it might help us reconfigure the ways in which we understand power and helps us move beyond the more transactional or ‘cool’ intimacy described by Illouz (2007). Taking this approach helps situate and contextualise discussions of equality that are otherwise quite abstract, and dependent on a highly masculinist view of ‘the subject’, who is unconstrained by caring responsibilities. But where does this leave the couples in this study, particularly as it relates to highly embodied, physiological practices of reproduction and parenting? At this point, it is worth remembering Claudia, who opened

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the first vignette with talk of her ‘disgust’ at someone being ‘dependent’ on her, as she saw it as a threat to her individuality. For her, and many of the other couples here, they are in a culture in which a more individualised logic is one which is part and parcel both of daily life, wider institutions and, indeed, ways of knowing oneself. A more relational perspective is certainly beneficial theoretically, but how helpful this is when people have to function within our contemporary sociopolitical landscape remains to be seen.

Conclusion: Escaping the ‘Parent Trap’? Whilst ‘equality’ between men and women can be seen as a social or political ideal, it is clear that there are barriers to this being realised. Some of these are material, in the sense that financial backing for sharing of care in the early years does not exist. Some of them, however, are cultural, in that it is women who are more strongly attuned to, and who undertake their identity work through the prism of an increasingly intensive parenting culture, itself tied to their very physiology as people who gestate, birth and lactate. What emerges is that for the women here what really ‘counts’ for them in terms of sustaining a sense of equality (and by extension, a sense of relationship satisfaction) is played out at the level of interpersonal negotiations. Whether they understand equality as overall ‘balance’ (with mothers taking the lead on care) or 50/50 (with the couple splitting it), what they want is for their partners to really ‘understand’ what life with a baby involves, ‘the good and the bad’, and more than that, they want a division of the ‘mental load’, particularly of parenting. In terms of recent European-wide policy agendas, ‘involving’ fathers in family life would go some way towards easing the burden of care many women shoulder and would certainly help them ‘see’ the realities of life at home with a child. However, there is also cause for caution, in that the extension of an intensive parenting to men might actually leave them in a similar ‘cultural contradiction’ between the worlds of work and home— which is not desirable either, and goes no way to tackling this larger paradox. One solution, suggested by Hays (1996), is to take greater social responsibility for raising children, through greater investment in and acceptance of childcare—both at the level of the state and by employers more widely. This would go some way to challenging the intensive,

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privatised, individualist (rather than shared, public or stratified) approach to parenting, which can result in huge pressure on individual parents and couples, left trying to balance the pulls of intensive parenting and egalitarian intimacy within the confines of their own relationships and households. Certainly, the toll of this on couples, and especially on women, in trying to live up to these ideals should not go unnoticed in our discussions around reproduction and care for the next generation. The last word goes to Claudia. In our interview when their baby was 12 months old, she said: I’m a woman who is like a man because I’ve always looked after myself financially, and I’m independent and I go and do my things and I don’t have anyone dependent on me, except now I do, and now I suddenly have to be a woman and a man…I have to be loving and a mothering nurturing person…and that’s a massive conflict in my identity because that’s something I’ve always shunned because I always wanted to be an independent masculine (essentially) woman!…I don’t know how that leaves us and that’s probably why [my husband] is saying, “I don’t really understand what 50-50 is because you’re doing everything and now you want me to do everything that you’re doing in the same way you’re doing it but you seem to have everything covered.”

But obviously I’m not actually coping.

References Bird, C. (1999). Gender, household labor, and psychological distress: The impact of the amount and division of housework. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 40(1), 32–45. Bristow, J. (2008). Why we need a parents’ liberation movement. Spiked Review of Books. http://www.spiked-­online.com/review_of_books/article/5386 Butler, J. (2020). The force of non-violence: An ethico-political bind. Verso Books. Collier, R., & Sheldon, S. (2008). Fragmenting fatherhood: A socio-legal study. Hart. Collins, M. (2003). Modern love: An intimate history of men and women in twentieth- century Britain. Atlantic Books. Cusk, R. (2001). A life’s work: On becoming a mother. Fourth Estate. Davis, L.  S., & Williamson, C.  R. (2019). Does individualism promote gender equality? World Development, 123, 1–1. Dermott, E. (2008). Intimate fatherhood: A sociological analysis. Routledge.

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Donati, P. (2018). An original relational sociology grounded in critical realism. In F. Dépelteau (Ed.), The Palgrave handbook of relational sociology (pp. 431–456). Palgrave Macmillan. Doucet, A. (2017). The ethics of care and the radical potential of fathers ‘home alone on leave’: care as practice, relational ontology, and social justice. In M. O’Brien & K. Wall (Eds.), Fathers on leave alone and gender equality: An international comparative perspective (pp. 11–28). Springer. Doucet, A., & McKay, L. (2020). Fathering, parental leave, impacts, and gender equality: what/how are we measuring? International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 40(5/6), 441–463. https://doi.org/10.1108/ IJSSP-­04-­2019-­0086 Eerola, P. Närvi, J., Terävä, J., & Repo, K. (2020). Negotiating parenting practices: the arguments and justifications of finnish couples. Families, Relationships and Societies, Online First, 9 (2), 1–17. Faircloth, C. (2014). Intensive parenting and the expansion of parenting. In E. Lee, J. Bristow, C. Faircloth, & J. Macvarish (Eds.), Parenting culture studies (pp. 25–51). Palgrave Macmillan. Faircloth, C. (2020). When equal couples become unequal partners: Couple relationships and intensive parenting culture. Families, Relationships and Societies, Online First. https://doi.org/10.1332/204674319X15761552010506 Gatrell, C. (2007). Whose child is it anyway? the negotiation of paternal entitlements within marriage. The Sociological Review, 55(2), 352–372. Giddens, A. (1992). Transformation of intimacy: Sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. Polity. Hays, S. (1996). The Cultural contradictions of motherhood. Yale University Press. Hochschild, A. (1989). The second shift. Penguin Books. Hochschild, A. R. (2003). The commercial spirit of intimate life and the abduction of feminism: signs from women’s advice books. In A. R. Hochschild (Ed.), The commercialization of intimate life: Notes from home and work (pp.  14–29). University of California Press. Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Polity Press. Illouz, E. (2012). Why love hurts: A sociological explanation. Polity Press. Independent. (2012). Why the ‘couples where women do more housework stay together’ study isn’t shocking. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https:// www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/why-­couples-­where-­women-­do-­ more-­housework-­stay-­together-­study-­isn-­t-­shocking-­8192069.html Jamieson, L. (1998). Intimacy: Personal relationships in modern societies. Polity Press. Josephides, L. (1985). The production of inequality: Gender and exchange among the Kewa. Tavistock.

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Kluwer, E., Jose, A., & Van de Vliert, E. (1996). Marital conflict about the division of household labor and paid work. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 58(4), 958–969. Lamont, E. (2015). the limited construction of an Egalitarian masculinity: College-educated men’s dating and relationship narratives. Men and Masculinities, 18(3), 271–292. Miller, T. (2005). Making sense of motherhood: a narrative approach. Cambridge University Press. Neale, B., & Smart, C. (2002). Caring, earning and changing: Parenthood and employment after divorce. In A.  Carling, S.  Duncan, & R.  Edwards (Eds.), Analysing families, morality and rationality in policy and practice (pp. 183–199). Routledge. New Statesman. (2020). Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”’ via. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https:// www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-­b utler-­c ulture-­ wars-­jk-­rowling-­and-­living-­anti-­intellectual-­times Ruppanner, L., Branden, M., & Turunen, J. (2018). Does unequal housework lead to divorce? evidence from Sweden. Sociology, 52(1), 75–94. Strathern, M. (1988). The gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. University of California Press. Twamley, K. (2014). Love, marriage and intimacy among Gujarati Indians. Palgrave Macmillan. Twamley, K. (2019). ‘Cold intimacies’ in parents’ negotiations of work-family practices and parental leave? The Sociological Review, 67(5), 1137–1153. Twamley, K. (2020). ‘She has mellowed me into the idea of SPL’: Unpacking relational resources in UK Couples’ discussions of shared parental leave take­up. Families Relationships and Societies. Online First, 10 (1), 67–82. Van Hooff, J. (2011). Rationalising inequality: heterosexual couples’ explanations and justifications for the division of housework along traditionally gendered lines. Journal of Gender Studies, 20(1), 19–30. https://doi.org/10.108 0/09589236.2011.542016

Author Index1

B Beck, U., 2, 4, 20, 21, 23, 24 Beck-Gernsheim, E., 2, 4, 20, 21, 23, 24 Bowlby, J., 34, 36 Bristow, J., 39, 75, 94, 137 Butler, J., 4, 145, 147 C Collins, M., 2, 23, 59, 103, 118, 136 D Dermott, E., 1, 30, 97, 139, 141 Doucet, A., 4, 31, 40–44, 54, 55, 138, 148 E Eerola, P., 41, 42, 141

F Ford, G., 36, 109, 112 Fox, B., 3, 43, 87, 118, 119 Furedi, F., 35–37, 92, 146, 147 G Gatrell, C., 43–45, 94, 141 Giddens, A., 21, 22, 119, 120, 137 Goffman, E., 19 H Hays, S., 1, 20, 24–28, 30, 35, 39, 82, 144, 149 Hochschild, A., 39, 43, 45, 46, 70, 121, 138, 142, 147 I Illouz, E., 21, 22, 46, 59, 121, 140, 146–148

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Faircloth, Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77403-5

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AUTHOR INDEX

J Jensen, T., 32, 38 L Lamont, E., 45, 142 Lareau, A., 32, 38, 39 Lee, E., 1, 19, 24, 25, 27, 30, 35, 36, 38, 40, 76, 92, 94 M Macvarish, J., 24, 29, 31, 35, 76 Martin, C., 24, 29, 31 O Oakley, A., 3, 37, 56, 78 R Rose, N., 36, 54, 110, 111, 113

S Sears, M., 36, 109 Sears, W., 36, 109 Strathern, M., 31, 37, 147, 148 T Twamley, K., 5, 22, 52, 56, 71, 88, 94, 96n2, 97, 122, 138–140, 146 V Van Hooff, J., 22, 23, 114, 139 W Warner, J., 38 Wolf, J., 27, 28, 82

Subject Index1

A Attachment Parenting, 36, 54, 100, 109 B Balance, 5, 14, 44, 59, 68, 75, 80, 88, 93, 108, 110, 135, 138, 139, 143, 144, 149, 150 Bed-sharing, 54 Birth, vii, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10, 14, 16, 20, 37, 44, 52, 53, 59, 60, 61n2, 68, 71, 75–88, 93, 94, 96, 98–100, 102, 109, 110, 115–117, 136, 138, 141, 149 Birth stories, 84–88 Body, 3, 11, 14, 20, 21, 78, 82, 91, 98, 113, 116, 122, 127, 136–138 Bottle feeding, 11, 92, 94, 109 Breaking gendered roles, 5, 9, 44, 71, 80, 98, 103, 138 1

Breastfeeding, 7, 9–11, 25, 36, 37, 54, 61, 62, 64, 66, 84, 86, 92–95, 98, 100–104, 109–113, 115, 116, 118, 124, 127, 130–132, 141, 143 C Childcare, 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 20, 24, 27, 36, 39–41, 43, 45, 51, 53, 55, 66–68, 94, 96, 97, 100, 102, 103, 108, 123, 126, 131, 132, 139, 141, 149 Childhood, 8, 10, 32–35 Class, 25, 31–32, 39, 43, 44, 54, 55, 58, 65, 68, 76, 80, 81, 84, 97, 127, 128, 131, 137 Cold intimacies, 22 Couple interviews, 56 Cultural contradiction, 27, 39, 114, 149

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Faircloth, Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77403-5

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SUBJECT INDEX

D Deadlock, 91, 103–104 Developmental psychology, 19 E Egalitarianism, 41, 42 Embodiment, 94–96 Emergency, 10, 83 Equality, 1, 3, 5–9, 14–16, 20–23, 26, 40–46, 51, 53, 58–60, 68–70, 77, 78, 80, 87, 88, 91, 98, 102–104, 110, 114, 117, 119–122, 133, 136–149 Experts, 7, 24, 26, 28, 30, 34, 35, 37 Expressing, 7, 11, 62, 67, 80, 84, 94, 96, 140 F Fairness, 5, 6, 45, 88, 95, 98, 137, 138 Feeding problems, 61–62, 84 Femininity, 97 Feminist, 39, 40, 43, 63, 70, 71 50/50, 5, 9, 14, 43–45, 59, 70, 80, 88, 98, 101, 103, 138, 139, 141, 144, 149 Flexible working, 2, 139 Formula milk, 7, 12, 54, 61, 67, 84, 93, 94, 100 G Gay father family, 113 Gender, 1–8, 15, 16, 24, 26, 30–31, 33, 38–46, 51, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60, 69, 71, 77, 78, 88, 91, 92, 96, 98–103, 110, 113, 114, 117, 121, 122, 133, 137–139, 142, 145

Globalising, 33, 145 Guilt, 46 H Hypnobirthing, 60, 80, 81 I Ideals, vii, 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 16, 19–23, 30–33, 37, 38, 42–46, 59, 60, 66, 68, 75, 80, 85, 104, 108, 113, 115, 120–122, 125, 135–139, 144, 145, 147, 149, 150 Identity work, 19, 45, 53, 54, 84–88, 94, 122, 139, 140, 142, 149 Ideology on top, 45, 70 Ideology underneath, 45, 70 Independence, 4, 8, 16, 21, 23, 46, 137, 147 Individualisation, 21, 22, 24, 119 Individualism, 2, 4, 40, 121, 145–149 Inequality, 6, 15, 21–23, 41, 56, 71, 116–117, 119, 139, 142, 145, 146 Infant feeding, 20, 54, 91–94, 100 Infant sleep, 109 Intensive parenting, 29–33, 39, 40, 54, 76, 94–96, 98, 104, 110, 114, 136, 139, 149, 150 Interdependence, 142 Interpersonal negotiation, 119, 140, 149 Intimacy, 6–8, 12, 14–16, 20–22, 32, 41, 46, 91, 103, 104, 108, 110, 113–122, 133, 136–137, 146, 148, 150 In vitro fertilisation (IVF), 98, 99, 123 Involved fatherhood, 1, 42, 139, 141

  SUBJECT INDEX 

L Labour, 1, 4, 10, 23, 41, 43, 46, 54, 56, 59, 60, 71, 75, 81–83, 95, 99, 104, 110, 124, 136, 137, 140, 146–148 Lesbian mother family, 2 Listening guide, 55, 56 Love, 22, 36, 64, 67, 68, 125, 132, 146, 147 M Masculinity, 97, 142 Mental load, 43, 69–71, 140, 149 Methodology, 16, 41, 45, 53–58 MMR jab, 139 Moralisation, 27–29, 37, 54, 92–94 N Narratives, vii, 2, 6, 19, 45, 54, 56, 59, 71, 77, 80, 85, 86, 88, 91, 95, 102, 108, 137, 139, 142, 147 P Pain, 61, 62, 64, 83–85, 94 Parental leave, 2, 5, 6, 9, 13, 20, 39, 51–55, 58, 63, 75, 94, 97, 98, 102, 125, 133, 135, 138, 143 Parenting, vii, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 15, 16, 19, 20, 22–33, 35–41, 43–46, 53, 54, 56, 58–60, 67, 69, 75–78, 82, 86–88, 91, 94–104, 108–110, 112–114, 121, 122, 126, 128, 130, 133, 135, 136, 139–141, 145, 146, 148–150 Parenting Culture Studies, 19, 138

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Physiology, vii, 7, 109, 141, 149 Plastic sexuality, 21, 120 Practices of parenting, 7, 32, 75 Pure relationship, 6, 21, 22, 120 Q Quality time, 39, 141–142 R Reflexive modernisation, 20, 21 Relationality, 7, 54 Relationship breakdown, 6, 23, 95, 147 Resentment, vii, 59, 118, 119, 128, 137 Responsibilities, 1, 2, 4, 5, 24, 31, 40, 42–44, 52, 70, 77, 81, 86, 87, 92, 97, 98, 101, 103, 128, 131, 148, 149 Risk, 27–29, 33–36, 54, 60, 76, 82, 83, 92, 93, 100, 109, 110 Romantic suffering, 22, 121 S Second-time parents, 2, 53, 141 Separate spheres, 24, 27 Separation, 22, 24 Sex, 21, 113–120, 126, 129, 136 Signal issue, 77, 91, 109 Sleep training, 13, 87, 112 T Twin parents, 81, 83, 88, 102