The Intuitive, Caring Mother

Abstract

In trying to articulate the first-person perspective, theoretical perspectives that emphasise some idea of the caring mother (parent) seem, at least at the outset, to be helpful. Feminist work on care and maternal understanding is, in a sense, a development of the work on the priority of the particular, and this is an important theoretical resource as it pays attention to the quality and the nature of particular relationships, thus promising to capture something more akin to the parent–child relationship than the categories and concepts often used in work in philosophy and philosophy of education. In this chapter, we draw on the work of Sara Ruddick on maternal thinking, on Nel Noddings’ work on care specifically as developed in her seminal work Caring (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984) and on Naomi Stadlen’s attempt to articulate What mothers do, especially when it looks like nothing (Piatkus, London, 2004) to shed some more light on the first-person perspective. Following on from this discussion, we will briefly develop a criticism of recently proposed conceptions of parenting (by Jennie Bristow and Frank Furedi) offered in opposition to the unwanted rise of the parenting expert and the increasing levels of state intervention in family life.