Paper short abstract:

This article explores how trends towards intensive parenting impact on the way inmate mothers experience motherhood from prison. We will focus on the contradictions emerging from the prison scene, highlighting mothers’ feelings of powerlessness and their efforts to stay connected with their children.

Paper long abstract:

Trends towards 'intensive parenting' have increasingly guided and shaped the way parents act upon their children. This has impacted especially on mothers, since women still play a central role in chilcare and education.

How do women prisoners facing imposed separation from their children manage social expectations and personal desires surrounding their performance as mothers? Drawing from data collected in a Portuguese prison, we will discuss this issue while highlighting the processes by which motherhood is produced discursively in a highly gendered institution.

Inmate mothers don't have the availability, time, or money required to meet certain social notions and expectations defining "proper" mothering and chilrearing, yet they want to preserve their role as mothers. They are also not alien to expert discourses about parenting since the prison environment also contributes to reproduce them. Our aim is to explore how recent changes regarding the social construction of parenting, and especially motherhood, impact on the way inmate mothers experience motherhood from prison, since these women deal with the same pressures as the ones faced by non-inmate mothers but are prevented from performing their role as mothers.

Our data allow for exploring the contradictions emerging from a prison scene where inmate mothers are continuously engaged in staying connected to their children, despite the institutional, physical, and even emotional barriers that surround them, and reproduce themselves the notion of parents as omnipotent. But, at the same time, these mothers feel anxious by their powerlessness, which contributes to generate feelings of self-blame, inadequacy, and dysfunctionality.