Motherhood, as a celebrated yet underappreciated role, is often thought of as a natural process, something instinctive that we refine by watching our own mothers and others in our community. We rarely think of motherhood as something that is time and culturally specific, yet, like culture itself, it is socially constructed, and both motherhood and childhood evolve over time. With the rise in educational attainment of mothers in the American population, the expectations associated with childhood increasingly include not just education but cognitive development and extracurricular activities as the partnership between parents and education intensifies in the joint project of human development of children.
Motherhood, Childhood, and Parenting in an Age of Education offers a new way to conceptualize the high demands of contemporary parenthood. It traces the emerging narrative about the "good mother," changes in the underlying assumptions of what constitutes the "good mother," and the implications for the "good childhood" as education grows in institutional strength. This book demonstrates that education is driving the formation of the parent and child roles in the dominant contemporary culture of the US although alternate models exist. Education itself has expanded over time to become our largest social intervention, defining behaviors and beliefs such as parental involvement in schooling, the unengaged parent, and the deficient student.