What makes a good mother? Two decades of research reflecting social norms of motherhood

Over the past two decades, scholars have investigated a
multitude of different aspects of motherhood. This article
provides a scoping review of research published from 2001
to 2021, covering 115 Social Science Citation Indexreferenced papers from WEIRD countries, with the aim of
reconstructing social norms around motherhood and
mothers’ responses to them. The analysis is theoretically
based on normological and praxeological concepts. The
findings reveal five contemporary norms of motherhood
that reflect both stability and increasing differentiation,
and are related to five types of mothers: the norms of being
attentive to the child (present mother), of securing the child’s successful development (future-oriented mother), of
integrating employment into mothering (working mother),
of being in control (public mother), and of being contented
(happy mother). Relying on an intersectional lens, we analyze mothers’ heterogeneous responses to these norms of
motherhood, and examine how neoliberal demands build
on and perpetuate inequalities.