Objetivos y políticas de gestión del riesgo financiero

When one sees children, one ‘sees’ parents. When one sees children who have problems, one looks for parents, especially mothers.

(Ambert, 1994: 530) If, as intensive mothering advocates suggest, meeting children’s ‘needs’ all but guarantees happy, well-balanced and well-developed children, then a child who is unhappy, or ‘badly behaved’ is a source of embarrassment and guilt for mothers. Tales of tantrums in public spaces were common among the women, and each told me of the ‘shame’ they felt,

although clearly there were differences in how the stories were related to me and dealt with at the time. Natalie, who lives with her partner, works full-time and has some help from her mother in addition to employing the services of child-minder. She has one son, who has a chronic health condition. When I asked her if her priorities had changed since having her son, she was clear that he comes first:

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Natalie: Yeah, it’s, you know, well, basically, you’ve just got yourself to think about

[laughs] before, you know, whereas now it’s just him, you know? As I say, if he’s bad (poorly) then the world’s just got to revolve around him basically.

JC: So does that feel always like what you want to do or…?

Natalie: Oh no [laughs]. You know, I’d much rather go to sleep or you know, he’s in

our bed just coughing all right. Oh, he’s poorly, you just – it’s not his fault, but at the same time, you know, you’ve been at work all day. You’re exhausted - and you’d just love to be able to go to sleep, but he stops – because my mum had him on Saturday. She come over on Saturday morning and brought him back Sunday morning and it was just bliss [laughs]. You feel guilty that you say that, because... It’s just a bit relentless sometimes...

Natalie tells me that in addition to her son’s illness, he also behaves ‘badly’ when they are alone together; he throws tantrums and hits her frequently she says, but not in front of other people. This is somewhat belied when he starts to hit her while I’m there and is taken to his room to “cool down”. She expresses her embarrassment to me and apologises for his behaviour.

One of the expectations placed on ‘good’ mothers is that they enjoy their child, indeed, within intensive mothering discourses, it is made clear that ‘children are ‘sacred’, ‘innocent’, and ‘delightful’, so mothers should always relish opportunities to spend time caring for and playing with them’ (Gunderson and Barrett, 2015: 3). Little wonder then that the admission that being away from him is ‘bliss’ makes Natalie feel guilty despite already telling me that ‘the world’s just got to revolve around him’.

I detect that Natalie does not often reveal her difficulties with her son, who she tells me behaves beautifully for his Grandmother and the child-minder. No doubt this difference in his behaviour is a source of much pain and anxiety for Natalie who despite her best efforts clearly feels she struggles with him. Given that these incidents happen when they are alone, it is clear that her guilt is a result of monitoring herself and her abilities. Her calm response and explanation to him when he hits her fits with the sensitive mothering model, in which mothers are encouraged to rationalise and explain to their children; as Walkerdine and Lucey (1989) this is a strategy mothers use which renders power covert and is designed to instil a sense of autonomy in the child. Walkerdine and Lucey found differences in the ways

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mothers dealt with conflict and aggression from their daughters, with middle-class mothers converting it into an opportunity to teach their children to manage their emotions. As Lucey (2004: 117) explains: ‘It was far more usual for the working- class mothers to be very explicit both about power differentials and their own position of authority’. This is not supported by my research, with mothers from all backgrounds adopting similar techniques. It is, I suggest, a change over time; there is over twenty-five years between their study and mine, during which time discourses of ‘good’ mothering have changed. I would argue that this includes the adoption of practices once associated with the middle-class as ‘normal’, so the

management of emotions in this way is commonplace.

As I discuss in Chapter Two, neoliberalism has operated as a governmentality that assembles around notions of the self to produce qualitatively different ways to understand subjectivity (Brown, 2003, 2005, 2013; Rose, 1989, 1999). The ‘ideal citizen’ now stands as self-

responsible, self-regulating, and entrepreneurial; the making of such a subject rests upon the notion of an inner self, free to transform and self-actualise. Intensive mothering, which I again set out in Chapter Two and have developed throughout my analysis in Chapters Four and Five, shares a similar ethos and calls upon mothers to become experts who can put into practice its principles. This opens up an interesting dilemma for Natalie since to access the help she indicates she would like means relinquishing some of her own autonomy. Admitting to me, a stranger, that her son hits her seems to me to be an incredibly intimate revelation; not because I was shocked, which I wasn’t at the time, but perhaps on reflection I am, but rather that she told me she didn’t admit it to anyone else. As Hochschild (1979) noted, it is mothers who are held socially responsible for children's behaviour, and mothers' honour that is at stake when children's outcomes do not match social expectations. Admitting that her son behaves badly, or asking for help with it entails Natalie either giving up her privacy, exchanging her autonomy, or acknowledging she is a failure. It is not a pleasant process, and Natalie has clearly decided it is not worth it, after all, as she told me ‘they’ll start watching you if they think you can’t cope’. I will be discussing shame and embarrassment, which is certainly detectable in both Natalie’s and Kelly’s discussions about Health Visitors when I discuss judgements made by strangers and passers-by in section 6.2. For now, I simply park the observation that ‘shame, and its opposite, pride, are rooted in the processes through which we internalise how we imagine others see us’ (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009: 41). To

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which I would add that neither is simply an individual emotion, but are profoundly social in nature (Chase and Walker, 2013; Loveday, 2015).