Abstract
Expectations of the transition to parenthood often bear little resemblance to parents’ lived experiences, yet shape parents’ emotional responses. Drawing on concepts of intensive mothering, emotion work, and maternal ambivalence, this chapter explores the turbulent emotions of the transition to parenthood through an analysis of interviews with new parents in Australia. It argues that the emotion work enacted by parents in an effort to perform appropriate modes of parenting, constitutes an additional drain on exhausted parents’ emotional resources. Analysis reveals that early parenthood in Australia remains deeply gendered, and that the gap between expectation and experience results not just from an absence of prior knowledge, but from a dynamic process of knowledge-sharing, silence, denial, and refusal to know.
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Williams Veazey, L. (2018). The Turbulent Emotions of Early Parenthood. In: Kokanović, R., Michaels, P., Johnston-Ataata, K. (eds) Paths to Parenthood. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0143-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0143-8_6
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