Changing Motherhood in the South African Middle-Class Context

Abstract

Parenting has been found to be highly contextually and culturally determined and there have been calls to research parenting within culture as it is lived. Due to changing social and economic factors, middle-class South African mothers face unique challenges in relation to the navigation of culture and class in child-rearing. Foregrounding the complexity of acculturation, this paper uses social constructionist theory in the analysis of maternal narratives and responses to video-recordings of their interaction with their infants, of a group of middle-class South African mothers from various cultural and racial groups, with an aim to understanding how mothering is changing amongst middle-class South African mothers. The findings suggest that acculturation is complex and influenced by a combination of socioeconomic status, geographical location, contact with other cultural groups and personal emotional experiences of having been parented within a particular culture.