{"id":431,"date":"2012-11-23T14:23:22","date_gmt":"2012-11-23T14:23:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=431"},"modified":"2014-02-12T19:28:11","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T19:28:11","slug":"the-temporal-emotion-work-of-motherhood-how-homeschooling-mothers-deal-with-the-time-crunch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=431","title":{"rendered":"THE TEMPORAL EMOTION WORK OF MOTHERHOOD: How Homeschooling Mothers Deal with the Time Crunch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record:<\/strong> Jennifer Lois, \u201cThe Temporal Emotion Work of Motherhood: Homeschoolers\u2019 Strategies for Managing Time Shortage\u201d in Gender and Society<\/em>, 24, no. 4 (August 2010): 421-446.<\/p>\n

Summary: <\/strong>Lois, a professor of sociology<\/a> at Western Washington University, here continues her work focusing on the lived experiences of homeschooling mothers.\u00a0 For a review of an earlier article by Lois on similar themes, click here.<\/a><\/p>\n

In this piece she\u2019s looking at how homeschooling mothers deal with the frustrations they feel due to the lack of free time they have.\u00a0 She begins with Sharon Hays\u2019<\/a>\"\" famous and powerful description of how the standards for being a \u201cgood mother\u201d went up and up over the course of the 20th century, resulting in the \u201cideology of intensive mothering\u201d that is so central to many homeschooling mothers\u2019 self-image.<\/p>\n

The amazing amounts of self-sacrifice required to realize such ideals leads to a severe lack of \u201cme-time,\u201d as these mothers often put it.\u00a0 One way mothers often rationalize this self sacrifice is to think of it as just a season in their lives\u2013eventually they\u2019ll have free time again, just not now, a process Lois (following others) calls \u201csequencing.\u201d\u00a0 But sequencing alone doesn\u2019t get rid of the emotions of guilt, resentment, and selfishness that haunt maternal psyches.<\/p>\n

Lois\u2019 study of homeschooling mothers found that many of them had little to no discretionary time, which led them to experience \u201cproblematic emotions\u201d they tried to manage through time-use strategies.\u00a0 They\u2019d try to get their husbands to help out with the schooling, but the men were either uninterested or incompetent (though lots of them liked the idea<\/em> of homeschooling).\u00a0 Mothers tried to have their kids\u2019 experiences be their own as well (say, taking piano lessons with the kids or using ethnic cooking as geography class), or redefined \u201cme time\u201d to include running errands like grocery shopping or even doing the dishes alone in the kitchen. \u00a0 But these were deceptions that weren\u2019t really satisfying to the women.\u00a0 When such strategies inevitably failed, mothers had to manipulate their subjective experience of time in a process Lois calls \u201ctemporal emotion work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Temporal emotion work comes in two varieties.\u00a0 When a mom feels resentful toward her husband and children because of the relentless self-sacrifice she\u2019s making, and then feels guilty for having these feelings, she has to do something about it.\u00a0 The first thing she does is the sequencing described above.\u00a0 The mother says to herself, \u201cthis is just a time in my life\u2026eventually I\u2019ll have time again to pursue my own interests.\u201d\u00a0 Homeschooling mothers draw on \u201cnostalgia\u201d and \u201cregret\u201d to buttress sequencing, reminding themselves of the good times they had when their child was a baby and then imagining that they would likely eventually look back on these current days with the same nostalgia.\u00a0 They told themselves that they would hate to look back and regret the time they failed to spend with their children while they were still children.\u00a0 Sequencing in effect is a form of emotional banking\u2013the mom is putting in the memories now, and she tells herself that she\u2019ll be able to look back with fondness on these days in the future.\u00a0 Homeschooling mothers love<\/em> hearing stories from movement veterans whose children are now grown and who say over and over, \u201cenjoy it while you can, for soon they\u2019ll be gone.\u201d\u00a0 They also love recounting how working women often say that they wish in hindsight that they had spent more time with their children when they were young.<\/p>\n

The second strategy mothers used to handle their negative emotions was \u201csavoring.\u201d\u00a0 Whereas sequencing leads mothers to think ahead to the future, savoring calls them to to dwell deliberately, to meditate on the present in all of its richness and complexity, to \u201clive in the moment\u201d as we say.\u00a0 Homeschooling mothers dwelt on the parts of the day they liked best, usually snuggling with the child on the couch in pajamas reading a good book or some other informal, unscripted interaction.\u00a0 By savoring such positive experiences, the rest of the day became more manageable.<\/p>\n

Appraisal: <\/strong>I always enjoy reading Lois\u2019 work.\u00a0 There\u2019s an underlying subtext that is, I think, critical of all of this self-sacrifice, but she never says anything like that.\u00a0 She seems to truly love and understand these women with whom she spent so much time in her research, and she gets them right as she describes the complicated emotions with which they struggle.\u00a0 But I think she wishes women in general wouldn\u2019t be so masochistic.\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019m just reading that into her work, I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 Regardless, she\u2019s one of the only researchers studying homeschooling who looks at the impact of the practice on the adults who do it, and she writes with thoughtfulness and rhetorical elegance.<\/p>\n

Milton Gaither, Messiah College, author of Homeschool: An American History<\/a>\"\"<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer<\/strong>:\u00a0 The views expressed in reviews are not the official views of ICHER or of its members.\u00a0 For more information about ICHER\u2019s Reviews, please see the \u00ab\u00a0About these Reviews \u00bb Section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Record: Jennifer Lois, \u201cThe Temporal Emotion Work of Motherhood: Homeschoolers\u2019 Strategies for Managing Time Shortage\u201d in Gender and Society, 24, no. 4 (August 2010): 421-446. Summary: Lois, a professor of sociology at Western Washington University, here continues her work focusing … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[8,19],"tags":[368,55,417,419,416,369,418],"class_list":["post-431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender","category-parental-motivation","tag-gender-and-society","tag-jennifer-lois","tag-problematic-emotions","tag-savoring","tag-sequencing","tag-sharon-hays","tag-temporal-emotion-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=431"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1135,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions\/1135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}