ABSTRACT
Several of the current trends of intensive parenting that have been identified in Euro–American contexts and described in different chapters in this volume have arrived in Chile, a context in which ‘child-centredness’ and ‘intensive mothering’ are inherent to the ideology of motherhood and kinship. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which a group of women in Santiago de Chile interpret, negotiate and reject recent pedagogies of intensive parenting ideologies coming from private, public and medical entities. Specifically, I focus on the stories of a group of women belonging to a segment of the population that forms a ‘first generation outside of poverty’ in Santiago. I argue that, for them, several intensive mothering mandates, encouraged by the state and by private practice, reinforce their sense of being good mothers. However, these do not satisfy another inherent feature of their intensive mothering expectations: social mobility aspirations in a neoliberal system. The study of their mothering aims and practices grounds both intensive mothering and existing kinship literature on mothering in Chile. This chapter provides a case-study of the appropriation and experienced contradictions of a global trend in a specific context that questions the ‘newness’ in the new intensive parenting.
