Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood:

Gender, Intimacy and Equality Charlotte

Faircloth
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Couples’
Transitions to
Parenthood
Gender, Intimacy
and Equality

Charlotte Faircloth
Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood
 Charlotte Faircloth

Couples’ Transitions
to Parenthood
Gender, Intimacy and Equality
Charlotte Faircloth
University College London
London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-77402-8    ISBN 978-3-030-77403-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77403-5

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For Amol (with love, and remarkably little fury)
 Preface

This book presents findings from a research project with couples (in
London, UK) as they become parents. The argument is that new parents
are caught in an uncomfortable crossfire between two competing dis-
courses: those around ideal relationships and those around ideal parent-
ing. On the one hand, they should be committed to being ‘equal partners’.
On the other, they should be parenting their children ‘intensively’, in ways
which are markedly more demanding for mothers. Reconciling these ide-
als can be difficult, and, as the book explores, has the potential to create
resentment and disappointment.
Drawing largely on the narratives of couples who have faced relation-
ship difficulties, the book points to the social pressures at play in raising
the next generation at material, physiological and cultural levels. These are
explored through concrete practices, linked to physiology by varying
degrees: birth, feeding and sleeping, three of the most highly moralised
areas of contemporary parenting culture.

London, UK Charlotte Faircloth

vii
 Acknowledgements

First thanks, of course, to the couples who shared their accounts of becom-
ing parents with me. This project really would be nothing without them.
It would also have been nothing without the Leverhulme Trust, which
funded the research whilst I was an early career fellow at the Centre for
Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent. That project was
under the mentorship of Ellie Lee, someone who has remained a constant
source of support and guidance throughout my career.
I’m particularly grateful to those colleagues I have been lucky enough
to collaborate with in recent years, or who have been kind enough to give
me feedback on drafts of this book—Jennie Bristow, Zeynep Gürtin,
Rachel Rosen, Ann Oakley and especially Katherine Twamley. At Palgrave,
thank you to Amelia Derkatsch for prompting me to submit a proposal, to
Linda Braus for seeing it through to production and to the anonymous
reviewers for their feedback. A final thanks to Eliana Johnson-Leighton,
who worked with me as a student research volunteer during a summer at
UCL, providing much-needed support with the analysis of a rather copi-
ous number of narratives.
To my children, this book would no doubt have been published much
faster without your arrival, but thank you for putting some practice
into the theory, confirming that no amount of research can really prepare
anyone for parenthood. And, for confirming that no amount of work
can get done without childcare (especially in 2020–1), a heartfelt thank
you to Claire Carson.

ix
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

Part I Context  19

2 Theoretical Context 21

3 Political and Methodological Context 51

Part II Practice  75

4 Birth 77

5 Feeding 91

6 Sleeping107

7 Conclusion135

Author Index153

Subject Index155

xi
 About the Author

Charlotte Faircloth is Associate Professor of Social Science in the Social

Research Institute at University College London (UCL), UK. From soci-
ological and anthropological perspectives, her work has focused on par-
enting, gender and reproduction using qualitative and cross-cultural
methodologies. This research has explored infant feeding, couple relation-
ships, intergenerational relations and, recently, the impact of coronavirus
on family life. Her first monograph, Militant Lactivism? Attachment
Parenting and Intensive Motherhood in the UK and France, was published
in 2013. She also co-authored Parenting Culture Studies in 2014. She is
co-editor of the volumes Parenting in Global Perspective: Negotiating
Ideologies of Kinship, Self and Politics (2013), Feeding Children Inside and
Outside the Home: Critical Perspectives (2018) and, most recently,
Conceiving Contemporary Parenthood: Imagining, Achieving and
Accounting for Parenthood in New Family Forms (2021).

xiii
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Study participants 57

Fig. 3.2 The mental load: A feminist comic 70

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Changes to what has been termed ‘Parenting Culture’ have now become
a well-established field of social science scholarship (Faircloth, 2013; Hays,
1996; Hendrick, 2016; Lee et al., 2014; Nelson, 2010). This scholarship,
largely based on research in Euro-American settings, has called attention
to an ‘intensification’ of parenting in the last 40 years, suggesting that rais-
ing children has become, culturally at least, a more demanding and com-
plex task.
So far, the majority of research in this area has looked at the effect of
these changes on individuals, and particularly on women. Mothers (more
than fathers) are recognised as increasingly ‘torn’ by the competing expec-
tations to parent intensively on the one hand, whilst participating in the
labour market on the other (Hays, 1996; Miller, 2005). More recent work
has documented the experiences of men grappling with shifting ideals of a
more intensive ‘involved’ fatherhood (Dermott, 2008; Miller, 2011;
Shirani et al., 2012). No research to date, however, has explicitly looked
at the impact of these changes on couples.
Focusing for the first time on couple relationships in the context of an
intensified parenting culture, this book reports on a longitudinal study
with 20 couples becoming parents (in London, UK) over a five-year
period. This is a particularly interesting historical moment at which to
observe couples’ experiences of the transition to parenthood as, at the
policy level, there has been a growing commitment to gender equality,
especially insofar as childcare responsibilities relate to men and women’s

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
C. Faircloth, Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77403-5_1
2 C. FAIRCLOTH

career prospects and ‘work-life-balance’ (see Miller, 2017). Parental leave

and ‘flexible working’ are two of the key policy responses, under the aus-
pices that sharing the responsibility for childcare traditionally assumed by
women will reduce gender differentials in terms of career progression and
pay (O’Brien & Wall, 2016). The couples were all professionally employed,
and the vast majority were heterosexual first-time parents, one of whom
were still at the stage of ‘trying’ for a baby. However, 5 of the 20 couples
had a deliberately different profile: some were second-time parents, one
couple had twins, another were in a co-parenting relationship as a gay
couple with a ‘single’ mother and the last were a lesbian mother family
(Fig. 3.1 in Chap. 3 explains this further).
The research shows that new parents are caught in an uncomfortable
confluence between two competing discourses: those around ideal rela-
tionships and those around ideal parenting. On the one hand, they must
be committed to egalitarian ideals about being ‘equal partners’. On the
other, they must be parenting ‘intensively’, in ways which are markedly
more demanding for mothers, and which makes paternal involvement in
particular more complicated.

Relationships End, But Children Are ‘Forever’

Drawing largely on the narratives of couples who have faced relationship
difficulties, this book points to the social pressures at play in raising the
next generation at material, physiological and cultural levels. As Collins
has noted, there is a contradiction at the heart of many couple relation-
ships, and therefore many contemporary families: a tension between the
aspiration for self-realisation through individualism (the freedom to ‘be
myself’) on the one hand and commitment through coupledom and par-
enthood (a desire to ‘make a life’ with someone) on the other
(Collins, 2003).
Before children, couples are arguably temporary; individuals are more
important than relationships, which exist—in theory at least—only as long
as they work (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). But children are ‘forever’.
The extraordinary cognitive dissonance provoked by having a child, and
the sense of being tied into something permanent, understandably takes
some acclimatisation. Furthermore, as one mother in this study said, it was
birth and early motherhood that made her ‘see’ her gender for the first
time, in that her bodily difference to her husband suddenly seemed to
‘matter’ more than it had in the past. Indeed, whereas physiological
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

difference or roles associated with specific genders might potentially be

downplayed in the time before children arrive, during the perinatal period
each parent is likely undergoing a deep (re-)gendering. All of these factors
considered, it is not surprising that the transition to parenthood creates a
complex of feelings on both sides, bound to cause at least some disruption.
This is not a new subject for academic research. Indeed, the idea that
parenthood disrupts marriage and is incompatible with romantic relation-
ships goes back at least to LeMasters in 1957, and there was a large body
of work on the transition to parenthood beginning at around that time,
much in the US but also in the UK. Perhaps most famous in the UK was
the work of Ann Oakley in the ‘Becoming a Mother’ study which com-
menced in 1974. The resultant books, From Here to Maternity, published
in 1979, and Women Confined: Towards a Sociology of Childbirth (1980),
highlighted the ‘shock’ of childbirth in forcing couples, especially women,
to acknowledge the divergence between expectations and reality, and to
realise that equality between men and women did not exist. Women
Confined in particular examined the theme of shock and analysed it in rela-
tion to women and the diagnosis of postnatal depression, contextualising
it thus:

the crushing numbness that can follow a birth over which a mother feels she
has little control; the cumulative insult of multiple, poorly explained techni-
cal procedures; the extraordinary (but yet ordinary) isolation and exhaus-
tion of finding oneself suddenly in charge of another human life. (Oakley,
2018 [1979], p. vii)

This ‘extraordinary (but yet ordinary) isolation and exhaustion’ reso-

nates with other work in the area since (see, for example, Asher, 2011;
Maushart, 1999; Miller, 2007, 2017; and also Fox’s When Couples Become
Parents: The Creation of Gender in the Transition to Parenthood (Fox,
2009) to which this book pays homage by echoing the title). The original
‘Becoming a Mother’ study was repeated 37 years later with many of the
same women, which prompted similar interesting temporal comparisons
about changes in the management of childbirth as women reflected on
how different things were (or are) for their own daughters, as well as
around the sociology of memory (Oakley, 2016). Whilst much had
changed about motherhood (mothers in general being older, a higher
proportion of same-sex couples and a more routine use of technologies
such as ultrasound and caesarean section), it was notable how much had
4 C. FAIRCLOTH

stayed the same. Feelings of alienation due to the medicalisation of child-

birth and the ‘shock’ many women experienced seemed uncannily similar,
a feature that was ‘just as prominent in the second study as in the first’
(2018 [1979], p. ix).
Another important theme to emerge from these later studies was
around the shifting role of the partner. Whilst there was a great degree of
continuity in the views expressed about partner relationships in the stud-
ies, there was greater surprise in the later ones at how the addition of a
baby changed many partner relationships towards more traditional gender
roles (around the division of labour, paid employment, personal interests
and so on), something that was not always anticipated or welcomed by the
women in an era of supposed ‘gender equality’ (see also Miller, 2017). In
line with this, there was an increased emphasis on the lack of indepen-
dence, which many women described as frustrating (Brunton et al., 2011,
p. 24). As such, this study recognises these historical continuities around
the transition to parenthood, at the same time as calling attention to
changes in the conception of both parenting and personhood which might
make this shift more acute today.
Tensions around lack of independence might be said to be a reflection
of shifting conceptions and expectations of personhood, or indeed wom-
anhood itself. As numerous scholars have discussed, our biographies in
recent years have increasingly become ‘choice biographies’, as part of an
era in which an overarching discourse of individualism within wider soci-
ety, where individuals are increasingly expected to ‘fulfil’ but also regulate
themselves through carefully curated life trajectories, behaviours and
choices (Butler, 2020; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Faircloth & Rosen,
2020). This can create discord when it comes to couple and family rela-
tionships, in that there can be difficulty in reconciling tensions between
partnering and parenting which are based on investments and commit-
ments beyond individual choice. That is, whilst becoming a parent can be
read as an exercise in ‘self-expression’ (particularly in the current historical
moment), it is also about a moral responsibility beyond the self (Ruddick,
1995; see also Doucet, 2015). To this end the book takes a relational per-
spective in understanding subjectivities within a family context, to try and
take a holistic view of how, why, when and with what implications people
within families make decisions that they do.
Certainly, a tension between the desire to ‘be oneself’ and ‘make a life’
with someone is as difficult to resolve, if not more difficult, for contempo-
rary ‘equal partners’, than ever. All of the couples I spoke with in the
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

course of the research would describe themselves as committed to gender

‘equality’ (or rather, none would say that they were against it). But what
was interesting was that, in spite of this, all of them were ‘gender tradi-
tional’ in that mothers tended to take longer periods of leave than fathers,
and scale back working commitments further down the line—and this is in
spite of the fact that the period in which these couples became parents for
the first time was during the advent of first ‘Additional’ Paternity Leave
and then ‘Shared’ Parental leave (see discussion in Chap. 2). Paying close
attention to how they talked about and understood equality in their rela-
tionships, I outline a typology in development with Twamley (see Twamley,
2020; Faircloth, 2020) to suggest a loose grouping into those couples
who talked about equality in terms of ‘fairness’ (a general principle as to
how to treat a partner) and ‘balance’ (in an overall sense, including cases
where each member of the couple ‘takes turns’ to take the lead on respec-
tive roles of working and caring). These are in contrast to those who talked
about it as ‘breaking gendered roles’ (e.g., men doing care work) or
‘50/50’ (with each member of the couple doing the same tasks to the
same degree.) Those in the latter group were most likely to talk overtly
about their commitment to equality, and relatedly, about their desire to
split their parental leave, for example, so that each member of the couple
took some sole responsibility for childcare (even if this did not actually
materialise in practice).
One of the most illuminating aspects about the design of this study was
being able to trace how expectations around parenthood and the division
of care matched up with reality (or rather, did not). What emerged is that
those couples who were most strongly committed to equality in general
(and ‘50/50’ in particular) were also those who were most disappointed
in terms of how things worked out in practice. Due to their resources—as
households with comfortable incomes, professional, flexible jobs and with
high levels of social capital—these are the couples who should be most able
to balance these competing demands of discourses around ‘good parent-
ing’ and ‘equal partnership’, and yet they, particularly the women, seemed
to be the ones who are most exasperated by the situations they find them-
selves in. To put it another way, why was it that so many of the well-­
educated, professionally employed, middle-class mothers I spoke to in the
course of this research were so frustrated?
One idea explored in the book is that underlying ideas about equality
(and particularly one concerned with ‘50/50’) is a highly individualised
understanding of subjectivity, as opposed to a more ‘relational’ one. The
6 C. FAIRCLOTH

suggestion is that this leads to a more ‘tit-for-tat’ rubric in relationships in

terms of how fairness is understood, calibrated and processed. This is espe-
cially hard to reconcile in the period of early parenthood when gender
difference is suddenly so ‘obvious’ and the edicts of a culture of intensive
motherhood reign with such ferocity.

Overview
Throughout the book, extended vignettes from three first-time, hetero-
sexual couples illustrate the larger themes around gender, intimacy and
equality which are explored in the research as a whole. The vignettes sit
outside the usual chapter-based structure and can be read separately from
the normal narrative flow. Including these extended narratives in an
unbroken fashion is one of the huge privileges of publishing research find-
ings in a monograph rather than in shorter articles, building over the
course of the book as a whole to provide an in-depth, rich and detailed
picture of the workings of couple relationships over a prolonged and criti-
cal period. The couples featured are those who struggled the most to
reconcile the competing narratives around relationships and parenting,
and who suffered the greatest relationship breakdown. They are not
intended to be representative of the sample, nor, as a qualitative study, is
the sample intended to be representative of the wider population. Indeed,
the accounts in this book are those of a highly privileged, largely white,
middle-to-upper-income group of participants, and the workings of inti-
macy and inequality in less privileged households cannot be extrapolated
to here. However, given all of the resources at the disposal of the couples
featured, these extended narratives arguably both magnify and clarify ten-
sions faced by couples making the transition to parenthood today: the
‘ideal’ of the reflexive, pure relationship is revealed to be very hard work,
particularly after the arrival of children, as it makes absorbing the practical
difficulties—and joys—of life extremely difficult.
By way of background, the first chapter reviews the literature on cur-
rent parenting culture and relationships, pointing to some of the contra-
dictions between them. The second chapter gives an overview of the
political context into which new babies are born in the UK, including the
kind of parental leave or childcare their parents can expect (if any). This
chapter also provides a discussion of the methodological design of the
study, following 20 sets of parents intensively during pregnancy and the
first year of their child’s life, and then intermittently for the next five years.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

The three central substantive chapters—which draw on the accounts by

all couples in the sample—take as a starting point the practices (and the
issues which flow from them) of birth, feeding and sleep, three heated top-
ics in contemporary parenting culture. These are ‘practices’ of parenting
which to varying degrees are unavoidable, and on a sliding scale of physi-
ology. Birth might be said to be nearly 100% physiological (particularly as
all mothers in this sample were birth mothers, and no babies were adopted
or conceived via surrogacy, for example). By contrast, feeding is only
potentially constrained by physiology, if women are breastfeeding or
expressing milk, or if doing either of these in combination with the use of
formula milk. Sleeping practices, by contrast, are not necessarily tied to
physiology at all—although often seem to be. As such, these three prac-
tices provide an interesting spectrum which are highly physiologically con-
strained at one end, and more socially constrained at the other (although
of course these overlap, as will become evident). Secondly, these are topics
that are discussed at length by professionals and experts, and which are
central to contemporary social policy, connecting to debates around gen-
der, workload distribution and intimacy. Finally, birth, feeding and sleep
can also be seen as the first major parenting issues, again which are dealt
with as varying matters of urgency. They are practices which help establish
a pattern of behaviour between parents—namely who, how, when and
why one or other parent will respond. As work on the ‘structuring prin-
ciple’ suggests, it is also the case that these early patterns can be extremely
difficult to break (Searing et al., 1973).
By way of conclusion, the book returns to ideas about equality, subjec-
tivity and relationality, pointing to some of the problems that arise when
people (individuals, couples or parents) have to live and create meaning in
their lives when normative assumptions are contradictory.

Vignette 1: Anthony and Claudia

I first met Anthony and Claudia at their house in South London, when
Claudia was eight months pregnant with their first child. At that time, she
worked as an academic at a central London university, whilst Anthony
worked in the city as an IT manager. They were a high-earning and well-­
educated couple (Anthony earned more than Claudia, but their household
income was around £150,000), who were highly reflexive. In our meet-
ings (four in-person, joint interviews over the course of the next 12
months, followed up by email exchanges two-and-a-half, and five years
8 C. FAIRCLOTH

later) they demonstrated time and again how central the issues of this
study—gender, intimacy and equality—were to their everyday negotia-
tions and conversations.
Anthony and Claudia met at university, and were together for a long
time before getting married and deciding to have children; they felt that
they had to ‘get over themselves’ as 30-somethings before they felt ‘able
to accommodate somebody else in the relationship’. From the outset, it
was clear that independence was something that they valued—they
socialised separately a lot and as Claudia explained at our first meeting, the
ideal of independence (which she held dear) was something that troubled
her with regards to their imminent arrival:

I’m part of this generation…I suppose, who hate the idea of children. It’s
sort of a disgusting thing that they’ll come and, you know, infringe on your
life…me and my friends are all very sort of independent, and independence
has been so valued through our childhoods…and so, and it’s seen as a really,
really bad thing to have anybody who’s dependent on you. So, in relation-
ships…and all my girlfriends and I would always establish this thing, ‘you
must never have someone who’s dependent on you’, that’s the sort of the
revolting thing to happen and you should get rid of them immediately. And
as an extension of that it feels like you’re not really allowed to have children
either because they’re also dependent on you and that’s like…not a very nice
thing to happen.

This concern about maintaining independence segues into Claudia’s

views on gender equality in the context of their relationship, which she
saw as under threat from the heavier physical burden carried by mothers in
terms of gestating, birthing and caring for children—albeit one which was
‘socially shaped’ in terms of the role expectations that came with it:

I mean we’ve definitely had a lot of discussions about how it works gender
equality-wise and what gender equality actually means, because I’m carrying
the baby and I’m allowed time off…And so, right from the start, you’ve got
this gender imbalance which I really struggled with. You know…Anthony’s
sort of point here [is] ‘well, of course you’re not equal because you are bio-
logically different’. So then, what is equality in this instance? I’m still not
convinced about how much of that is socially shaped, and how much of that
is absolutely has to be that way biologically…at the beginning I was saying,
well, ‘if we bottle feed the baby there isn’t any reason that he should be
more dependent on me than on you because we’re both feeding him and
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

what’s the difference?’, you know, we could say there is absolutely no differ-
ence, we could do exactly 50/50, or you could do more than me
[to Anthony].

This concern with equality was baked into their plans to become par-
ents—Claudia agreed to try to conceive a child if her husband signed up
to the idea of ‘splitting things 50/50’ once she had returned to work after
a six-month maternity leave, with each of them working a four-day week
and providing childcare on the fifth day. (Whilst this couple did know
about the possibility of splitting parental leave, at this point it would have
meant Anthony only being eligible for three months of statutory pay, with
no top-up from his employer, and this was deemed unaffordable).
Although Anthony was hesitant about the chances of his boss agreeing to
him moving his role from five to four days a week, Claudia said that this
arrangement was important, not only for equality reasons but also because:

I’m a kind of controlling person so I could end up just saying, ‘that’s not
how you do it’, if I’m there all the time, and I could end up like in that situ-
ation where I’m resenting Anthony and so on…I am one of those high
achieving people who probably would get…I have the potential to get very
like ‘into’ it. So I have to—we have to—put in place things that will stop me
from doing that and that will allow Anthony to have direct control over this
situation as well.

During that first interview, just before the birth of their first child, this
was a couple that was highly committed to ideals of equality, with the
intention that care for the baby, including feeding, be split ‘as evenly as
possible’, particularly after the initial period of maternity leave. In fact,
even during this period, although Claudia thought there was too much
‘propaganda’ about breastfeeding, she intended to express breastmilk in
parallel with breastfeeding, so that her husband could ‘do his share’. Once
they were both back at work, they would split everything at night (unless
the other person is having a day ‘off’ with the baby the next day in which
case that person would take the lead). As such this maps onto the ‘50/50’
iteration of equality mentioned in the introduction. At the same time,
Claudia also expressed an affiliation to the idea of ‘breaking gendered
roles’ as a marker of equality—although interestingly, this was something
which was more obviously a point of contention between them. Anthony
said, for example:
10 C. FAIRCLOTH

And we were talking about things like, what colour would you paint the
room? What would you dress them in? And, you know, you [Claudia] said,
‘I don’t, if we have a girl I don’t want everything to be pink and ponies and
stuff, it has to be, you know, allow them, not, give…and then I said ‘I want
them to have enough structure so they have something to work with. So,
dress the boy in trousers, give him a train set but don’t suppose that he’s
automatically going to want to play with a train set, he may want to play
with an action man, or some sort of doll or, you know, be a, provide a kind
of an expected structure but not necessarily hold him to it.

Asked about plans for her maternity leave, Claudia said: ‘I guess we’re
just going to see…But [at least after these conversations] I think that I’m
now in the position where I do genuinely believe that he really does want
to be involved, because before I really was…I was like, yes, maybe you’re
just saying it and really you just want to recreate the scenario of your own
childhood where your mum did everything.’ They were hoping for a
waterbirth in their local hospital, and to avoid ‘too many interventions’,
particularly an epidural.
So what happened?
I went back to the house when their son—James—was 12 weeks old
exactly. It was around 7 pm at night, and Claudia held the baby through-
out the interview, moving him to a sling at one point to help him sleep; his
jabs that day had apparently made him a bit more cranky than usual. We
started with the birth, which did not go as anticipated—but was in fact the
only one in Claudia’s NCT (National Childbirth Trust antenatal child-
birth education) group of six mothers that did not end in Caesarean sec-
tion or forceps delivery.
Claudia had a long labour, over 53 hours, which included an induction
with pessaries and then a drip, an episiotomy and an epidural (something
she felt ‘guilty’ about and which had added complications due to spinal
fluid leaking so badly she had to stay prone for four hours). Shortly after
the birth, she haemorrhaged so badly that she was rushed into emergency
theatre—it turned out that some of the placenta was still inside her uterus.
A few weeks later, she developed an infection of the uterus in addition to
a Strep B infection. She described these early days as a ‘continuous physi-
cal onslaught’.
In the midst of the ‘onslaught’, feeding the baby was far from simple.
She tried breastfeeding after birth, but her nipples bled so badly she had
to express milk using the hospital pumps—her milk came in early (on day
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

two) but pumps were in short supply, her breasts became engorged, and
she was sent home, with a view to being able to express better there (albeit
with a question mark over her own need for a blood transfusion at this
point). Her husband was very active in helping getting the baby latched
on to feed in the early days, especially as Claudia was too weak to even sit
up for long periods. However, she ‘persevered’ with breastfeeding through
‘tremendous pain’ (‘my whole body would…I screamed. Sometimes I
couldn’t hold the head’), often expressing and bottle-feeding which was
marginally less painful.
Even once breastfeeding was established, the baby was regularly dis-
tressed when feeding. On seeking support for these issues, the couple
received a huge amount of conflicting advice as to the cause: Thrush and
lip tie were diagnosed and treated to little effect; Claudia restricted her
diet to control for intolerances such as dairy; Reynard’s disease was sug-
gested, in conjunction with vasospasm, but the anti-hypertensive she was
prescribed resulted in horrendous headaches. At nearly nine weeks in, she
said it felt like things were ‘getting so extreme’ that they decided to give
the baby some formula. However, being advised to try and wean their son
off the bottles of expressed milk so that he more readily took the breast, at
this point, the baby refused to take a bottle (of formula or expressed milk).
His weight started to plateau.
In conjunction with a GP (‘the only person, really, who’s given any sup-
port to me, as an individual, not as a breastfeeding mother’) who told
Claudia to try different types of bottle and different varieties of formula,
they eventually managed to find some sort of compromise, and it turned
out that the baby had a cow’s milk allergy coupled with possible reflux. At
our 12-week interview, feeding continued to be a trial, with the baby fuss-
ing, back-arching and regularly upset. At this point, he fed at least eight
times in 24 hours (every feed was logged in a spread sheet), though
Claudia worried that she had created a ‘horrible environment’ for him,
and ‘guilty’ about making this ‘awful awful decision’ to use formula. She
was cross that this was something she was confronted with every time she
looked at a packet of baby milk, where the law required a public health
message about the benefits of breastfeeding be listed. She was also angered
by well-meaning friends who asked if she had ‘tried a local breastfeeding
café?’ or any implication that she had been ‘a wuss’ for ‘giving up’.
As planned, Anthony continued to go to the office at similar hours to
before, with Fridays at home where possible to ‘help’, but Claudia’s days
had ‘no routine’ at all. She read numerous books and realised that the
12 C. FAIRCLOTH

baby ‘should be sleeping in his cot’ for naps, but so far was only able to
sleep in the sling that she wore, which felt like ‘a cheat’. Nights were very
broken, and being so tired, she felt ‘no capacity to make any decisions at
all’. She hated not being able to follow up with work requests about some
of her publications more efficiently, and had several people waiting on her
emails. Claudia’s mother was able to come to London one day a week to
help, but she felt she needed ‘way more help than she realised’. Her in-­
laws offered, but this was not deemed a viable option.
One Friday when Anthony was at home, Claudia went to get her hair
cut, only to receive a phone call from Anthony shortly into the appoint-
ment, saying that the baby would not take a bottle, and ending with
Anthony driving down to the hairdresser so that she could (breast)feed.
This left her feeling ‘very much the key player’ in spite of their intentions
to be ‘equal partners’, saying to her husband: ‘if you can’t look after him,
you will bring him to me…I am in charge’. She commented (again, it is
worth reiterating that this was an in-person, joint interview):

it does feel so unfair that I’m at home and Anthony’s not, particularly now
when there’s no reason that it could be either of us who’s at home [now that
the baby is on formula milk]. And I know that’s a really horrible thing to say
’cause it makes it sound like I don’t like being with James. But it’s a
really…it’s really intense. It’s really, really hard work. But it’s really, really
mundane and boring. It’s really hard because it’s unrelenting and you are
completely out of control of it, which doesn’t suit me.

Although the baby went on to sleep in a separate room (with a monitor

on, always by Claudia’s side of the bed), there was little time for intimacy;
Claudia remained ‘obsessed’ by making sure the baby was asleep and
‘obsessed’ by ‘how many mills [millilitres] of food’ he had. ‘Any intimate
time…[would] distract me from my task at hand’, she said. Anthony felt
grateful for the ‘redundant intimacy’ that comes in long-term relation-
ships: ‘You know it’s there but…you don’t really have to work to maintain
it’ (to which Claudia replied, ‘We’re taking it for granted’).
When I next saw this couple, James was six and-a-half months old.
Claudia had returned to work, and the couple employed a nanny three
days a week (rather than use a nursery as anticipated)—Claudia was using
Annual Leave to look after the baby on Fridays, whilst her mother looked
after him on Mondays. Anthony, however, was at home full time, having
been made redundant shortly before Claudia went back to work. After
requesting to move to a four-day week, his boss felt that he ‘didn’t have
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

the commitment he wanted from me’, and he was told his position was
impossible to accommodate in shorter hours. He received a generous
financial package, and was taking some time off over the Christmas break
before looking for a new job in earnest in the New Year. As Claudia said,
they decided that they had to keep the nanny, who had just started before
this news, because Anthony needed the time to apply for new roles, and in
case he was offered something starting immediately. However, she had
been ‘feeling very jealous of this scenario because I didn’t get to do any of
this stuff [like play tennis, as Anthony now does regularly]’.
With her return to work on the horizon, and their nanny wanting to
know what sort of routine James was on, the couple had decided that the
‘sleep situation’ was something they needed to tackle. James at this point
was having four naps a day, for which he would need to be rocked to sleep,
often for up to 30 minutes at a time, and often waking as soon as he was
put down. During the night at around five months old, he would wake up
numerous times, and ‘we would spend an hour, sometimes two hours,
each time he woke up in the night, holding him until he went to sleep. Put
him down, he’d wake up, hold him again. Put him down. He’d wake up.
Hold him again’. They undertook some ‘sleep training’—a regimen with
a basic rule that the baby needed to be able to settle himself to sleep from
being awake. They read several books before finding an approach which
suited them, and although it was ‘awful’, because the baby cried to begin
with, this resulted in much better sleep all round. Coupled with this,
James had recently been weaned onto solids and seemed more settled
digestively, although he still vomited regularly.
At our final formal interview, when James was just over a year old,
things had changed again. Anthony had had six months out of paid work,
seven including parental leave. He had a new job, for five days a week,
whilst Claudia normally worked a four-day week as originally planned,
with a grandmother taking care of James on a Monday, and a nanny share
for the three remaining days. She said:

[It’s] just an unrealistic hope that Anthony could find a job that was going
to fulfil him, which is still really important, and enable him to be able to do
a four day week. It was a nice idea. I felt let down by it because I wanted
Anthony to stick to it because that was our pact before we had a baby, that
we’d do that, and I felt like he was letting me down but having now seen
how difficult the job market has been, how difficult it is to get any job, the
fact that Anthony’s got a job which is really good for him and is the ideal
job, then it doesn’t matter.
14 C. FAIRCLOTH

James was sleeping better than he did before, and his problems with
feeding had continued to settle. Claudia tended to attend to him in the
night as she was ‘better’ at soothing James than Anthony, and because she
had been at work, she felt ‘happier’ to do it because she missed him.
Claudia felt happy that Anthony has at least had some days (before starting
his new job) where he had been in sole charge of the baby. This, however,
was something Anthony struggled with, for fear that people would look at
him and think, as he put it, ‘why is that man pushing that pram and why
the hell isn’t he at work?’
Whilst they felt that time for ‘intimacy’ was lacking, with Claudia feel-
ing ‘alienated’ from her body, the couple continued to be very communi-
cative and reflexive about their relationship, especially around the question
of equality. Claudia clearly had to do some cognitive work to reconcile her
ideals around equality with the way things had worked out. Here, we see
her shift her ideals around equality from ‘50/50’ to one more aligned
with ‘balance’, thereby maintaining the idea that this is an ‘equal’
partnership:

Anthony was saying isn’t it really important that I’m bringing money into
the house and I was like, ‘No, that’s not what matters to me’…That’s not
what makes you an active participant in terms of equality. What I had been
saying before is equality is if you also feed James and do all of these things
and then you know what it’s like, then you can do the same thing…[now,
I’m saying] what Anthony brings is a very different thing but it’s still equally
important.

I received no response from this couple when I checked in when James

reached the age of two-and-a-half years; in time it emerged that they had
a second son at around this time. At the five-year check-in, however,
Claudia responded by email and told me that the couple had separated
several times. She linked this to some of the feeding practices they fol-
lowed with their second son:

I breastfed Alex [their second son] until he was 18 months old and this was
blamed by everyone for why he didn’t sleep so well (he continued to not
sleep well when I stopped, though), and I was told I had ‘made my bed’ so
I deserved to be woken continuously by him and deserved to have to not
only feed him but settle him, which would take 1–3 hours each time, after
which he would only sleep for 1–2 hours. It was utterly exhausting and took
everything out of me, and yet I was expected to be performing motherly
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

duties to my other child, and on top wifely duties to my husband who com-
plained of the lack of intimacy and I think justified him deciding to switch
off entirely from our relationship and fantasise about being out of it and
with other people. The whole thing has been utterly heart breaking and
devastating.

She also reflected on how much she ‘gave’ to the baby during this
period, saying that she wished she had been a bit more laissez-faire with
her approach to parenting:

that’s one of my regrets, when [my first son] was small, he could’ve sat in his
bouncy chair and I could’ve done my hair but I didn’t want to split my
attention from him because I thought that would damage him for life. So
it’s just mental and you completely neglect yourself…[and] then you just
judge everybody else because they’ve managed to put some makeup on!

Claudia linked some of their discord to the fact that, by this point, she
was earning more than her husband:

intimacy is now a luxury, equality is far more acutely negotiated, and gender
has become much more obvious in terms of expectations…Anthony became
very distressed because of my attention going to the children, and became
resentful of me which created a very difficult atmosphere which affected not
only our relationship but our family unit. Unwittingly, I think the children
became competition for my attention in our relationship. It remains unclear
how women can live up to all the expectations, not just with work, but with
partners who also need their support e.g. in periods of unemployment. I do
feel this fell a lot on my plate as a woman—and was expected not only in our
nuclear family but also by our own families, who continued to promote the
idea that any father doing more than they did in the 80s was a bonus. Not
starting from equality but from stark inequality. Like, ‘women working is a
luxury and even a cause of the problem, being selfish’. While of course this
was necessary financially but this somehow is hidden and unspoken because
it is uncomfortable to talk about a woman being the breadwinner, even
between us in our house. There was a lot of dancing around issues and
treading on eggshells with each of these issues you list: gender, intimacy and
equality. I think you anticipated exactly the key issues that can be faced,
which are made very acutely problematic when we are in the employment
situations of this time.
16 C. FAIRCLOTH

At a more recent check-in, while writing this book, I found that the
couple were living separately, with Claudia looking after the children for a
majority of the time.
Re-reading our interviews, it is striking how dominant Claudia’s voice
is in the accounts—it is rare that her husband proffers an opinion on any-
thing without taking the lead from his wife, or being contradicted by her
when he does. Indeed, in the quotes, only a small number come directly
from Anthony, and even then they are usually follow-ups to something
Claudia has said. (As I explore further in the section on methodology, this
may of course say something about the research environment and the
gender of the researcher as much as the couple themselves.)
It is also noticeable here that the spoken commitment to ‘equality’ is
not reflected by the contribution of both partners to their accounts of
parenting. What this book tries to do is explore how ‘ideals’ of equality
mesh with contemporary couples’ experience of becoming parents for the
first time; how they weather the conflicts between ‘independence’ and
‘nurturing’ (as Claudia puts it), by looking closely at issues around birth,
feeding and sleep; and how, therefore, the issues of gender, intimacy and
equality play out in the lives of new parents.

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 1 INTRODUCTION 17

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 PART I

Context

Introduction to Part I
The following section outlines two fields of academic scholarship—inti-
mate relationships and parenting—to make the argument that contempo-
rary couples are caught in an uncomfortable confluence between
competing narratives of family life.
The field of Parenting Culture Studies is informed by the insight that
‘parenting’ (as opposed to child-rearing) has become a hugely expanded
task in recent years, replete with a multimillion-pound industry of advice
and support. Underlining the emergence and popularisation of develop-
mental psychology, this chapter shows how parenting has become a more
‘intensive’ activity for parents, particularly mothers, than it was a generation
ago, with infant experience understood as having life-long consequences.
It has been observed that in recent years the word ‘parent’ has shifted
from a noun denoting a relationship with a child (something you are),
to a verb (something you do) (Lee et al., 2014). Goffman’s concept
(1959) of ‘identity work’—the narrative processes of self-making that
mothers and fathers engage in as they account for their parenting prac-
tices—helps us understand the significance of this linguistic shift for the
experience of parents. ‘Parenting’ is now cast as an occupation: the ‘most
important job in the world’, and something in which adults (particularly
mothers) are expected to be emotionally absorbed and become personally
fulfilled. It is also a growing site of interest to policymakers in the UK,
understood as the cause of, and solution to, a wide range of social ills (Lee
et al., 2014). The ‘ideal’ parenting promoted by these policymakers is
20 Context

financially, physically and emotionally ‘intensive’. Parents (again, namely,

mothers) are encouraged to spend a large amount of time, energy and
money in raising their children (Hays, 1996).
The ‘permanence’ of parenting is contrasted with literature around
ideal (couple) relationships which instead endorse notions of equality, inti-
macy and fluidity, in line with the ‘reflexive modernisation’ thesis (Beck &
Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). An overview of these two bodies of literature, as
well as the policy context around parental leave and childcare (particularly
the low take-up for ‘shared’ parental leave, the current policy iteration)
sets the scene for the chapters which follow, outlining how the contradic-
tion between these two ‘ideals’ is experienced by contemporary couples in
the UK in terms of their experience of birth, infant feeding and sleeping.

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Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.
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culture studies. Palgrave Macmillan.
 CHAPTER 2

Theoretical Context

Couple Relationships and Ideals of Equality

Work by Giddens (1992), Bauman (2003), Beck (1992), Beck and Beck-­
Gernsheim (1995) and others (Illouz, 2007) has explored shifting rela-
tionship patterns in the contemporary age. Broadly speaking, this body of
work argues that, in an age of ‘reflexive modernisation’, there has been a
shift away from traditional, patriarchal couple relationships, based on an
inherent inequality between men and women, towards a more equitable,
mutually fulfilling model, accompanied by the rise of a more ‘plastic’ sexu-
ality in particular (Giddens, 1992). Sex, now ‘liberated’ from reproduc-
tion by contraception has, he suggests, become more democratised for
men and women, and means that women in particular are able to express
themselves erotically in ways completely unlike the past. In terms of rela-
tionships, Giddens argues that in the late twentieth century, in the place of
traditional patterns of marriage for example, individuals became more
aware of the need for a fulfilling relationship, based on ‘confluent love’,
one that is active and contingent. As part of a wider culture of ‘individuali-
sation’, independence within relationships is highly valued. The ‘pure rela-
tionship’, which is not bound by traditional notions of duty and obligation,
has come to depend, instead, on communication, intimacy and a sense of
equality.
Taking a more critical stance, Illouz has argued that ‘equality’ is itself
an internally contradictory concept, in that it has been modelled on

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2021
C. Faircloth, Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77403-5_2
22 C. FAIRCLOTH

rational, economic systems of bargaining and exchange, indicative of a

‘cold’ intimacy and a turn towards an ‘emotional capitalism’ more widely
(Illouz, 2007). This leads to what she calls ‘romantic suffering’, in that
wider social structures (including marriage) are in contradiction with the
‘quest for love’, and that this is internalised as disappointment and per-
sonal failing. In an era where choice in partner is (apparently) more free
and open, Illouz’s work has pointed to the gendered nature of this ‘roman-
tic suffering’, in that women are disadvantaged by being more family ori-
ented, and ‘need’ to find a partner within a specific physiological timeframe,
unlike men who have more flexibility (2012). Further, the separation of
romantic relationships from wider social and moral structures, manifest in
increasing freedom in our choice of partner for example, means that even
‘love’ itself has become individualised, rationalised, an ‘object of endless
investigation, self-knowledge and self-scrutiny’ (2012, p. 163) and a
lonely site for self-validation, again to which women are, culturally, more
vulnerable. However, while the research here presents evidence for Illouz’s
assertion that ‘love hurts’ (2012), it also points to the limits of an analyti-
cal focus on individual or self-reflexive ‘choices’, to bring relational ten-
sions around partnering and parenting to the fore.
Indeed, since the publication of these ‘individualisation’ theories of
modern intimacy scholars working in the field of personal life have argued
for a more nuanced perspective, grounded in the realities of everyday
experience, which is often less equitable than either theory or legislation
might suggest (Smart, 2007). As Gillies (2003, p. 2) states, concepts of
‘individualisation’ and ‘democratisation’ that underpin theories of inti-
macy are much debated, ‘with many disputing the claim that personal
relationships have become more contingent, negotiated and self-directed’.
In short, whilst discourses around ideal relationships may have changed,
practices have not kept pace (Jamieson, 1999)—precisely the gap this
book seeks to explore.
Although Jamieson is critical of Giddens’s argument regarding the
emergence of the pure relationship, she agrees that disclosing intimacy
and equality is an ideal within contemporary relationships, through which
individuals narrate and idealise their own aspirations (see also Twamley on
the ideal of love in relationships, 2012). Jamieson observes, therefore, that
in heterosexual relationships, much ‘creative energy is deployed in disguis-
ing inequality, not undermining it’ (1999, p. 485, emphasis added). This
chimes with work by numerous scholars (see, for example, Van Hooff,
2011), who argue that in (heterosexual) relationships it is typical to find
 2 THEORETICAL CONTEXT 23

both male and female participants claiming that women have ‘higher stan-
dards and are more competent performers of household chores, and that
the division of labour is practical, based on the hours worked by both
partners’ (Van Hooff, 2011, p. 19). Importantly, however, what I am
interested in here is not the actual amount of time spent by each couple
member per se on particular domestic or parenting related tasks, so much
as participants’ perceptions of the amount of work they do compared with
their partners, and ‘how this is reconciled with discourses of equality’ (Van
Hooff, 2011, p. 21). This is important: in their study drawing on Swedish
data regarding housework and rates of divorce, Ruppanner et al. (2018)
make a related point that it is not the unequal division of labour between
couples in itself which causes conflict, but rather the lack of recognition
with regard to that inequality that leads to lower relationship satisfaction.
So how do these messages about ‘good relationships’ being based on
equality intersect with messages about ‘good parenting? Collins (2003)
has pointed out, for example, that in post-industrialised settings, whilst
(some) couples might live relatively equal lives before having children,
parenthood accentuates the gendered division of labour and still has the
potential to divide egalitarian couples along more traditional lines. Where
independence and equality might be hallmarks of ideal contemporary rela-
tionships, parenthood is marked by ideals of obligation and permanence
(Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). As they argue, the understood irrevers-
ibility of a kinship tie with a child sits uncomfortably with a more ‘plastic’
approach to relationships. In line with this thesis, Roman observes in her
study of couples becoming parents in Sweden that her study participants
perceived children and parenting to be risk-filled projects in relation to
self-realisation, but also the couple relationship (2014, p. 454). To this
extent, many couples are in the paradoxical situation of seeing marriage,
cohabitation and parenthood (and lack of opportunity for an ‘indepen-
dent life’) as a threat to that very family life, in that they might lead to
relationship breakdown.
At the same time, in a culture which shuns permanence and commit-
ment for the sake of self-fulfillment, there is something existentially appeal-
ing, relaxing, even, about a relationship that is beyond the remit of
personal preference, and therefore the parent–child relationship is one suf-
fused with deep meaning (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Ribbens
McCarthy & Edwards, 2002). I turn now to consider social science work
in this area to help ‘think through’ the implications for couples when they
become parents, and the shift towards creating something ‘permanent’.
24 C. FAIRCLOTH

Contemporary Parenting Culture

Across the world, and across history, parenting has long been subject to
moralising and guidance (Hardyment, 2007; Faircloth, 2013). However,
as becomes rapidly apparent to those who start to research the way that
any routine aspect of bringing up children is discussed, a distinctive lan-
guage is now used to describe these activities. If one looks, for example, at
the question of how to discipline children, this is rarely conceptualised as
a community task or responsibility of adult society as a whole where cul-
tural, moral or religious norms are foundational. Instead, it is an individ-
ual- or family-based ‘parenting strategy’, focused primarily on changing
parental behaviour (so as to discourage spanking or shouting at children,
for example) (Daly, 2010; Reece, 2013). There are ‘parenting manuals’,
‘parenting guides’, ‘parenting classes’ and ‘parenting education’ that all
purport to be able to improve matters in this area of the everyday life of
parents (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995).
A central source of scholarship for what has been termed Parenting
Cultures Studies (see Lee et al., 2014; Macvarish and Martin, 2021) is to
understand the development, usage and meaning of this terminology—
noting that the use of the term ‘parenting’ as opposed to ‘child-rearing’
indicates a privatisation and individualisation of the responsibility for chil-
dren away from the wider community and into the realm of the private
family. From this point of view, a trajectory towards placing particular
significance on the role and contribution of the parent, using their ‘skills’
to ensure a child’s ‘successful life’, has a long history. It is at least as old as
industrialisation, and, as Sharon Hays (1996) details, it may be considered
that the basis for contemporary parenting culture lies in the working
through of the separation of ‘the family’ from the wider economy and
society. This ‘separate spheres’ thesis, whilst having important implications
for gender relations, also meant that the family and, by extension, child-
care became understood as a ‘sacralised’ endeavour, away from the world
of work, which was governed by more commercial interests. However,
despite its long history, it is also recognised that ‘parenting’ has acquired
specific connotations more recently.
By looking at the language of ‘parenting’, a picture emerges of a grow-
ing momentum from the 1970s onwards towards the targeting of parental
behaviour as deficient and also ‘parenting’ as something of a relentless task
or ‘job’, to be conducted under the watchful gaze of experts. The other
central idea is that people other than parents have special insights that can
 2 THEORETICAL CONTEXT 25

and should be brought to bear. Indeed, one of the dominant observations

is that ‘parenting’ is now viewed, particularly by policymakers, as an activ-
ity that cannot be effectively carried out without being explicitly taught
and learned (Lee et al., 2014). The central proposition to emerge is that
parenting is not a neutral term to describe what parents do as they raise
their children. Rather, the transformation of parenting into a verb has
taken place through a sociocultural process centring on the belief that
‘parenting’ is a highly important and problematic sphere of social life. In
turn, ‘parenting culture’ can be summarised to mean the more or less for-
malised rules and codes of conduct that have emerged over recent years
which reflect this deterministic view of parents and define expectations
about how a parent should raise their child.
One of the earliest—and still most influential—observers of the changes
in parenting culture was the US sociologist Sharon Hays, in her 1996
book, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. She noticed that many
mothers she worked with were going to extreme lengths in the course of
raising their children:

Why do so many professional class employed women find it necessary to

take the kids to swimming and judo and dancing and tumbling classes, not
to mention orthodontists and psychiatrists and attention-deficit specialists?
Why is the human bonding that accompanies breast-feeding considered so
important that elaborate contraptions are now manufactured to allow chil-
dren to suckle on mothers who cannot produce milk? Why are there copious
courses for babies, training sessions in infant massage, sibling-preparedness
workshops, and designer fashions for two-year olds? Why must a ‘good’
mother be careful to ‘negotiate’ with her child, refraining from the demands
for obedience to an absolute set of rules?’ (Hays, 1996, p. 6)

Hays recognises that human children need an extended period of physi-

cal care to make the transition from infancy to adulthood, of course. But
as she says, ‘modern American mothers do much more than simply feed,
change and shelter the child until age six. It is that “more” with which I
am concerned’ (Hays, 1996, p. 5). What she noticed about this ‘more’ is
that it involves devoting large amounts of time, energy and material
resources to the child. There is a belief that a child’s needs must be put
first and that mothering should be child-centred. This ‘more’ is also almost
always done by the mother—these messages about parenting are more
strongly internalised by women, so that even where fathers are very
26 C. FAIRCLOTH

‘involved’, ultimately the buck stops with the mother. This has huge impli-
cations for women’s relationship with employment and notions of gender
equality, as I discuss throughout this book. And finally, observes Hays, the
‘more’ requires a mother to pay attention to what experts say about child
development. It is not enough to just muddle through or do what seems
easiest.
Hays terms this an ideology of ‘intensive motherhood’, one which
urges mothers to ‘spend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money
in raising their children’ (Hays, 1996, p. x). Under this ideology, ‘the
methods of appropriate child rearing are construed as child-centred,
expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, and financially
expensive’. But as she says, ‘the ideas are certainly not followed in practice
in every mother, but they are, implicitly or explicitly, understood as the
proper approach to the raising of a child by the majority of mothers’ (Hays,
1996, p. 9). So rather than being a uniform set of practices, then, intensive
motherhood is best thought of as ‘the normative standard…by which
mothering practices and arrangements are evaluated’ (Arendell, 2000,
p. 1195).
Hays is particularly puzzled by the emergence of this ideology at a time
when women (in the US at least) make up over 50% of the workforce
(Economist, 2009). What one might expect—that as women work longer
hours, motherhood becomes less time consuming—does not appear to be
the case. In fact, according to time–use studies, in the case of two-parent
families, today’s children are in fact spending substantially more time with
their parents than in 1981 (Gauthier et al., 2004; Sullivan, 2013; see also
Sayer, 2004). This is despite increases in female participation in work,
despite increases in attendance at childcare and preschool by children and
despite an increase in time spent with children by fathers. Perhaps it is not
surprising then that the mothers Hays worked with talked about being
tired, overstretched and ‘torn’, when the worlds of work and home have
both become so demanding. Rizzo et al. (2013) point to some of the
negative mental health consequences of this rise of intensive motherhood:
not only are parents spending more time with their children—the quality
of that time has become far more intense, leading to feelings of pressure
and anxiety.
 2 THEORETICAL CONTEXT 27

Motherhood and Moralisation

Numerous scholars have picked up on Hays’s concept of ‘intensive moth-
erhood’ to describe the contemporary experience of parenting in Euro-­
American settings. And whilst Hays recognises that not all mothers will be
working mothers, the cultural contradiction between the worlds of work
and home is one, she argued, that affects all mothers. She notes the irony
that we live in a society where child-rearing is generally devalued, and the
emphasis is on the world of work, whilst at the same time motherhood is
held up as an almost-sacred endeavour. This means that people have to
undertake what she calls ‘ideological work’ to make their own positions
liveable. (In fact, says Hays, people are forced to make their decisions
around childcare in circumstances that are often beyond their control,
although this does not feed so well into the ‘Mommy Wars’ ostensibly
between working and stay-at-home mothers, now so familiar in media
accounts (Douglas & Michaels, 2004).)
What is clear is that as well as whether women work or not, the day-to-­
day practices of motherhood have become the subject of public, even
political debate (Freely 2000). What parents feed their children, how they
discipline them, where they put them to bed, how they play with them: all
of these have become politically (and morally) charged questions. Indeed,
as soon as a pregnancy is confirmed, a whole chain of events is set forth:
prenatal diagnostic tests, birthing options, feeding solutions, sleeping
practices, whether to use a dummy or not. All of these are highly contro-
versial issues, and yet all require, to a greater or lesser extent, decisions to
be taken, and fast. There are an overwhelming number of alternatives,
necessities and personal desires at play, often not entirely harmoniously.
As Lee et al. note: ‘What were once considered banal, relatively unim-
portant, private routines of everyday life for children and families…have
become the subject of intensive debates about the effects of parental activ-
ities for the next generation and society as a whole’ (Lee et al., 2010,
p. 294). As noted, one of the reasons the intensive motherhood injunction
wields such power, Hays suggests, is because it links to the separate spheres
thesis: ‘intensive’ mothering is perceived as ‘the last best defense against
what many people see as the impoverishment of social ties, communal
obligations, and unremunerated commitments’ (1996, p. xiii).
Wolf (2011), writing about motherhood in the US, links this public
interest to a broader argument around risk-consciousness and an emer-
gence of a ‘neoliberal’ culture. Where dangers are redefined as risk and
28 C. FAIRCLOTH

thus ‘viewed as the product of human action and decision-making rather

than of fate’ (Lupton and Tulloch, 2002, p. 318, in Nelson, 2008, p. 517),
individuals hold themselves ever more responsible for ensuring the safety
of themselves and of those who are dependent on them. Wolf therefore
talks about the concept of ‘total’ motherhood to characterise the experi-
ence of contemporary mothers. She notes that mothers are expected to
become their own experts on all aspects of child-rearing—making sure
that mealtimes, stories and playing are not only safe, but optimal for infant
development, and thereby becoming: ‘lay paediatricians, psychologists,
consumer products safety inspectors, toxicologists, and educators. Mothers
must not only protect their children from immediate threats but are also
expected to predict and prevent any circumstance that might interfere
with putatively normal development’ (Wolf, 2011, p. xv).
Echoing Hays, Wolf draws attention to the way in which this focus on
risk frames good motherhood as totally child-centred, with no cost con-
sidered too high for mothers to bear. Since children are considered vulner-
able and unable to protect themselves, mothers are charged with reducing
(or avoiding altogether) any risks to their children’s health and well-being.
This frames the mother–child relationship in an antagonistic way:

Total motherhood is a moral code in which mothers are exhorted to opti-

mise every aspect of children’s lives, beginning in the womb. Its practice is
frequently cast as a trade-off between what mothers might like and what
babies and children must have…When mothers have ‘wants’—such as a
sense of bodily, emotional, and psychological autonomy—but children have
‘needs’—such as an environment in which anything less than optimal is
framed as perilous—good mothering is defined as behaviour that reduces
even infinitesimal or poorly understood risks to offspring, regardless of the
potential cost to the mother. The distinction disappears between what chil-
dren need and what might enhance their physical, intellectual, and emo-
tional development. Mothers are held responsible for matters well outside
their control, and they are told in various ways that they must eliminate even
minute, ultimately ineradicable, potential threats to their children’s well-­
being. (Wolf, 2011, p. xv)

Lee et al. (2014), in particular, draw attention to the ‘army of profes-

sionals’ who now colonise this area of social life, because parenting is
increasingly understood to be too important a task to be left up to parents.
Instead, the view of policymakers, at least in the US and the UK, is that
parents should be ‘enabled’ to parent well, via practices based on ‘research
 2 THEORETICAL CONTEXT 29

about the characteristics of effective parenting’ (Johnson, 2007). Edwards

and Gillies (2013) back up these assertions in their research on the differ-
ences between parenting in 1960s and 2010s Britain. What would have
been considered standard parenting practice in the 1960s (leaving chil-
dren unsupervised to play, letting them go out at night alone or asking
older children to supervise younger ones, for example) would be consid-
ered neglectful today. The expectation more latterly is that parents should
be constantly present to monitor their children, and prevent them from
‘risks’, both known and unknown.
Each of these scholars points to the way that, within this new style of
‘parenting’, a specific skill set is denoted: a certain level of expertise about
children and their care, based on the latest research on child development,
an affiliation to a certain way of raising a child and a particular educational
strategy. There are, of course, many ways of caring for children ‘inten-
sively’, as is discussed below; but whichever way one does it, it is clear that
there is a broader cultural logic around intensive parenting, which holds
that parents are wholly responsible for their children’s outcomes.
This has interesting implications for the subjectivity of parents. As
Macvarish and Martin note, what is interesting about verbal nouns such as
‘parenting’ is that they have no subject. ‘While calling someone “the par-
ent” defines a person in particular ways, “parenting” is detached from the
parents, floating more freely from the particular adult subject…In this
respect, “parenting” could be done by people who need not be parents
and, parents may not necessarily be “parenting” at all times or at any time
all. Thus, it has been argued, “parenting” signifies a de-centring or demot-
ing of the parent as an autonomous subject while focusing attention on
monitoring their relationship with their child as the implementation of a
series of tasks requiring the acquisition and application of skills and tech-
niques’ (Macvarish & Martin, 2021, see also Ramaekers & Suissa, 2011).
Clearly, being well-educated is a requirement for participation in these
choices between parenting models, as is a certain access to economic
resources which enable parents to consume the material goods that in turn
come to define the various methods of infant care. But this is also about
adopting a certain sort of identity, then:

Most of all [parenting] means being both discursively positioned by and

actively contributing to the networks of idea, value, practice and social rela-
tions that have come to define a particular form of the politics of ­parent-­child
relations within the domain of the contemporary family. (Faircloth et al.,
2013, p. 2)
30 C. FAIRCLOTH

Different Performances of the Cultural Script

The ideology of intensive parenting described above does not, of course,
affect all parents equally, and certainly not all parents today in the US (or
the UK) are ‘intensive parents’. However, it remains an important ‘cul-
tural script’ or ‘ideal’ to which parents respond in negotiating their own
practices. (see Lee et al., 2014, for a fuller discussion).

Gender
As Hays observed, perhaps the most obvious difference in response to the
ideology of intensive parenting is in terms of gender. While some recent
research has shown how men increasingly see ‘good fathering’ as about
being ‘involved’ with and emotionally present for their children (Dermott,
2008), mirroring the ‘intensive’ mothering model to some extent, other
research has shown that they also continue to hold on to more traditional
ideas about fathering. Shirani et al. (2012), for example, show that men
(in the UK) are more likely to question expert advice about parenting,
reject the need for hypervigilance and limit material consumption as a
means of contesting the competitive aspect of contemporary parenting
culture.
Similarly, Shaw’s (2008) work on family leisure draws on work with
parents in North America, to explore gender differences in response to
this cultural change. In an era of ‘intensive’ parenting, there has been a
shift in family leisure patterns towards maximising children’s health and
well-being, rather than on adult-oriented activities, she observes. Parents
are expected to act as pseudo-teachers, optimising their children’s intelli-
gence through a range of extracurricular activities. Shaw notes that it is
women who act on these discourses, both self-consciously and in more
invisible ways. Much of the work of enabling a child-centred approach to
family time (the scheduling and planning) falls to women, says Shaw,
echoing Dermott’s (2008) observations on the gendered split between
‘caring about’ and ‘caring for’ children, or what Lupton (2012, p. 13)
refers to as the ‘invisible mental labour’ of mothering—something I return
to in later chapters.
 2 THEORETICAL CONTEXT 31

As Macvarish and Martin note, however, there is another way of look-

ing at this process—not just one of en-gendering but rather de-gendering,
with important implications for women’s subjectivity:

By de-naturing the caring instincts of parents, ‘parenting’ also undoes the

specific authority attached to the status and biological reality of being either
a ‘father’ or a ‘mother’. ‘Parenting’, Smith argues, particularly ‘marginalises
motherhood’ (2010, p. 362), perhaps because modern mothers have his-
torically been attributed authority in partially naturalised terms: as natural
carers, hormonally and neurologically suited to nurturing infants, or at the
very least, physically equipped to breastfeed their babies. Although this, of
course, has trapped women in sex-based, highly-moralised gender roles,
much has also been written about how mothers gained authority relative to
men by the creation of a modern version of ‘good mothering’, which incor-
porated external expertise from the sciences of hygiene, medicine, psychol-
ogy and psychoanalysis (Apple 1995, 2006)…Similarly, policy and
practitioners often talk of ‘engaging fathers’ in ‘parenting’ in order to
‘involve’ them in family life (Doucet 2018). This is sometimes argued for in
terms of redressing the gender imbalance within the home, but it also con-
tains an implicit assumption that natural paternal affinity with the child is
lacking. It must, therefore, be cultivated by father-focused parenting sup-
port. (Macvarish & Martin, 2021)

As such, although much of the literature around the intensification of

parenting points to the gendered toll of this on women, much of it could
also be read as a de-authorisation of the parent as someone with a particu-
lar moral responsibility to the child at all.

Class
The ‘script’ of intensive parenting (or, mothering) is clearly a very middle-­
class vision of what ideal family life should look like. This is a limitation,
but not one that invalidates the attention paid to these middle-class dis-
courses. Engagement with this framework of intensive mothering is valu-
able because it presents a culturally dominant belief: that is, the middle
class presents the most powerful, visible and self-consciously articulated
model readily apparent in public discourse and policy. As Strathern puts it
in After Nature, her examination of English kinship, ‘I focus on middle-­
class usage [of kinship terms], largely to do with the way the middle class
enunciate and communicate what they regard as general social values’
32 C. FAIRCLOTH

(Strathern, 1992, p. 25). As such, attention to these culturally dominant

beliefs can be highly instructive.
This is not to say that parenting is not ‘classed’. Nelson’s work in par-
ticular draws attention to the classed differences in the internalisation of
the ‘intensive’ parenting ideology (2010; see also Gillies, 2009; Lareau,
2003). For the professional middle-class parents with whom she worked,
who demonstrated the ‘intensive’ parenting style, she sees a desire to
extend and protect childhood. For the working-class parents, the impetus
to do this was constrained by material, financial necessity that children
earn their own living as quickly as possible. Thus: ‘within what I have
called the professional middle class, parents do, indeed, adopt a style of
parenting that has as its key features constant oversight, belief in children’s
boundless potential, intimacy with children, claims of trust and delayed
launching’ (Nelson, 2010, pp. 174–175). As is discussed further below,
they were, of course, also the parents who had the material resources to
invest in additional classes and equipment, as well as the time to invest in
one-to-one interactions demanded by a more ‘intensive’ parenting style.
By contrast, in ‘the working class and middle class…parenting styles draw
on concerns about concrete dangers, an awareness of youthful indiscre-
tions, and a desire to see children mature sooner, rather than later’, simi-
larly constrained by their own material conditions (Nelson, 2010, p. 175).
However, although class differences in orientation have been observed—
as have individual differences throughout social classes—the problem here
is the way that intensive parenting is the one that is culturally validated,
meaning that the vast majority of parents, regardless of class, will be left
feeling that they ‘fall short’. As such, ‘ideal’ parenting practices can be
mobilised in a class-based way. Jensen’s work on the politics of parent-­
blame is relevant in this regard, showing how what she called ‘crisis talk’
around parenting has been used to police and discipline families who are
considered to be morally deficient and socially irresponsible. More worry-
ingly, she also shows how this has been used to justify increasingly punitive
state policies towards families (2018).

Cultural Variation
In a recent collection with colleagues (Faircloth et al., 2013), we collated
a series of chapters to explore the cultural purchase (or otherwise) of
‘intensive’ parenting in a cross-cultural perspective. What emerged there is
that while the discourses and practices of parenting may be seen as
 2 THEORETICAL CONTEXT 33

culturally and historically specific, they are currently acquiring a global

significance as they diffuse and interact with local and indigenous concep-
tualisations of raising children. As a number of anthropologists have
pointed out (e.g., Stephens, 1995), in a period characterised by the spread
of neoliberal economic regimes around the world, parenting ideologies
have a particular salience and significance in that parenting has become
intimately tied to projects of governance. In a range of settings around the
world, recent work on parenting has therefore foregrounded negotiations
around the shifts towards a new ‘parenting’ culture—whether that is resis-
tance, rejection, accommodation, modification or a complex combination
of several forms of agency (see, for example Bueskens, 2018; Faircloth &
Rosen, 2020; Kokanović et al., 2018; O’Reilly, 2009).
Having this global perspective is essential, not only because parenting is
at present a globalising set of ideas and practices that cannot be separated
from considerations of global power inequities. An international perspec-
tive also allows us to challenge ideas about the moral valence of particular
notions of parenting, as well as revealing the many ways in which kinship,
identity and cultural ideals concerning motherhood/fatherhood are chal-
lenging and resisting certain formations of intensive parenting. Finally,
they help us contextualise categorical assumptions not only around gen-
der, but also more fundamentally around our understandings of adult-
hood and childhood (Faircloth et al., 2013; Faircloth & Rosen, 2020).

Children at Risk
Certainly, developments in parenting can be understood as implying the
emergence of a historically distinct way of thinking about children and
childhood. Debates around social and historical constructions of child-
hood form a whole subfield of sociology, and cannot be adequately sum-
marised here. Rather, I aim to highlight the central points of this way of
thinking about childhood that are relevant to the discussion pursued in
this book.
This begins with the observation that a growing distance has been
placed between children and the adult world; children, by and large, have
less to do than they used to with ordinary adults in communities. Yet this
distance by no means leads to children being left to ‘do their own thing’.
Children are not free or more autonomous beings by merit of their
increased estrangement from adults. On the contrary, they are, as indi-
cated, both more overseen in their activities by their parents and the
34 C. FAIRCLOTH

subject of more intervention and social control in other ways too. As the
sociologists of childhood James, Jenks and Prout have commented:

Children are arguably now more hemmed in by surveillance and social regu-
lation than ever before…parents increasingly identify the world outside the
home as one from which their children must be shielded and in relation to
which they must devise strategies of risk reduction…On the other hand,
both public and private spaces are increasingly monitored by closed circuit
television to contain the threat that unsupervised groups of children and
young people are thought to potentially pose. Even the boundaries of the
family are held to be at risk of penetration by insidious technologies like
video and the Internet which could pose serious moral threats to our chil-
dren’s childhoods. (James et al., 1998, p. 7)

Certainly, childhood has always been as much about the imagination

and actions of adults as it is about physical children, and across space and
time, societies have had different ideas about children, which in turn
shapes how parents are expected to behave towards them (see Hardyment,
2007 for full overview). Centring on the definition of children as ‘at risk’,
it is this way of thinking about children, what they need, and the problems
of how adults relate to them, that makes a more ‘intensive’ or ‘total’
motherhood possible.
Historically, it was during the post–Second World War period in par-
ticular that psychological and cognitive child development theorists came
into an ascendency, with Freud, Erikson and Piaget studying the associa-
tion of childhood experience with adult development. Despite the differ-
ences between these theories, what united these studies was the assumption
of the absolute necessity of a mother’s loving nurture. ‘Attachment the-
ory’, discussed further below, claimed that the constant presence of a lov-
ing and responsive attachment figure—typically the mother—was the
foundation for lifelong mental health. On the basis of his research with
children in institutional settings, the psychiatrist John Bowlby wrote:

What is believed to be essential for mental health is that the infant and
young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous relation-
ship with his mother (or permanent mother-substitute) in which both find
satisfaction and enjoyment. (Bowlby, 1995 [1952], p. 11)

It was along these lines that Dr Benjamin Spock, Penelope Leach and
Thomas Berry Brazelton, to name three of the most popular experts to
 2 THEORETICAL CONTEXT 35

emerge in the second half of the twentieth century, produced the first edi-
tions of their books designed to help parents ‘parent’. The underlying
paradigm, subsequently developed by parenting experts, was that experi-
ence in early infancy has life-long implications and that this period of life
is one entailing enormous risk (Hays, 1996). Indeed, the developmental
paradigm is one of the key reasons parents are seen as a determining force
in how their children turn out. The flipside to the ‘vulnerable child’ is the
risky parent: or, as Furedi puts it, ‘Omnipotent parenting is the other side
of the coin of child vulnerability’ (Furedi, 2002, p. 58). These two impor-
tant ‘myths’ result in a highly skewed understanding of adult–child rela-
tionships, and opens the door to increased intervention:

The interlocking myths of infant determinism, that is, the assumption that
infant experience determines the course of future development, and parental
determinism, the notion that parental intervention determines the future
fate of a youngster, have come to have a major influence on relations between
children and their parents. By grossly underestimating the resilience of chil-
dren, they intensify parental anxiety and encourage excessive interference in
children’s lives; by grossly exaggerating the degree of parental intervention
required to ensure normal development, they make the task of parenting
impossibly burdensome. (Furedi, 2002, p. 45)

As Lee et al. (2010) note, it is hard to overestimate how far the concept
of the ‘at risk’ child has expanded when applied to the area of parenting:
parents are, in effect, seen as risk managers, tasked with optimising their
children’s outcomes in conjunction with expert advice (Lee et al., 2010).
Of course, for many centuries there have been ‘child experts’ or self-­
proclaimed ‘authorities’ who set out their views on the mistakes they think
parents make. Today, however, what this means is that ‘now almost every
parenting act, even the most routine, is analysed in minute detail, corre-
lated with a negative or positive outcome, and endowed with far-reaching
implications for child development’ (Furedi, 2002, p. 65; also see Wall,
2010, who looks at this in light of the new ‘brain science’ around early
childhood, or Macvarish, 2016 on the rise of ‘neuroparenting’). With
experts stressing the importance of the early (even preconception) envi-
ronment for infant development (see, for example, Gerhardt’s (2004)
book Why Love Matters), providing children with the right kind of envi-
ronment turns normal activities of parenting into a series of tasks to be
achieved. Touching, talking and feeding are no longer ends in themselves,
36 C. FAIRCLOTH

but tools mothers are required to perfect to ensure optimal development.

Lee et al. (2010) give the example that playing with a child is no longer
simply an enjoyable activity for adult and child; it is an instrumental way of
ensuring positive ‘long-term outcomes’.
Rose has even argued that ‘love’ can be used to promote a certain type
of self-understanding in children, and is duly emphasised for mothers:
increasing confidence, helpfulness, dependability at the same time as avert-
ing fear, cruelty or any other deviation from the desired norm (Rose,
1999, p. 160). The conversion of ‘love’ from a spontaneous sentiment
manifested in warm affection into a parental function or skill is one of the
key reasons mothers are now routinely told to ‘enjoy their baby’, with
almost magical powers ascribed to ‘unconditional love’ (and disastrous
consequences to its absence) (Furedi, 2002, p. 79).

The Many Methods of Raising Children Intensively

Methods of childcare can be divided into those styles that are ‘structured’,
and those that are (putatively, at least) ‘unstructured’. The former might
be characterised by scheduled feeding, formula feeding and separate sleep-
ing, made famous (in the UK at least) by authors such as Gina Ford and
her controversial but bestselling Contented Little Baby Book (1999).
Unstructured models, by contrast, aim to dissolve notions of rational effi-
ciency in favour of more relaxed styles of care, often characterised by prac-
tices like long-term, on-cue breastfeeding, a family bed and ‘positive’
discipline (Bueskens, 2001, p. 75).
Liberal models of childcare have been made most famous by the work
of William and Martha Sears, who coined the term ‘Attachment Parenting’
in The Baby Book (1993 [1982]). They drew on the bonding work done by
Bowlby, Klaus and Kennel, agreeing that the optimum way of caring for a
child was to keep mother and baby in prolonged physical contact. The
argument is that babies have evolutionary expectations that must be met
if they are to mature into happy, healthy children and adults. Doing any-
thing other than this is to deny the child’s innate needs (paraphrased from
Bobel, 2002, p. 61). Arguing that modern culture has impeded ‘common
sense parenting’, the Searses claim that it is ‘what we would all do if left to
our own healthy resources’ (2001, p. 2). The ‘ABCs’ of attachment par-
enting are given by the Searses in the form of a table (2001, p. 4). The ‘B’
tools, such as breastfeeding and babywearing enable parents to tune in to
their baby’s ‘cues’, which in turn enables them to parent appropriately.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Boarding party
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Boarding party

Author: Robert F. Young

Illustrator: Virgil Finlay

Release date: December 4, 2023 [eBook #72310]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company,

1963

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOARDING

PARTY ***
The fey Mr. Young continues his scholarly researches
in the scientific origins of our myth and legend
with this tale of an agile—and avaricious—one-man

BOARDING PARTY

By ROBERT F. YOUNG

Illustrated by FINLAY

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Amazing Stories September 1963
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
(Translator's note: The original of the following report was recently
acquired by the Terran Industrial Library through the Interstellar
Historical Exchange Society, into whose illustrious fold the member
nations of the Terran Economic Bloc have at last been admitted. The
narrative is of primary interest to the library officials because it
provides unequivocable proof that, long before the Interstellar
Economic Community took official cognizance of our existence,
several articles of Community Commerce found their way into our
culture. To the layman, however, the narrative is of primary interest
because it provides an intriguing parallel to a narrative of an
altogether different nature.)

TO: Interstellar Nurseries, Frimm 4

FROM: Captain of the Greenship Uxurient, Urtz 2
SUBJECT(S): (1) Why the Uxurient put in to an out-of-bounds
system during the Frimm 4-Urtz 2 run; (2) how a boarding party of
one gained the greendeck and made off with a Uterium 5 snirk bird,
a toy friddlefork, and two containers of yellow trading disks; (3) why
the Uxurient's flexible ship-to-ground capillary tube is ten exids
shorter than it used to be.

(1)
Why the Uxurient put in to an Out-of-Bounds System during the
Frimm 4-Urtz 2 Run
Two light-cycles out from Frimm 4, the first shoots of the yumquat
trees broke through the greendeck precisely on schedule. A little
over a light-cycle farther out I noticed during one of my periodic
inspections that the young leaves were beginning to turn yellow, and
subsequent tests of several greendeck soil samples revealed an
acute deficiency of mineral elements D-2 and Z-1, plus an advanced
aridity. I immediately retired to the greenship's subdeck, where I
found the contents of the soil-solution vat to be at a shockingly low
level. An analysis of the contents indicated a near-total absence of
mineral elements D-2 and Z-1.
Further investigations have since convinced me that the
responsibility for this critical shortage rests upon the shoulders of
none other than Ur-Lon-Ho-Lee, Interstellar Nurseries' senior
shipping clerk, but at the time, the yumquat-tree shipment pre-
empted my attention to the exclusion of all other matters. If the trees
were to be allowed to shoot up at the usual accelerated growth rate
and were to be delivered in satisfactory sapling stage to the Urtz 2
customer who had ordered them, I had but one course of action
open to me: to put in to the nearest system, find a planet with a soil
rich in moisture and rich in mineral elements D-2 and Z-1, and
replenish the soil-solution vat by means of the Uxurient's ship-to-
ground capillary tube. Fortunately, there happened to be a system in
the vicinity of the Uxurient's present position, but unfortunately it
happened to be one of the many systems that are out-of-bounds to
Interstellar Economic Community ships. Before coming to a decision,
then, I had to weigh the importance of my mission against the risk of
causing "a substantial interference in the normal evolution of an
extra-Community culture"—a possibility that is always present when
a Community ship is forced to enter an out-of-bounds system. I
decided that it was my responsibility both to the customer and to the
company to run this risk, and proceeded to put in to the system at
once.
I wasted no time on the outer worlds, knowing from experience that
such worlds rarely yield anything in the way of flora and hence could
not possibly possess the kind of soil I needed, but arrowed in to the
orbital regions of the first four. Perceiving at once that Four would not
serve my purpose, I continued on to Three. Three turned out to be a
Frimm 4-type planet in all respects save its slightly smaller size; it
also turned out to be the reason for the system's having been placed
out-of-bounds. I was not surprised: One seldom finds soil of the type
employed by Frimm 4 nurseries without finding intelligent life in the
immediate vicinity. In this instance, I used the term "intelligent life" in
its broadest sense, for the several civilizations I transchecked at
random revealed technologies not far removed from the paleolithic
stage, and in one case, in the very midst of it.

On several of the land masses I detected scattered deposits of the

soil-type I needed, and I could have replenished the Uxurient's soil-
solution vat from any of them. However, I chose an unusually rich
one on a large island near the major land mass, reasoning that the
less time I consumed in the operation, the less chance there would
be of my occasioning "a substantial interference in the normal
evolution of an extra-Community culture". This particular deposit
bordered a small community of scattered, thatch-roofed dwellings,
and abounded in trees similar to the yumquat species. After
activating the Uxurient's ventral camouflage-unit, I brought the
greenship down to about two hundred mirids, gravved it into position
above the edge of the forest, and opened the capillary-tube lock. I
timed my maneuver to coincide with the passing of the dusk belt,
but, reluctant to attract any more attention than was absolutely
necessary, I waited through most of the ensuing night phase before
lowering the capillary tube. Unfortunately, I erred somewhat in my
calculations, and the tube's rhizomorphous feeding system, owing
partially to the rather strong wind that had sprung up during the night
phase, entered the soil much closer to one of the native dwellings
than I had intended should be the case; however, dawn being near
at hand, I lacked sufficient time to recoil and relocate the device, so I
left it where it was. I was not particularly worried: the natives'
superstitious fear of the tube would probably preclude their
approaching it closely enough for them to be able to damage it, and
if their superstitious fear of the tube itself was not strong enough to
make them keep their distance, their fear of the "low-lying cloud"
from which the tube depended should be.
My mind at ease in this respect then, I reduced the opacity of the
hull's upper hemisphere to complete transparency so that the
greendeck would benefit from the rays of the system's sun, after
which I retired to the subdeck to check on the first influx of nutrients
into the soil-solution vat. The length of the capillary tube prohibited
any immediate change in the solution-level, so while I waited, I
busied myself checking the tubes that run down to the vat from the
section of the greendeck where the upper extremities of the capillary
tube are affixed. Next, I checked the outgoing tubes that feed the
greendeck soil. By the time I finished, the level had begun to rise.
I waited till it rose above the halfway mark, then I took a sample and
ran an analysis. The result delighted me: the D-2 and Z-1 mineral
element content had quadrupled! If the rapidity with which the vat
was filling continued, I would be able to disengage the capillary tube,
recoil it, and be on my way before the next night phase.
I lingered for a while longer, watching the level climb. Finally,
remembering that I had not eaten since before my discovery of the
soil deficiency, I left the vat-room, picked up three lliaka hind
quarters in the meat-compartment, attached them to my belt, and
proceeded up the ramp to the greendeck. The thought of the fine
steaks which the quarters would yield made me realize how truly
hungry I was, and I set off across the greendeck toward my distant
living quarters with quickened steps. As I walked, the sight of the arid
soil stretching away in every direction afflicted me with melancholy,
even though I knew that the deplorable condition was well on its way
toward being corrected. The leaves of the baby yumquat trees, I saw
to my dismay, had more than merely yellowed: they had shriveled
too. And so scrawny were the little shoots that, had I not known that
they were there, I might very well have walked in their midst and
have been unaware of their existence. Indeed, the greendeck,
awash now with bright morning sunlight, had more of the aspect of a
desert than it did an aspect of a thriving oasis where plants are
grown during shipment. I submit that my bringing the Uxurient in to
an out-of-bounds system was more than merely justified: it was in
keeping with the highest ideals that govern man in his relationship to
plant-life.
 (2)

How a Boarding Party of One gained the Greendeck and made off
with a Uterium 5 Snirk Bird, a Toy Friddlefork, and Two Containers of
Yellow Trading Disks.
Arriving at my living quarters, I removed my greendeck fatigues and
laid them upon the arms of the rack beside the entrance, wondering
as I always do on such occasions how Ho-Hat-Li-Tum, the
company's morale manager, could have fallen for so blatantly
whimsical an appointment as a clothes rack in the form of a life-size
woman. Granted, greenship pilots lead lonely lives, but tell me this:
how can the mere act of their laying their outer garments upon the
outstretched arms of a brainless, speechless, feelingless mannequin
in the least alleviate their loneliness? If Ho-Hat-Li-Tum were really
concerned about the morale of the greenship pilots, he would spurn
such halfway measures and concentrate his energies on getting the
regulation that forbids pilots to take their wives into space with them
rescinded.
To continue: Once in my living quarters, I proceeded directly to the
galley where I cut two large steaks from one of the lliaka
hindquarters. Placing the steaks upon the grill to sear, I got a loaf of
bread and decanter of wine out of the provision closet, after which I
set the table. When the steaks were done, I placed them on a large
platter and sat down to eat. It was at this point that I received a very
definite impression that I was being watched.
I looked around the galley. Other than myself, of course, no one was
there, and certainly the various cupboards were much too small to
harbor a secret onlooker. A secret onlooker indeed! Angry with
myself, I put the matter from my mind, concluding that the condition
of the yumquat trees had depressed me to a greater extent than I
had realized, and that I had fallen prey to preposterous imaginings. I
wish now that I had been less eager to ascribe what proved to be a
perfectly valid psychosensory perception to my emotional letdown.
I ate ravenously, devouring both of the steaks and the entire loaf of
bread. Afterward, a feeling of peace and good will stole over me, and
on an impulse I called the Uterium 5 snirk bird down from its perch
above the galley doorway and persuaded it by means of a crust of
bread to perch upon my forefinger. Despite the large and ovoid
xanthous droppings which these birds sporadically deposit on chairs,
tables and floors, they make wonderful pets, and I envied the
particular customer who was to receive this one—a tiny, bright-eyed
female—as a partial bonus for his yumquat-tree order. The other
components of his bonus—the toy friddlefork and the two containers
of yellow trading disks—stood on a shelf just behind me, and
reaching around and procuring them, I set them on the table before
me. Such evidence of largess invariably renews my faith in the
company, and on long runs I often get out customer bonuses and
speculate on the munificence of a concern such as ours. Thus I
speculated now—but not for long. I had not slept for nearly two zodal
periods and was far more tired than I realized, and to complicate
matters, the heavy meal which I had just consumed had had a
soporific effect upon me. Almost before I knew it, I dozed off.

I believe that my first apprisal that the previously mentioned

psychosensory perception had not been illusory after all was the
creak of one of the cupboard doors. Unfortunately, this apprisal was
on the unconscious, rather than the conscious, level, and failed to
arouse me from my stupor. It took the hysterical cackling of the
Uterium 5 snirk bird, a few moments later, to bring me back to true
awareness, and by that time, it was too late. The tiny man who had
shinned up the table leg and seized the snirk bird, the two containers
of yellow trading disks, and the toy friddlefork had already regained
the deck and was running toward the doorway. In the process of
climbing back down, he must have bumped the toy friddlefork and
accidentally activated its tonal unit, for it was bleating away
insistently as he bore it away. Indeed, so insistent were its cries that
one would have thought that it expected me to come after it and
succor it.
Incredulously, I got to my feet. I saw then that the thief was not a
man, but a boy—the tiniest boy that I have ever seen in my whole
life. Assuming his stature to be average, it is unlikely that even a full-
grown adult of his species would come any higher than a Frimm 4's
citizen's knee-cap!
I called after him, uttering my name in as gentle a tone of voice as I
could manage and assuring him that if he would return the articles
he had stolen no harm would come to him. He only ran the faster,
and fairly streaked through the galley doorway, down the entrance
corridor, and out onto the greendeck. I had no choice but to set off in
pursuit, and this I did, naively believing that I could overtake him
easily. In this I erred indeed. Never have I ever seen anyone run so
fast. Why, there were times when I could have sworn that his feet
weren't even touching the deck!
As I lumbered along in his wake, I wondered how he could
conceivably have gotten on board. Had he climbed the capillary
tube? This didn't seem possible in view of the Uxurient's altitude and
in view of his diminutiveness, but I could think of no other answer.
There was no need for me to, I saw presently: that he had climbed
up the tube was unequivocably demonstrated by the ease and the
celerity with which he now began to climb down it.
 (3)
Why the Uxurient's Flexible Ship-to-Ground Capillary Tube is now
Ten Exids Shorter than It used to be
Loath to give up the chase, I started climbing down the tube myself.
This is not as difficult as one would at first imagine—as I myself had
imagined, in fact, prior to making the attempt. The branch-like
protuberances that absorb the sunlight and transmute it into the
energy required for the capillary-action provide numerous hand- and
footholds, and had it not been for the almost gale-force wind that had
developed, my descent would have been relatively easy. Even with
the wind, I found myself in no great danger, and I have no doubt but
what I would have reached the ground in due course had I not
underestimated the resourcefulness—and the blood-thirstiness—of
my youthful quarry. He kept calling out repeatedly at the top of his
voice, but I did not suspect what he was up to until, halfway down, I
paused and looked below me. I was just in time to see a woman run
out of the thatch-roofed dwelling near which the tube had rooted
itself and hand him a small object the very moment his feet touched
the ground.
I deduced from the shards of sunlight that the object threw off that it
was a cutting tool of some kind. I was not long left in doubt in any
event, for no sooner did the boy have it in his possession than he
began to wield it. A series of thuds was borne upward by the wind,
and with each thud, the tube gave a convulsive shudder. I had seen
unattached ship-to-ground capillary tubes at the mercy of the wind
before, and I knew the danger that confronted me. Consequently I
began climbing back up toward the Uxurient at once. While I will not
attempt to deny that I was frightened, I would like to point out that it
wasn't so much my predicament that frightened me, but the cold-
blooded attitude of the young savage below me. He thought that by
severing the tube he could bring it crashing to the ground, and the
ferocity and the frequency of his blows testified to the eagerness with
which he awaited my destruction.
It was his very attitude, I believe, that gave me the strength and the
determination to gain the Uxurient after the tube broke free and
began lashing wildly back and forth. For a long while I lay gasping on
the greendeck; then, when my breath came back, I recoiled the tube,
secured the tube-lock, and lifted into space. The soil-solution vat was
not as full as I would have wished, but by careful rationing I knew
that I could make its contents suffice. Whether I could or not, I
wanted no more part of the world I had just left. I never want to see
the place again.
I would like to append a word in my defense. While it is true that I
was instrumental in exposing an extra-Community culture to a
technology far beyond its ken, it must be remembered that all such
cultures are flexible in nature and can absorb the seemingly
inexplicable with the utmost equanimity. They achieve this quite
simply by identifying the unfamiliar with the familiar, and by ascribing
those phenomena which happen to be beyond their experience to
the workings of magic. Far from having an adverse effect, the
present instance will, I am sure, provide the basis for a colorful
legend. No doubt the legend will acquire a more satisfying ending,
and unquestionably the boy's exploits will be exaggerated. As
regards the Uterium 5 snirk bird, the toy friddlefork, and the two
containers of yellow trading disks, you may be sure that the young
rascal had already identified them with objects with which he was
familiar (and which he coveted) before he left the galley cupboard in
which he was hiding. If he had not done so, he would not have stolen
them. In any case, I am not unduly bitter about their loss, even
though I must make that loss good. The measure of a Frimm 4
citizen's true worth is the quantity of his magnanimity; hence I hope
that both the boy and the woman—probably his mother—live happily
ever after.

(signed)
Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum
THE END
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