Mothers with young children: Caring for the self through the physical activity space

Abstract

Mothers with young children have been consistently identified in public health discourses as having lower levels of leisure time physical activity than the general population. They are subsequently positioned as an at risk population susceptible to, for example, weight gain and postnatal depression. Women's ethic of care and good mother discourses work together to constrain mother's physical activity levels. In addition, public health discourses attempt to mobilize mothers into engaging in regular, rigorous sessions of leisure time physical activity, which often creates a calculative relation to self as women try to meet the expectations prescribed by health professionals. In this article, however, we employ Foucault's ethics of self to explore how 18 mothers with young children problematized and resisted prescriptive notions such as the ethic of care to create a space to begin to practice self-care through participation in leisure-time physical activity.

Keywords:

• leisure activity
• meanings
• subjective well-being
• women's leisure