Being a ‘good mother’

Abstract

This paper draws on tape-recorded interviews with 90 women who gave birth in Victoria, Australia in 1989, followed-up when their infants were around 2 years. Half of the sample had been assessed as depressed 8–9 months post-partum using the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (case/depressed group), the other half had low scores indicating they were unlikely to have been depressed at the time of the original survey (control). Fifteen of the women in the case/depressed group and two women in the control group had scores of 13 or higher on the EPDS at the time of follow-up at 2 years. The interviews explored a broad range of topics related to the experience of motherhood in the first 2 years after giving birth. The paper focuses on a section of the interviews in which women were asked to describe their conception of a ‘good mother’. Women who had been depressed at 8–9 months post-partum compared with women not scoring as depressed at this time, and those depressed at follow-up compared with women not depressed at follow-up, did not differ in their ideas of what is involved in being a ‘good mother’.