Raising Generation RX: mothering kids with invisible disabilities in an age of austerity

In this detailed and insightful book, Linda Blum carefully and thoughtfully lifts the lid on the lives of 48 women who identify as mothers of children with ‘invisible disabilities’. As a feminist sociologist, she treats the women in her study as ‘important, knowing subjects’ (7). In doing so, she explores the ways in which the mothers both draw on and challenge the dominant discourses that touch their lives as she co-constructs the women’s narratives within the text. The study took place in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century and the mothers’ stories are marked by a particular temporal and cultural context, especially with reference to the health, education and care system, as well as cultural attitudes to class, race and gender. However, Blum describes the United States as a post-industrial context; this is a context in which neoliberal ideology promotes individual responsibility over the role of the state. As such, Blum describes a context that will be familiar to many of us living in a time of neoliberal ableism in the Global North (Goodley 2014).

‘But why study mothers?’

Blum addresses the question ‘but why study mothers?’ (3) at the beginning of Raising Generation RX. This is an important question; after all, one could argue that library shelves are awash with books focusing on the lives of mothers of disabled children. Mothers of disabled children already represent an overly scrutinized and surveilled group within research and in professional practice. However, what this book offers is a rich account of persistence and change in the mothers’ lives; while much has changed since the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly the requirement for mothers to care and to enter the labour market in order to be judged ‘good mothers’ (Jensen 2012), much else has remained the same. The ghost of Bettleheim lingers in mothers’ lives as we continue to assign women the major responsibility for child care and the primary share of the blame when things ‘go wrong’ with children’s development and/or behaviour (Runswick-Cole 2015). In a time of neoliberal parenting (Jensen 2012), there is still much still to be said about the lives of mothers of disabled children.

Why invisible disability?

Blum also addresses the question of why the focus here is on mothers of children with ‘invisible disabilities’. The ‘Generation RX’ in the title of the book may be unfamiliar to readers outside the context of the United States. Generation RX refers to a generation of children and young people who are being offered ever-increasing types and amounts of prescription drugs in the United States (Associated Press 2005). In the States, children with ‘invisible disabilities’ can certainly be classified as part of Generation RX; the mothers in this book describe the drugs that have been prescribed to their children, including Ritalin, Prozac and lithium. The number of children labelled with ‘invisible disabilities’ and being medicated is rising across the Global North. Furthermore, mothers of children with ‘invisible disabilities’ see themselves and their children as different from mothers and children with ‘visible disabilities’. They describe the ways in which ‘the lack of visibility’ or ‘evidentness’ of the origins of their child’s difficulties creates difficulties in their lives (36). While mothers of children with ‘invisible disabilities’ and their children experienced stigma and disgrace, their perception is that children with visible disabilities and their mothers are viewed as more ‘legitimately’ disabled and therefore experience less stigma (37).

The children are characterized by many of the mothers as having ‘em-brained’ disorders stemming from ‘innate brain issues’ (5). The mothers describe the varied ways in which they are come to (or are forced to) accept and are then required to manage their child’s ‘innate brain issues’. Blum describes the ways in which the mothers’ negotiations of these demands intersect with issues of class, race, gender and sexuality. Blum also notes that these diagnostic claims are made at a time when a neuro-cultural discourse permeates understandings of childhood. Nonetheless, Blum describes how throughout the book she ‘attempts to treat invisible disabilities as both, real, embodied and as cultural inventions specific to time and place’ (7; original emphasis).

Why gender, sexuality, race and class?

A distinctive approach within Raising Generation RX is the foregrounding of the issues of sexuality, gender, race and class. Mothers of disabled children often appear as a homogeneous group in accounts of their lives and the impact of other aspects of their identity status remains hidden or under-theorized. In the context of the United States, Blum painstakingly exposes the presence of white, middle-class, heterosexual privilege within the mothers’ lives, including the mothers’ attempts both to exploit and to resist such privilege. Interestingly, none of the 48 mothers Blum describes are themselves identified as disabled mothers. Mothers’ diversity is described by income, household and ethnoracial location but not by dis/ability status. However, several of the mothers in the book report that they, like their children, are taking medication such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

‘Expansive mother blame’

Blum concludes by arguing that a core finding of the book is that ‘mother-blame has become so expansive, yet so indirect’ (240). While arguing that few mothers are blamed, or even blame themselves, as the ‘underlying cause’ of their child’s difficulties, ‘good mothers’ are exhorted to engage in ‘scientific motherhood’ (240) and to take primary responsibility for enhancing their child’s neurological development. In an age of neuroscience, institutional, environmental, cultural and structural inequalities have been redacted from accounts of how to promote ‘normal’ child development, leaving mothers to bear the responsibility of having produced an ‘em-brained’ child who is not ‘good enough’ to serve the requirements of the global economy. Yet Raising Generation RX offers many counter-narratives to such narrow and de-contextualized accounts of mothering and childhood, and demands us all to think again about the role of structures of the state in building family well-being.

Katherine Runswick-Cole
The Centre for Social Change and Community Well-being
Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
[email protected]
© 2015, Katherine Runswick-Cole
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2015.1075952