Still Good Mothers, Maybe Even Better: Augmenting Motherhood Through External Care in South Korea

• In Event: Family Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10: Gender Roles and Ideologies

Abstract

Combining maternal caregiving with external childcare support is now a routine part of everyday family life in many postindustrial societies, even in contexts where intensive maternal involvement is normatively privileged over reliance on non-parental support. Using South Korea as a revealing case that shows this dynamic, this study examines how mothers understand, incorporate and evaluate external childcare usage within contemporary standards of good motherhood. Drawing on sixty in-depth interviews with South Korean mothers raising young children, I show that mothers do not simply experience external care as a deviation from good mothering. Rather, mothers frame external care as a responsible and legitimate resource for achieving maternal ideals. They define good mothering around the expectation that mothers should skillfully integrate external support into their care arrangements. Taken together, external care emerges not as a moral risk to be minimized, but as the very terrain on which maternal competence is evaluated. While this ideal is widely shared, mothers’ capacity to meet it fully is unequally distributed, shaped by structural conditions such as class, employment, and access to reliable caregivers. Overall, my findings reveal both change and continuity in the ideals of motherhood, showing how contemporary ideals of good mothering are being reconfigured to accommodate external care while still reflecting and reproducing enduring inequalities in family life.

Author

• Jimin Gim, University of Wisconsin-Madison