The intertwined histories of motherblame and ableism arose out of the American Euthenics movement from 1910 into the 1950’s. Euthenics was inseparable from eugenics. Both sought to “improve the race” through the production of “efficient” human beings, the first through heredity, the second through controlling the environment.  This paper will explore two roles the American University played in the mental hygiene arm of the movement: 1) research institutes which studied children and their mothers, creating theories about how to rear “normal” children and decrease the existence of “feeble-minded”,  “mentally defective”, and “delinquent”  children and 2) euthenics courses of study, marketed as “women’s majors”, which taught curriculum, materials and programming designed by the institutes. Together they created a new professional class of women, child-welfare workers, who job was to surveil and police mothering in marginalized communities. Mental health conditions and developmental differences were framed as expensive burdens to society and blamed on bad mothers. This paper examines archival materials, such as curriculums and professional journals, to illustrate how prejudices against marginalized mothers and their children permeated child-welfare institutions from their inception, providing an important background for understanding contemporary phenomena such as the Foster Industrial Complex.

Mothers on the Frontline is a feminist non-profit organization founded and run by mothers of children with mental health conditions to promote caregiver healing and children’s mental health justice. This session introduces the Mothers on the Frontline Wisdom Collective Methodology for engaging stigmatized communities in collective healing. Our Wisdom Collective praxis uplifts mother’s stories as rich sources of knowledge and healing. We work with caregivers, whether they are parents, educators, advocates, or community members, to identify and name the systems, ideologies, practices and narratives around mental health that isolate, stigmatize, and punish people with mental illness, their families and caregivers. In this session, we will co-create sacred space for the sharing and gathering of stories and naming of wounds from caregiver stress and stigmatizing narratives. In line with The Care Manifesto’s concept of “promiscuous care”, we do this for collective resistance to neo-liberal narratives and to facilitate expansive imagining of a world that meets the needs of our children, a world that does not erase and exploit our labor and love.

Motherblame, while ubiquitous today, was not always the response to “undesirable” outcomes for children. Mother blaming arose at the same time, and in the same context, as the study of children.  Importantly, both were part of a larger progressive movement of eugenics and euthenics in the United States. The concept of “unfit mother” was constructed alongside concepts of “unfit” persons, particularly children as “delinquents” and “feeble-minded”. This presentation examines child study movements in the United States from the 1880’s to 1940’s and how those movements interact with developments in psychology, psychiatry, and progressive women’s movements to produce narratives that blame mothers for poor health and social outcomes of their children.

                In the 1880’s, three trends in the United States interacted to yield a movement that focused on the ways mothers raised children: 1) psychology became an academic discipline in American Universities, 2) women’s clubs politically advocated for funding and resources for the study of children, and 3) there was a focus on science as way to improve human life. All three of these trends combined in and were themselves influenced by the “sciences” of eugenics (which focused on heredity) and euthenics (which focused on environment). This presentation will examine the child development movement, which sought to study “normal” children, the child guidance movement, which studied and addressed child mental health conditions and behavioral problems, and federal policies around child welfare during these five decades, tracing how motherblame became an American staple. 

                  I will pay particular attention to the role research at child guidance clinics and the Iowa State Child Welfare Research Station played in the construction of motherblame and how the ideology of motherblame was spread through motherhood magazines, women’s clubs’ programming, and federal policy.

This paper gives a brief genealogy of ‘motherblame-stigma’, a social prejudice that blames mothers for stigmatized conditions in their child(ren). Blaming mothers for their child’s mental health conditions has its roots in child studies carried out in the name of eugenic and euthenic “sciences”. Motherblame-stigma is historically structured by ableism, patriarchy, racism, and classism. Today motherblame-stigma continues to serve as a reactive attitude that operates to oppress primary caregivers. It drives them to intensive labor that is exploited by institutions shirking their moral and legal responsibilities to children with disabilities. Motherblame-stigma functions as a form of structural gaslighting that makes this exploitation invisible.This paper will provide specific examples of Institutional gaslighting through policy, law, and public narratives that place primary caregivers in a double bind that individualizes blame for institutional failures towards children with disabilities, all while exploiting and appropriating their care labor.

This panel explores various ways meanings of motherhood are constructed through language, contemporary discourse, and stories. In the spirit of the conference theme, if we are thinking about what motherhood looked like in the past, looks like now, and how it might look like in the future––and more specifically if we want to point to who has been and who might be excluded, included, and/or obligated to engage in reproductive and related labor–– we must think carefully and perhaps creatively about how we talk about motherhood.Our panel proceeds amidst a backdrop of gender expansiveness and gender essentialism—which in some cases seem to be two sides of the same coin. We keep an eye toward identifying discourses, rhetorical moves, and storylines that essentialize or otherwise recuperate motherhood for patriarchal purposes while, exploring the absences, nuances, and possibilities of gender-inclusive language––and more broadly, gendered discourse–– in discussions about mothering, highlighting narrative structures that promote a practice of empowered mothering without resorting to essentialism.

Dr. Nyden will examine the history of motherblame and how it operates to obscure government failures to provide a full continuum of non-carceral mental health care for children. Using the framework of epistemic injustice (how people are harmed as knowers), she examines motherblame-stigma as a social prejudice fueling various forms of epistemic oppressions, which scapegoat, gaslight, and exploit mothers, contributing to both the Children’s Mental Health Crisis and the Care Crisis.

The prevailing view that mental health stigma prevents caregivers from seeking needed health care for their children is the basis of outreach programs and anti-stigma campaigns. This paper examines how an amalgam of mother-blame and mental health stigma structurally functions within healthcare and social service systems to deny care to children. I argue that this amalgam is the basis of institutional gaslighting through policy and legal code that obscures and perpetuates social injustices against children. I examine case studies to illustrate how operational narratives epistemically harm caregivers, exploit their labor, and result in the structural medical and social neglect of children. This work utilizes a relational standpoint theory of caregivers developed through interviews, ethnography, and community participatory research in relation to my work with Mothers on theFrontline, a non-profit organization founded and run by mothers to promote children’s mental health justice and caregiver healing. This theory recognizes that the intersectional positionality of both the caregiver and the cared for work together to inform whether the caregiver and child’s testimony receive uptake in these systems and the hermeneutical framing these systems give that testimony. The gender, race, and class of both caregiver and child together play a significant role in who is deemed worthy of care and of punishment.This paper contributes to STS by 1) illustrating how institutions gaslight through speech (public statements and messaging), as well as through action (policy and code); and 2) by presenting and applying a new relational standpoint theory. 

This workshop introduces the Mothers on the Frontline Wisdom Collective Methodology (WCM) for engaging stigmatized communities in qualitative research.  We developed this methodology in our work with Mothers on the Frontline, a non-profit organization founded and run by mothers of children with mental health conditions to promote caregiver healing and children’s mental health justice through storytelling.

The WCM is an approach to working with stories as rich sources of both knowledge and healing.  WCM disrupts positivist research practices that strip storytellers of their agency and wisdom by commodifying their lived-experience and treating their knowing as mere information.  Conventional interview questions are framed so that the interviewee can only provide responses formed to the hermeneutic container provided by the interviewer – preventing discovery, amplifying bias, and further traumatizing research participants.  By offering a third space, a co-created relational maker-space, WCM: 1) brings together the researchers meta-level analysis with the participants lived-experience; 2) produces new qualitative data and research questions; and 3) facilitates healing and increased hermeneutic agency for the research participants.  Workshop attendees will learn interview practices that build mutual trust and respect, refrain from harm, and gather wisdom inaccessible by conventional methods.  This workshop begins with a reflexive exercise to identify attendee’s positionalities in relation to their research and research participants. Using this exercise as a reference, we will discuss the theories informing the WCM. By the end of the workshop, participants will have the opportunity to develop their own reflexive storytelling prompt that can be used in future research projects.

This paper will examine the three controlling images (Mammy, Matriarch, and Welfare Queen) discussed by Collins in Black Feminist Thought through the lens of Black motherhood and parenting children within the stigmatized space of childhood mental illness.  Through the use of personal ethnography and the analysis of policy history, this paper analyzes the parallels between negative constructions of Black motherhood and beliefs about mothers of children with mental health conditions, and analyzes the intersections between race, gender, public policy, and stigmatized constructions of motherhood.

Mothers of children with severe mental illness are often gaslit into thinking that their inability to secure adequate services for their children is an individual parental failure, when in fact, various systems meant to serve such children not only fail to make needed services available, but structurally exploit, appropriate, and erase mother-labor. This paper will examine examples of epistemic exploitation and labor-appropriation by insurance companies, Medicaid, and disability services. This paper will argue that such failures to provide care are not only social injustices for children with mental illness, but epistemic injustices for the mothers who care for them.

This paper examines how structural gaslighting manifests in institutional, interpersonal, and internalized gaslighting to individualize as maternal failure what are in fact institutional failures of health systems, insurance companies and state agencies to make appropriate health care and and educational supports available for children with severe mental illness. The conceptual work fueling this gaslighting is begetter stigma, a particularly harmful amalgam of mother-blame and courtesy stigma.

This workshop aims to bring together individuals (parents, caregivers, professionals) who have lived-experience with children’s and youth mental health and mental health systems to brainstorm and share information about children and youth mental health care and mental health justice. Members of Mothers on the Frontline will introduce their Children’s Mental Health Justice Framework and Wisdom Collective Methodology and discuss how they utilize them for holistic policies and practices that center the well-being of children, families, caregivers, and communities.

We have been conditioned to think of mental illness as a character flaw caused by bad parenting. This stigma is a deep-rooted source of shame for children, parents, and teachers. It fundamentally assumes that good choices involve a strong will overcoming interfering emotion. Neuroscience says otherwise. Trauma-informed care offers a promising alternative to the punitive paradigm if it can get beyond the part of the stigma it keeps – that mental illness is caused by bad parenting. This requires 1. recognizing that neuro-difference has many causes (including brain injury & genetic conditions) and 2. broadening ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) research to include institutional and community traumas (such as school trauma, medical trauma, and racial trauma).

Members of the Essie Justice Group and Mothers on the Frontline will discuss the power and perils of uplifting the experiences of women in advocacy work. Panelists will explore the significance of bringing women’s stories into stigma-laden public debates, through a focus on advocacy at the intersection of mental health and incarceration. Leaders of Essie Justice Group and Mothers on the Frontline will discuss their methodologies and commitment to promoting healing and agency while avoiding voyeurism and further trauma in their efforts to leverage women’s stories to advocate for decarceration and the mental well-being of ourselves, children, and loved ones. This Panel Discussion is part of Grinnell Prize Week at Grinnell College, Grinnell Iowa.

Mothers of children with mental illness are on the frontlines of two global crises. The rates and severity of children’s mental illness have been rapidly growing, increasing the need for services and community supports. At the same time, four decades of privatization and austerity have resulted in what Emma Dowling calls “the care crisis,” including a state of disarray in the children’s mental health service sector. The intersection of the children’s mental health crisis with the care crisis makes it impossible for many children to access hospital beds for mental health emergencies and community-based disability services necessary to keep them alive and in their own homes. Mothers overwhelmingly bear the economic and social burdens of filling in disability service gaps. Furthermore, the very agencies charged to serve children with disabilities depend on the exploited and appropriated unpaid labour of their mothers. This article introduces the concept of “motherblame-stigma,” a social prejudice in the form of social disgrace, blame, and distrust of mothers related to a stigmatized characteristic of their child. After tracing the history of motherblame-stigma for children’s mental illness, I apply an epistemic oppression framing to illustrate how motherblame-stigma functions to prevent mothers from correcting distorted public narratives about child disability service infrastructures (a contributory injustice) and to sow self-doubt within mothers about their own experiences and capabilities (gaslighting). I provide examples of institutional gaslighting in state policy, law, public statements, and narratives to blame mothers for failing to seek and navigate services that do not exist.