TY - JOUR
T1 - "Mothers as Candy Wrappers"
T2 - Critical infrastructure supporting the transition into motherhood
AU - Britton, Lauren
AU - Barkhuus, Louise
AU - Semaan, Bryan
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the participants for their time. This study was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant #1657429. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. Supplemental support was provided by Ithaca College and Mozilla Research.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © ACM.
PY - 2019/12
Y1 - 2019/12
N2 - The transition into motherhood is a complicated and often unsupported major life disruption. To alleviate mental health issues and to support identity re-negotiation, mothers are increasingly turning to online mothers' groups, particularly private and secret Facebook groups; these can provide a complex system of social, emotional, and practical support for new mothers. In this paper we present findings from an exploratory interview study of how new mothers create, find, use, and participate in ICTs, specifically online mothers' groups, to combat the lack of formal support systems by developing substitute networks. Utilizing a framework of critical infrastructures, we found that these online substitute networks were created by women, for women, in an effort to fill much needed social, political, and medical gaps that fail to see 'woman and mother' as a whole being, rather than simply as a 'discarded candy wrapper'. Our study contributes to the growing literature on ICT use by mothers for supporting and negotiating new identities, by illustrating how these infrastructures can be re-designed and appropriated in use, for critical utilization.
AB - The transition into motherhood is a complicated and often unsupported major life disruption. To alleviate mental health issues and to support identity re-negotiation, mothers are increasingly turning to online mothers' groups, particularly private and secret Facebook groups; these can provide a complex system of social, emotional, and practical support for new mothers. In this paper we present findings from an exploratory interview study of how new mothers create, find, use, and participate in ICTs, specifically online mothers' groups, to combat the lack of formal support systems by developing substitute networks. Utilizing a framework of critical infrastructures, we found that these online substitute networks were created by women, for women, in an effort to fill much needed social, political, and medical gaps that fail to see 'woman and mother' as a whole being, rather than simply as a 'discarded candy wrapper'. Our study contributes to the growing literature on ICT use by mothers for supporting and negotiating new identities, by illustrating how these infrastructures can be re-designed and appropriated in use, for critical utilization.
KW - ICTs
KW - Motherhood
KW - Social media groups
KW - Transition
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85076699304&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85076699304&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3361113
DO - 10.1145/3361113
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85076699304
SN - 2573-0142
VL - 3
JO - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
JF - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
IS - GROUP
M1 - 232
ER -