Feeding without Apology: Maternal Navigations of Distal Discourses in Family Meal Labour

Excerpt : Family meals sit at the intersection of expert advice, child-centred philosophies, workforce demands, and “good” mother ideologies. As researchers and policymakers call for families to increase the frequency of shared family meals to solve a variety of problems related to children’s well-being, we direct our focus toward mothers, who remain largely responsible for this labour. Borrowing from relational dialectics theory, we examine how mothers navigate distal discourses as they talk about the histories, processes, and problems associated with their feeding labour and family meal experiences.