Musical Motherhood in Everyday Australian Middle-Class Family Life

In this chapter, I discuss what motherhood looks like in current Australia and how social policy has influenced maternal practices. Neoliberalism, as a historical phase of capitalism, has instilled the need for some mothers to appear aspirational for their children, constantly seeking opportunities to accrue cultural capital and reproduce their middle-classness. It is timely to define class and how that is represented in Australian society. I begin to show how the women’s nurturing of certain dispositions in their children is influenced by gender and class as a means to gain privileges and advantages in educational institutions and workplaces. I investigate how mothers navigate motherhood and paid employment and those who opt out, ‘choosing’ to be stay-at-home mothers. For some stay-at-home mothers, volunteering enables them to fulfil roles and exhibit the skills that they may have in the workplace, but volunteering comes with its own affordances and costs. Finally, I explore the investments mothers make to increase the family cultural capital and the rationale that mothers present for wanting to ‘be there’ for their children. For some mothers, this is possible because they have the requisite resources needed to action this, but for others, they are unable to ‘be there’ due to other constraints, and so make alternative arrangements. The balancing act of trying to meet family needs while navigating paid work or study commitments, societal expectations and accruing cultural capital are discussed. I end the chapter by beginning to examine music as an intergenerational family practice and how family cultures develop, maintain and evolve over generations.