Making Time in Motherhood to Invest in Children’s Music

In this chapter, I launch into what it is to be a musical mother using Bourdieu’s theoretical toolkit as my theoretical framework to investigate the social and classed practice of mothers’ engagement with music. I examine notions of ‘taste’ as an affirmation of class and how markers of taste have evolved to include wider perspectives such as cosmopolitanism. I acknowledge the limitations of Bourdieu’s conceptualisations when discussing gender and argue for the inclusion of feminist theories to look at concepts such as emotional labour, mental load, intensive mothering, concerted cultivation and affective recognition. I then reveal how the mothers’ stories were generated using a narrative inquiry approach. I seek to explore how the mothers’ subjective experiences align to the dominant cultural norms of the day or how they resisted these hegemonic tropes.