Intensive Mothering, Concerted Cultivation and Good Mothering

In this chapter, the mothers’ practices are scrutinised to show the varying degrees of intensive mothering enacted as part of children’s musical development. A continuum of intensive mothering is evident. The mothers’ work shows how they cultivate their children’s dispositions to provide advantages and opportunities for capital exchange in the future. These future-oriented investments are perceived as being worth the huge amount of effort exercised due to the affordances they will acquire later. There are slippages where to be too intense can go against the logic of good mothering and position mothers as having unrealistic expectations of their children and diminishing their childhoods. Judgements are made by society on mothers’ mothering performances and from within middle-class musical mothering itself. The fine line between such perceptions of good and bad mothering is demonstrated through children’s musical practice. It is not just mothers who concertedly cultivate their children’s musical development but also the grandmothers who perform this intergenerational musical nurturing.