Mothering and Radical Selfcare: An Autoethnography of Participating in a Facebook Parenting Group

Abstract

The article documents the experiences of parenting of an urban Indian Hindu middle-class couple at the intersection of virtual and physical spaces and ideas. The experiences and ideas documented in this paper have co-evolved as the authors are parenting their four-year-old daughter and realised how their participation in a Facebook parenting group is influencing them as parents. The relational perspective in autoethnography is used to examine the mutual influences between the authors as partners, parents, and participants in the Facebook parenting group. This is done to understand how our participation in the Facebook parenting group mutually influenced our understanding of ideas of empowered mothering and self-care. The paper draws from Audre Lorde’s idea of radical self-care to analyse the interactions on the online group on empowered mothering and self-care.

Keywords

• mothering
• motherhood
• parenting
• self-care
• self-love
• empowered mothering