Author: Lecturer PhD. Camelia Delia VOICU
The paper focuses on the maternity, as social status-role, from the perspective of parenting, for a better and deeper understanding of the phenomenon of motherhood, especially the ways it manifests within the women social category, whose existence is determined by the coordinates prescribed by the gender identity and, perhaps to a greater extent, by those imposed by the professional identity, in the context of a „pseudo-modern” Romania or manifesting a “trendy modernity” (Schifirneț, 2009). If the mother status is timeless, meaning that, once obtained, it cannot vary with the passage of time (and consequently with the mother`s or child’s age), the maternal role is strongly influenced by the passage of time and by the social context in which it manifests. The paper performs an analysis of the maternal role from the perspective of the role prescriptions and the role conduct, emphasizing the condition of negotiation between those two for the success of motherhood and also, for the women integration in the society and the construction of the her identity, especially under the increasing impact of the „professionalization” of motherhood. The specialization in the accomplishment of the maternal conduct is imposed not only by the social institutions related to the maternity (medical/ educational/ social protection institutions), but also by the mother herself, in the context of the motherhood culture developed in the last decades and the use of information technology.