Since the 1980s, a growing number of American women are choosing to start a family without a male partner. Not only are these women going against the norm, they do so in an era of “intensive mothering,” which places enormous responsibility on mothers to assure that their children have every possible advantage and judges mothers for the way their children turn out. An intensive case study of one American single mother by choice illuminates a range of worries produced as a result of engaging in intensive parenting in an age of anxiety and highlights some of the special stresses that may pertain to doing so as an intentionally single mother.
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