Navigating “proper food” and “good mothering” on social media

This study contributes to understandings about how UK mothers use social media practices to navigate, negotiate and enact family food provisioning. “Proper food” and “good mothering” remain entangled sociocultural conventions that govern a range of food provisioning practices. In the face of time pressures and the challenges of children’s fussy eating, we explore how mothers use social media to avoid misaligning their practice performances with these cultural ideals. Through our practice theoretic analysis of qualitative interviews and online forum discussion threads on Mumsnet, we illuminate three social media practices that represent the dynamic entanglement of mothering, food provisioning and social media interaction. Mothers attune food provisioning practices online to the conventions of “Proper food,” which includes admitting misdemeanors and seeking advice on how to attend to the collective governance of established conventions. Mothers collectively contest existing conventions through skillful negotiation, although in-so-doing invoking other “good mothering” conventions that limit the scope of the renegotiation. Finally, social media interactions displace “good mothering” by allowing mothers to demonstrate attentive love online, while severing this care from food provisioning. Our research advances our understanding of the role of social media practices in the everyday enactment of food provisioning by middle-class mothers.