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In this article, we delineate the pathways by which mothers’ strategies to integrate work and family emerge during the early years of parenthood. We conducted a secondary analysis of 100 interviews with 17 families from a longitudinal, qualitative data set that explored women’s strategizing about work-family integration during early parenthood. Using Critical Feminist Theory and principles of Institutional Ethnography, we examined the ways in which contextual factors, including couple level processes, and individual preferences, interacted to shape work-family integration strategies over time. For most mothers, there was little alignment between early preferences regarding work-family integration and actual arrangements over time. Most mothers made work-family integration decisions, including decisions about use of family policies, and interpreted work-family integration challenges, according to the ideal of intensive motherhood. This hooked mothers into a pathway that led them to adjust or abandon early strategies, and that progressively ‘washed out’ differences in preferences. The pathway also led to strategies in which child care was prioritized over paid work involvement. This study contributes to understanding of the processes and pathways by which women align their work-family integration preferences and strategies to dominant ideology of motherhood, a process that reinforces gender roles in families with young children.

It all comes out in the wash: family policy, ideology and the pathway to contemporary mothering