There is much at stake for women in negotiating the contested terrain of motherhood. What has been described as the ‘religious wars’ about babycare (Jardine 2010), as well as about mothering and parenting more generally, have become increasingly intense, with often daily prime-time news coverage of the quality, quantity and consequences of contemporary mothering. The recent high-profile publication of a UNICEF report on child well-being has added fuel to the flames of public interest in motherhood (Ipsos MORI and Nairn 2011), with its heavily reported conclusion that the time poverty of family life in the UK, where a relatively high proportion of mothers participate in paid employment (Finch 2006), is the result of excessive ‘materialism’which, alongside a lack of clear distinction between family roles of ‘mother’,‘father’and ‘child’, compromises children’s well-being. The politicisation of motherhood goes beyond this concern with the relationship between ‘family time’and children’s well-being, with its implications of maternal responsibility (Bunting 2011). It is also bound up with the idea that many societal and health-related problems can be explained and resolved in terms of the quality of parental care in a child’s early years (eg see BBC Radio 4 2011). The UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s initial response to the riots that broke out in England’s cities during August 2011, pledging that programmes to support parenting would be ‘accelerated, expanded and implemented as quickly as possible’in a bid to fix Britain’s ‘broken society’(Cameron 2011), illustrates the assumptions about the connection between (gendered) familial roles and relationships on the