The vulnerable-empowered mother of academic food discourses: a qualitative meta-synthesis of studies of low-income mothers and food provisioning

The nutritional health and wellbeing of children, and by extension their weight, is a heated topic in contemporary discussions of food and health, particularly for low-income populations. Despite contrary understandings, there remains a dominant societal framing that parents–in particular low-income mothers–are solely responsible for the status of their children’s health and wellbeing. In this paper, we examine how low-income mothers are positioned within the academic literature to reveal where responsibility for children’s health and well-being is positioned. We present a meta-synthesis of 18 qualitative studies to identify how mothers’ food choices and feeding are positioned, and the recommendations that researchers identify for promoting child health within this discursive terrain. We found that low-income mothers faced multiple challenges relating to cost, convenience, concerns about health and wellbeing. However, many of the recommendations made by researchers focused extensively on behavioural interventions aimed at the vulnerable mother rather than structural interventions to support mothers’ feeding practices. We argue that discourses of low-income motherhood must recommend structural, and not just individual, change to counteract dominant constructions of the ‘vulnerable-empowered mother’.