The rich and complex history of childrearing practices most often coalesces around women's behaviour. Because women are imagined as best suited to perform the work of childrearing, maternal behaviour has long been the subject of state, public and academic scrutiny. Although the definitions and expectations of motherhood change with the times and advancements characteristic of a particular era, one consistency has been the construction of mothers as primarily responsible for preparing children as future citizens, ensuring that they grow up to be responsible, contributing members of society. This construction is particularly salient as transformations in the way we view childhood shift the way we understand childrearing (Faircloth, 2014a). Parenting is now a task, ‘a form of learned interaction’ that determines children's success or failure (Lee, 2014, p. 8). In this recent history of the emergence of parenting as a task, there are two key ideologies that help to contextualize the rise of AP. The first is scientific motherhood, the dominant framing for ‘good’ motherhood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the UK and Canada, and the second is intensive mothering, the cultural contradictions of which define contemporary parenting culture.

Scientific motherhood

Scientific motherhood is ‘the idea that mothering should be guided by scientific supervision and principles’ (Litt, 2000, p. 21). Although the ideology first emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the notion that science is best suited to inform parenting has continued to define what we call ‘good’ motherhood, evident for example, in the current reliance on neuroscience to shape parenting (Lowe et al, 2015). The emergence of scientific motherhood coincided with the arrival of ‘scientism’ (Wilkie, 2003, p. 177) in European and North American societies, during which major scientific innovations such as the discovery of germ theory completely transformed the way everyday people, particularly mothers, lived their lives. This discovery, and scientism in general, enabled the emergence of preventative medicine and thus began the first indication of medical interest in the behaviour and habits of mothers.

Physicians’ newfound interest in mothering behaviour reflected a larger cultural phenomenon that emerged alongside and as a result of scientism: medicalization. Medicalization is ‘the process through which medical interpretations have acquired cultural legitimacy’ (Litt, 2000, p. 4) to the exclusion of other explanations. This process is most clearly evident in the shifts in the customs of childbirth over the past 300 years (Stone, 2009).