In some ways, motherhood is a universal and unchanging human experience. But in other fundamental respects, experiences of mothering shift with different cultures and time periods. Something distinctive is taking place in the twenty-first century, where what it means to mother is being powerfully remade by rapid environmental change.
Environmental disasters like fires, floods and cyclones are of course a perennial human experience. Disaster research demonstrates that human experiences of crisis have always fractured along gendered, cultural and socio-economic fault lines – where groups already social marginalised or disadvantaged suffer the most in the aftermath of crisis. Mothers have distinctive experiences of disasters that are a product of both their gender as women and their caring roles in relation to children.
Parents bear an additional burden during disasters as a consequence of their relationship to their children. Mothers experiences are distinctive from fathers because of the gendered nature of caring that they perform during disasters. While fathers are more likely to protect property or rescue community members, mothers more frequently adopt a primary caring role for their children’s emotional and physical wellbeing.
Mothers can also be particularly vulnerable during disasters. Evidence from across the globe attests to the way that crisis exacerbates gender-based violence, with violence against women increasing in the aftermath of a range of crises including drought, fires and pandemics.
As the frequency and intensity of environmental disasters increases in the twenty-first century due to climate change, so too are the disaster experiences of Australian mothers shifting. One study of the experiences of pregnant people entering parenthood during the Black Summer fires concluded that ‘reproduction in the Pyrocene can be unpredictable and scary’, with multispecies relationships and places of refuge taking on new significance. Another study of families with very young children during the fires discovered that parenting complicated disaster experiences, particularly around preparing to evacuate, seeking refuge and tending to the needs of young children, such as infant feeding.
Our research demonstrates that this age of climate-fuelled disasters is affecting motherhood in new ways. Mothers are increasingly worried about the emotional, and not just the physical, harm that disasters may cause their children. Jade was in Melbourne with her family during the Black Summer fires. While they were physically safe, they were nevertheless affected:
“The kids could smell the smoke and, yeah, it was – they were asking me about it and [distressed] . . . I felt like I had to leave the television off . . . I felt like I didn’t want to distress them . . . I had to say that it was okay but it wasn’t . . . I just want to protect them from knowing all this.”
With an intensifying rate of environmental disasters comes new attempts to make sense of these crisis points. Amelia has observed a shift in understanding and language in her community since the 2019–20 Black Summer fires.
“People used to say like weather events were an act of God . . . but now it’s just not used anymore because I think people understand how ridiculous that term is,” she said.
Josie has noticed a similar phenomenon as extreme weather events have increased.
“It’s really just in the last three or four years that I think a lot of people have been starting to make the connection with the fires we had here, and then the floods that have occurred in various places. I think now, the majority of people do understand that climate change is here, it’s here now, and we do need to act,” Josie said.
Perhaps most fundamentally, mothers are now anticipating future disasters through the ways they raise their children. Our interviews with contemporary Australian mothers suggests that this age of super-charged disasters appears to be shifting collective understandings of ideal parenthood. There is an increasing sense that ‘good’ motherhood obliges mothers to anticipate and prepare their families for disaster.
The impacts of climate change were at the forefront of Kate and her husband’s minds when choosing a location to build their family home – both in terms of projected sea level rises and fire risk. Then their traumatic experience of surviving the 2009 Black Saturday fires motivated the family to make fire precautions part of regular family life.
From that point, Kate has always had an evacuation bag packed. In the lead up to every summer, which spells bushfire risk in Victoria, Kate makes her family practice an evacuation drill, including the dog, cat and guinea pigs: “So that next time, if that happens, it’s not as stressful. And expecting it to happen . . . just to sort of normalise it, because I think if things are going to get stressful, well-laid plans don’t always work.”
For Josie, heightened disaster risk has also changed how she plans summer holidays. She explained that when she was younger, she would often go camping and bushwalking during the summer. But now, Josie explains that “We don’t want to be travelling at that time of year, because your risk of travelling through an area where there’s fires, and perhaps getting caught, is really, really scary.”
The escalating risk of fires has changed her emotional relationship to the seasons, too: “I absolutely hate the summer, because of the scariness of fire risk.”
Mothers have always had a distinctive experience of disasters, but their experience changing in the twenty-first century. Australian motherhood is being fundamentally transformed by environmental change. Some women are choosing to forgo motherhood because of their concerns about a climate-changed future. Others find motivation in their relationship with their children to keep fighting for climate justice, but with an awareness that their childrearing practices need to change if they are to prepare their children for an uncertain future. In a myriad of ways, shifts in the natural world are reshaping motherhood and its centrality in our human world.