Motherhood, Absence and Transition: When Adult Children Leave Home

How do mothers manage the experience of separation when their children leave home? The vast majority of academic texts on motherhood have focussed on women's experiences of the early years of mothering, while texts covering the topic of home-leaving have tended to privilege the young person's experience. Combining lively empirical material with an illuminating social-theoretical framework, Trish Green's book addresses the much neglected area of the mother's experience of separation from her child at the time of their home-leaving. The book makes clear how the mother's experience of separation is silenced, first by the sociocultural constructions of motherhood per se, second by the privileging of the child's transition to adulthood, and third by a neglect of the relational dimension of this particular lifecourse transition. In doing so the book makes an important contribution to debates on ageing, identity and the lifecourse, providing a timely critique to notions of the centrality of independence to identity in western value systems. It will be of great interest to sociologists with interests in the family and motherhood, gender, identity and the lifecourse, and also to academics in the fields of social work and cultural geography.