mothering
- 1The care and nurturing that a mother provides to her child.
Her steady mothering gave the children a deep sense of security.
Researchers debate how much early mothering shapes a person's later life.
Oppositeneglect
Note
The core sense counts as well as collects. Alongside uncountable mothering there is a plural, motherings, for separate acts or episodes of care. Rachel Bowlby's Feminist Destinations (1996), writing on Virginia Woolf, sets Mrs Ramsay's "marryings and motherings" side by side, and the plural turns a mother's care into a series of deliberate acts rather than a steady condition.
- 2The protective care a mother gives her young.
Instinctive mothering drove her to shield the baby from the surging crowd.
The documentary captured the mothering of elephants guarding their calves.
Similarprotectiveness
- 3Present participle and gerund of mother.
He is mothering the orphaned lambs through the cold nights.
Constantly mothering her grown sons, she still packs their lunches.
Note
The -ing form serves every sense of the verb, not only the caring one. Mothering lambs or grown sons is the transitive verb meaning "nurture," and it takes a direct object. A brewer's sense hides here too. Fermenting alcohol that is mothering is developing mother, the substance that turns it into vinegar, and that use needs no object.
- 4Nurturing or protective behavior like that of a real mother, shown by someone who is not the person's actual mother.
The veteran nurse's mothering eased the anxious interns through their first shifts.
He resented the constant mothering he got from his older coworkers.
Similarcoddling, babying, fussing
Note
Care carried beyond the family, and it often has an edge. In Dane Rudhyar's Rania (1930), a lover's caresses become "this mothering" that "the male resents," and the word still hints at being treated like a child. It can also be plainly admiring, as when a day-care teacher in LIFE (1970) puts mothering ahead of teaching. Context, not the word, decides which tone it takes.
Less common meaning
- 5Clipping of a-mothering: the former practice of visiting one's mother or mother church.
Note
A Lenten custom rather than a kind of care. The word is clipped from a-mothering, the old practice of returning to one's mother or mother church. It belongs with Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent. In Mary B. Merrill's account of 1894, absent sons and daughters, apprentices especially, came home that day with a small present for their mother. On its own the word is obsolete.
Showing meanings only.
mothering is a form of mother
mother, verb: To care for and nurture someone as a mother would be expected to treat her child. Full entry
- Spelling
- mother → mothering: add -ing
Use it in a sentence
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Origin
Formed from "mother" combined with the suffix "-ing".