Mother’s little helper: interviews with Australian women show a posh relationship with alcohol

Men have historically, and still do, drink greater than women. But in recent times there was an uptick in women’s drinking, particularly amongst women of their late 30s through to their 60s.

This is concerning, as no level of alcohol is taken into account secure for our health, and women are especially susceptible to alcohol’s long-term health harms (for instance, cancer and heart disease).

We’ve also seen the emergence of the “wine mum” in popular culture and greater social acceptance of ladies’s drinking.

But women still drink otherwise to men, and there are some vital the explanation why – particularly for ladies who juggle each paid work and motherhood.

In 2022, we conducted interviews with 22 Australian working moms aged 36 to 51, to learn more about their each day lives and the role alcohol played. Most of the ladies were middle-class professionals. Many were partnered to men, some were single, and all had school-aged children they sorted alongside their jobs.

We’ve recently published two recent papers exploring what we found.

Modern working moms

Now, greater than ever, women are entering the workforce and developing careers. At the identical time, many even have to satisfy the demands of getting children. While we prefer to think we’re moving towards a more equal society, women are still expected to do the majority of childcare and domestic duties.

This means many ladies are having to do “double shifts” of paid and unpaid labour, increasing the prospect they’re stressed, and limiting how much time they need to chill out, unwind, and pursue hobbies. This is where alcohol is available in.

Most women we talked to felt over-committed due to their competing roles. Whether they’d partners or not, they were often taking up the “default” caregiver role. This involved tasks comparable to getting kids ready for varsity, cooking, cleansing, and organising appointments.

At the identical time, their jobs might be mentally or emotionally stressful, comparable to working in health care or project management.

And it wasn’t unusual for these two worlds to overlap. For example, some women talked about needing to send emails or make calls from home outside work hours, or feeling there was an expectation for them to take break day work to take kids to appointments.

Many women were fatigued, they usually felt a way of guilt at not having the ability to commit fully to either role. As Mia, a full-time employed, partnered mother said:

You’ll spend your life feeling compromised, doing a half job as a parent, and a half job as a employee.

When participants talked about drinking alcohol, it was something accessible they might do alongside their home duties. For example, a glass of wine while cooking dinner was almost ubiquitous. Drinking helped women manage busy days, and the quantity they drunk was not all the time something they’d the capability to be mindful of. As Caroline, a full-time employed, separated mother explained:

We don’t sit down and stand around just like the boys do drinking, with the beer cans round our feet. We drink a glass of wine while we cook tea […] while we’re sitting doing the children’ homework or arguing with them about, ‘where’s your sock? Where’s your library book?’ […] it makes it very easy to think ‘I’ve only had one glass of wine’ while you’ve had three or 4, since you’re not mindful of what you’re doing.

Many of the ladies we talked to also described feeling under-supported. This included at work, where they felt there wasn’t all the time enough flexibility to accommodate their parental obligations, and at home, where their partners weren’t all the time around to share the workload.

These stresses and pressures meant alcohol became a “prize” or “reward” for getting through the day. And when participants felt particularly stressed or under-supported (which was often), the reward of a drink at the tip of the day was all of the more vital. According to Penelope, a part-time employed, separated mother:

I believe that I reach out to drinking at the tip of the day because I’m really quite overwhelmed, or quite exhausted mentally and physically from the day.

What concerning the pandemic?

Things became much more complicated through the COVID pandemic. Women suddenly took on “triple shifts” – mothering, working and home-schooling – leaving many feeling much more overwhelmed. As Belle, a partnered mother who worked part time, said:

We were all working and attempting to home school, and it was just so awful […] so I suppose my girlfriends were going through that too, those with kids, they usually were all definitely drinking lots more.

Alcohol was classified as an “essential service” during lockdowns (bottle shops remained open while many other retail stores closed), and against this backdrop, participants felt it became much more normalised. They talked about seeing media depictions and promoting of alcohol, including online memes that made wine out as a solution to address the pandemic. Belle said:

Everyone would send one another little memes of ladies just drinking, and it definitely became […] a socially acceptable way of getting through that basically shit time.

Hobbies and exercise activities they’d previously turn to to alleviate stress were often restricted due to the pandemic. As such, alcohol became certainly one of the few things left. Many women we talked to were either drinking more, more often, or felt an increased desire to drink, especially through the height of the pandemic and once they were home-schooling.

To understand why and the way modern working moms drink alcohol, it’s also vital to think about how the alcohol industry targets women, often framing alcohol as a symbol of relief and leisure amongst busy working moms.

But it’s equally vital to understand being a contemporary working mother is hard, especially as traditional gender expectations of ladies as carers persist. Almost 60 years ago, the Rolling Stones sang about “mother’s little helper” in reference to women using substances to administer on a regular basis life.

Until we see changes in the best way women are supported at work and residential, alcohol may proceed being “mother’s little helper” for a lot of working moms.