When the Ghosts Live in the Nursery: Postpartum Depression and the Grandmother‐Mother‐Baby Triad in Luzhou, China
Open accessAbstract
In Luzhou, China, where grandmothers often serve as primary caregivers for infants, the past and the future haunt new mothers suffering from postpartum depression. In this article, I draw upon longitudinal interviews conducted with 10 families in Luzhou as part of a larger multisited ethnography of postpartum depression and anxiety. I argue that the grandmother‐mother‐baby triad model of infant care in interior urban China accentuates the pain of depressed postpartum mothers by making it difficult for them to rid their homes of the ghosts of past traumas and lost futures. Mothers resent and fear grandmothers even as they rely on them to care for their babies. Memories of trauma, perceived displacement by the grandmother as the mother figure for their babies, and lack of control over their households and children characterize depressed postpartum mothers’ experiences. Mothers primarily blame their mothers‐in‐law for their unhappiness even as they depend on themselves to “self‐adjust.”
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Scholarship on motherhood generally neglects the grandmother's influence on how women mother.
“Scholarship on motherhood generally suffers from a lacuna-that of the grandmother (Mason, 2020).”
From Mothers and grandmothers: <scp>Rethinking</scp> motherhood in the context of intergenerational caregiving (2025) · cites this paper as Mason, 2020
In the Abstract (page unavailable), Mason contrasts psychological literature on the mother-baby dyad with a grandmother-mother-baby triad. The section “The Mother-Baby Dyad and the Grandmother-Mother-Baby Triad” says the dyad did not reflect the Luzhou mothers’ realities. This supports a gap in that particular framework, but not the broader claim that scholarship on motherhood generally neglects grandmothers. (LLM, conf=0.84)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredA central assumption in much motherhood scholarship is that the mother is the primary caregiver for the child(ren).
“A central assumption in much scholarship on mothering and motherhood is that the mother (a woman) is the primary caregiver for the child(ren) (Budds, 2021;Mason, 2020).”
From Mothers and grandmothers: <scp>Rethinking</scp> motherhood in the context of intergenerational caregiving (2025) · cites this paper as Mason, 2020
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Hanser, A., & Zhang, Y. (2025) · Journal of Marriage and Family · doi:10.1111/jomf.13070 · Cited by 7 · see citing works
- Authors
- Mason, K. A.
- Affiliations
- Brown University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Mason, Katherine A.
- ORCID
- Mason, Katherine A.
- Venue
- Ethos
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2020-06
- Volume
- 48
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 149-170
- ISSN
- 0091-2131 (ISSN-L)
- 1548-1352
- PMC
- PMC8896502
- OpenAlex
- W3087061651
- Cited by
- 11
- References
- 8
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 2 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 0.75
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Ethos (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (P2C HD041020)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Maternal Mental Health During Pregnancy and Postpartum
- Social Sciences › Demography › Family Dynamics and Relationships
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Homicide, Infanticide, and Child Abuse
- Keywords
- postpartum depression, grandmother, intergenerational caregiving, mother-in-law relationships, infant care, traumatic memory, displacement, household control, self-adjustment, postpartum anxiety, Luzhou
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