ONCE a year, on one Sunday, persons worldwide join hands to celebrate and revere mothers in a grandiose way. And today’s that day- Mother’s Day.

Motherhood involves those acts of caring and nurturing for one’s children and providing guidance to help them develop and navigate a sometimes complicated world.

In carrying out these functions, mothers have their work cut out for them — more so as Caribbean women. The plantation life out of which the population has grown, shaped the way much (if not our entire) society, functions.

In 1949, G.P. Murdok (1949) posited that the ideal family structure was the nuclear family. This family type has the mother and the father, along with the children in the household and more often than not, the father is seen as the head of the household. This family structure has been seen as ideal, since it was said to be able to fulfil the functions of reproduction, satisfaction, economic cooperation, and socialisation — all necessary for the group (the family) to remain functional in society.

Interestingly, Murdok based his claims on consideration of the developed world and did not take into consideration the intricacies that have arisen out of varying experiences- i.e., the plantation system in our case.

The first thing that should be understood is that, in the Caribbean, the role of the father in the family has been more marginal. That isn’t to diminish the role of fathers in any way, but just to acknowledge that because of plantation experiences, male absenteeism has been something that emerged. And what this has done is prompt the women to function in their traditional roles (caregivers and nurturers) and non-traditional roles (breadwinners).

On the female side, women face the task of fewer job opportunities due to their constriction to certain jobs (largely in providing services and clerical and secretarial work); unequal pay and the unequal distribution of power, which gives rise to much violence in the household. Generally, also, women have traditionally learned that they must revere and be subservient to their husbands. There are certain prejudices they have had to accept as the gospel.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)’s Situation Analysis on Women and Children in Guyana (2016), noted: “A mix of social norms and social and cultural practices have been identified as the main factors that influence violence against women.”

The study leaned on sociological perspectives to further break this down and advanced that gender-based violence is caused at the individual level — which is largely driven by gender inequality; childhood experiences and toxic masculinity, and at the social level — which is shaped by the country’s history and how tenets of religion and culture shape morals, practices and attitudes. There are pathological studies, conducted by Frank Fraziers on the lower-class African family, that highlight another dimension that the matrifocal family structure has to contend with is poverty.

I read recently that when a woman has been taught her entire life that she must be this way, she is likely to accept that role. While this behaviour can be easily passed to the children through socialisation in the family, a thing for mothers is that they always strive to ensure that their children lead better lives than them.

I might be far from a position of experience, but what I can say is that I think that the role of a mother is much more than taking care of the household, and teaching children how to take care of themselves. Being a mother means you are inherently a role model for your children and maybe even to the people around.

Even in the face of lower access to jobs, the pervasiveness of limited education and poverty, Caribbean mothers have always striven to ensure their children would have a better life than them. And in my opinion, this just spotlights how critical mothers are to the development of human capital.

Every year, even if it is just for one day of the year, we will read about the mothers working to make ends meet, while being the best role models for their children. But I think what is important too, is that we recognise what hoops our mothers in the Caribbean have to jump through and make things work. In our context, particularly, I cannot emphasise just how important the role of the mother is.