9 Roles and Responsibilities of Mothers in the Family - Bscholarly (2024)

Roles of Mothers in the Family: A mother is very dear to the family as she plays a very essential role, especially in the lives of her children. This is a reason why children often love their mothers and hold them more to heart than their fathers.

In this article, we shall consider the essential roles which a mother plays in the Family.

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Conceptual Clarification

Role: Role is the function of a person. In this context, role refers to the duties and responsibilities of a Mother in the family.

Mother: A mother is a female parent. A mother in this context does not refer to a single mother, that’s a mother living alone with her child. But we are referring to a mother who is married and living together with her family.

Family: A Family may be a nuclear or extended family. However, in this article, we are only concerned with the nuclear family which is a group consisting of Father, Mother, and their Children.

Thus, let’s examine the role of a mother in the family.

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Roles and responsibilities of a Mother In The Family

The following are the duties and responsibilities of a mother in the family:

1. Childbearing: Childbearing is the primary and sole responsibility of a mother, as she is the only one who can bear a child.

Childbearing is a very essential responsibility because, without its fulfillment, we won’t have a proper family setting of Father, Mother, and Children.

2. Catering for the children: Upon Childbearing, it is the responsibility of the mother to cater to such a child. She is solely responsible for breastfeeding that Child, and also as the child grows she still exercises the responsibility of taking care of the child, carrying the child, and feeding the child. The same responsibility is still applicable to a mother when she has more than one Child.

3. Catering: While it is the responsibility of a mother to cater for her child as expatiated above, it is also her traditional duty to do catering for the family. Catering in this instance means cooking food, buying foodstuffs, baking snacks, and satisfying the stomach of members of the family.

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4. Laundry: This is another traditional responsibility and role of a mother in a family, as from time immemorial it is the mother that does the laundry, especially that for her children.

Thus, she is responsible for washing the clothes of her children, spreading them, arranging them into their drawers, and ironing them as the case may be.

5. House Chores: Completing house chores has been the traditional role of a mother in the family, hence the emanation of the concept of Housewife.

A Housewife is a woman whose occupation is caring for her family, house affairs, and doing the house chores. This means that in such a family where the mother is a housewife, while the Husband goes to work, the mother will stay at home doing the house chores. These chores include but are not limited to: Sweeping the house, cooking, washing plates, fetching water, cleaning the house, and washing clothes.

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6. Teaching the children: This is an important role of a mother in the family. In the process of nurturing the Children, the mother ought to teach her children how to behave properly, how to be responsible and how to indulge in all aforementioned house chores, from cooking, to how to wash their clothes, to how to wash their plates, amongst others.

7. Keeping the Family Together: With the uprising in divorce cases and judicial separation all over the world, the role of a mother has stepped up as she can now help bring unity and keep the family together through bonding with her children, submitting to her husband, and Childbearing. Childbearing is a very essential tool of curbing divorce and keeping the family together, as most often the husband will have a double mind with respect to the welfare of their children if there will be a separation, and because of these Children, he will remain committed to the marriage.

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8. Caring: In most instances, a Mother is caring. Hence, it is usually her responsibility to exercise care not just for her children, but for guests in the house. That’s why most often when a Family receives a visitor; it is usually the mother who runs around gathering refreshments and food which such visitor will consume.

9. Emotional bond: The mother is usually close to her child. Hence, she builds a strong emotional bond with such Child and it is, therefore, her duty to inculcate that Child with value, moral principles, and nurture them properly into their environment.

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It is on this note that we can conclusively say that the role of a Mother in a family cannot be overemphasized. The mother is like the livewire of the family, and as such, it is very difficult for a family to cope without a mother, especially for the young children.

This essentiality of a mother to a family as elaborated above is the reason mothers are cherished, loved and Mother’s day is occasionally celebrated to appreciate the input of mothers to the Family.