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“In thinking about emotional reproduction, we should also consider the material sites where care takes place. Working-class sociality has historically not been confined to the privatised home to the same extent as bourgeois emotional reproduction. But forms of sociality that extend beyond the domestic space are constantly under threat.”

“When we see love as the will to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love”

“Trust is the heartbeat of genuine love. And we trust that the attention our partners give friends, or vice versa, does not take any- thing away from us-we are not diminished. What we learn through experience is that our capacity to establish deep and profound connections in friendship strengthens all our intimate bonds.”

“Committed love relationships are far more likely to become codependent when we cut off all our ties with friends to give these bonds we consider primary our exclusive attention. I have felt especially devastated when close friends who were single fell in love and simultaneously fell away from our friendship.”

“Many of us learn as children that friendship should never be seen as just as important as family ties. However, friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community. Learning to love in friendships empowers us in ways that enable us to bring this love to other interactions with family or with romantic bonds.”

“The extended family is a good place to learn the power of community. However, it can only become a community if there is honest communication between the individuals in it. Dysfunctional extended families, like smaller nuclear family units, are usually characterized by muddied communication. Keeping family secrets often makes it impossible for extended groups to build community.”

“The privatized patriarchal nuclear family is still a fairly recent form of social organization in the world. Most world citizens do not have, and will never have, the material resources to live in small units segregated from larger family communities. ”

“By encouraging the segregation of nuclear families from the extended family, women were forced to become more dependent on an individual man, and children more dependent on an individual woman. It is this dependency that became, and is, the breeding ground for abuses of power.”

“Capitalism and patriarchy together, as structures of domination, have worked overtime to undermine and destroy this larger unit of extended kin. Replacing the family community with a more privatized small autocratic unit helped increase alienation and made abuses of power more possible. It gave absolute rule to the father, and secondary rule over children to the mother.”

“Much of the talk about "family values" in our society highlights the nuclear family, one that is made up of mother, father, and preferably only one or two children. In the United States this unit is presented as the primary and preferable organization for the parenting of children, one that will ensure everyone's optimal well-being. Of course, this is a fantasy image of family.”

“Peck defines community as the coming together of a group of individuals "who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to 'rejoice together, mourn together,' and to 'delight in each other, and make other's conditions our own." We are all born into the world of community.”

“Communities sustain life — not nuclear families, or the "couple," and certainly not the rugged individualist. There is no better place to learn the art of loving than in community. M. Scott Peck begins his book The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace with the profound declaration: "In and through community lies the salvation of the world." ”

“While this can create collectivities constituted against dominant forms of reproduction and ideology, it can also lead to increased emotional depletion and strain on those who are made responsible for healing the emotional harms caused by a hostile society. This is especially the case when emotional reproduction is individualised and possibilities for more collective responses to emotional harm are reduced.”

“Community cannot take root in a divided life. Long before community assumes external shape and form, it must be present as a seed in the undivided self: only as we are in communion with ourselves can we find community with others.” —Parker Palmer

“Groups that face social marginalisation also have to engage in more compensatory types of emotional reproduction oriented towards healing the harms of oppression. The emotional costs of racism, homophobia, and transphobia can be severe, and marginalised people often seek to address these harms within their own communities.”

“The family and the community must provide some emotional satisfaction for those whose work conditions are the opposite of satisfactory. While women have been charged with a lot of waged and unwaged work, they often have to do some work of creating the home as an apparent site of non-work, of leisure and relaxation, obscuring their own labour in the domestic sphere.”

“Emotional reproduction is not just oriented towards the suppression of bad feeling. It is also about creating an emotional sphere outside of waged work—a site supposedly free from work discipline. Emotional reproduction has a compensatory function. It is not only about creating emotional discipline but also about creating zones that are seemingly outside of emotional regulation... in the workplace.”

“Capacities for management of negative emotions, both one's own and those of others, are increasingly central working-class jobs in the service economy. This requires a high level of self-control—the ability to keep smiling even while facing emotional abuse. This regulation of feeling creates the need for a space outside of work where people do not need to perform the same emotional deference as ... at work.”

“But since Hochschild wrote The Managed Heart, more and more working-class people are employed in service occupations characterised by strict regulation of emotional expression. The demand for the emotional style of discipline and deference remains central for working-class jobs. Working-class children may therefore need to learn discipline and emotional control rather than emotional self-expression.”

“According to Hochschild, working-class parents are more likely to emphasise obedience and discipline. She explains this by the fact that working-class people are more likely to work with things than with people, and therefore they do not need to learn skills of emotion management and social interaction in the same way as middle- and upper-class people.”

“The whole project of parenting is about educating that will in the right direction, and teaching the child to desire class reproduction. The child is taught to want the right kind of life — including a career, a house, and a family that is often very similar to what their parents themselves have or aspire to.”

“Working-class and racialised women were left out of the glorified account of motherhood. These women supposedly do not perform the right kind of class transmission to ensure the reproduction of the white bourgeois nation. Their work is therefore seen as unskilled, and is subjected to various forms of control and stigma.”

“white bourgeois women took on the spiritual and emotional guidance of men and children. This spiritual work has always been more highly valued. It contributes to the ambiguous status of motherhood, which is simultaneously devalued and glorified. The spiritual duty of mothers has been used as a way of claiming rights and status for white bourgeois women, as a reward for their work of raising virtuous citizens.”

“Sharon Hays writes that the 19th century ideal of white bourgeois motherhood was centred around raising virtuous future citizens of the nation. The bourgeois nation was also a white nation, linking the spiritual reproduction of children to racial ideals... and classed division of labour within social reproduction, where black, brown, working-class, and immigrant women were relegated to menial tasks...”

“White bourgeois mothering in particular involves demands for 'spiritual' work... moral guidance and education of the child's needs and desires. Dorothy Roberts writes that white women's bonds with their children are seen as unique and exclusive even when the children spend more time with a nanny or at daycare. This stems from an understanding of femininity and family as our haven in the heartless world of capital.”

“Parents are made to invest more and more time in the emotional guidance of children as well as pay for expensive services that will educate their child to be able to compete on the job market. Intensive mothering is a way of translating the logic of the market within the family. ”

“middle-class parents prime their children for high-status professions by focusing on developing a capacity for decision-making. Middle- and upper-class parenting also involves encouraging children to experience themselves as affective individuals with their own unique emotional lives. This prepares children for success in their future careers, ensuring the preservation or improvement of the family's class advantage”

“While we tend to associate reproductive work with the reproduction of people, class distinctions themselves need to be continually reproduced. The emotional conditioning of children is a fundamental aspect of reproducing capitalist class relations. Bourgeois mothering is responsive to the naturalised and individualised emotional needs of children, and therefore teaches them that those needs are important.”

“Emotional reproduction in childhood is constructed as the foundation of successful reproduction more broadly. Social problems are blamed on the supposed failure of women to love their children enough.”

“literature aimed at mothers which emphasised the need for a primary caregiver. Children's emotional needs were thus constructed in a way that meant only one person could satisfy them. Even with the rise of 'working mothers' and daycare centres, where more people were involved in childcare, this notion of individualised parenting was retained or even intensified. Mothers are constructed as primary parents...”