This article attempts to problematize the notion of children’s voices by focusing on one of its more problematic features, namely, silence. It argues that far from being absences or lack of data, children’s silences are pregnant with meaning and a constitutive feature of their voices; childhood researchers who need to account for children’s voices must therefore attend to their silences rather than merely their voiced utterances. Drawing on poststructuralist critiques of voice, this article illustrates the value of taking children’s silences seriously by situating them within the proper interactional, institutional, and discursive contexts which give rise to them.

This article focuses on examining and understanding the way motherhood and babyhood are constituted in the midst of cultural practice and particularly though consumption as a fundamental and constitutive element of modern-day definitions and understandings of motherhood and babyhood. More specifically, the article focuses on how middle-class first-time (to be) Greek Cypriot mothers acquire a sense of motherhood and simultaneously construct notions of babyhood as their pregnancies unfold; how the experience of pregnancy is lived and perceived by expectant mothers as a state of anxiety and a condition of risk; and, finally, how all these processes are mediated by consumption broadly conceived. Findings of this qualitative study show that the experience of pregnancy for these women was associated with feelings of acute anxiety for the amelioration of which they engaged in a variety of consumptive practices, especially medically related, which served to further institute consumption as a constitutive element of ‘motherhood proper’.