Between the Case and the Cradle: A Feminist Phenomenological Study of Professional Knowledge and Motherhood among Chilean Social Workers

Social workers are trained to observe, analyze, and intervene in family systems, and many are also mothers raising children of their own. This study examines how professional formation in social work shapes the maternal practices, self-evaluations, and epistemic positions of women who are trained to analyze family life and are also mothers living inside it. Drawing on a feminist phenomenological design, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 women social workers in active practice in Chile. Thematic analysis guided by an intersectional feminist framework revealed three interconnected dimensions: an active, reflexive negotiation with inherited parenting patterns; the migration of professional knowledge into embodied maternal practice, what we term embodied professional reflexivity; and the structural conditions of gender and labor that frame both. Together, these dimensions constitute a dual epistemic position: occupying simultaneously the standpoint of the professional who knows about families and the person who inhabits familial life. Professional formation operates as a biographical disposition that migrates beyond the professional domain into the experience of motherhood. Findings contribute to scholarship on intergenerational transmission of parenting, professional reflexivity, and feminist analyses of motherhood in care professions in Latin America, with implications for social work education, supervision, and practice.