Supporting mothers to break down barriers to exercise
Understanding the challenges of physical activity for mothers of pre-school children – supporting better relationships through small steps. The Bristol Girls Can social marketing project.
Motherhood and physical activity
Everybody knows that an individual’s free time is dramatically reduced by parenthood, but research from public health has shown that for mothers, physical activity is one of the first things to go. Not only that, evidence shows that this group is generally less active than fathers and their physical activity tends to be less vigorous, structured and planned. Being too time-poor for exercise and having the right kinds of support in place is particularly an issue for mothers from lower socio-economic backgrounds. The impact of lower activity levels can be huge on a woman’s mental and physical health. But it can also have an unexpected effect on the development of healthy physical activity patterns in their children.
Bristol Girls Can
The Bristol Girls Can social marketing project, funded by Sport England is managed by Claire Nicholls at Bristol City Council. It aims to break down barriers to exercise and inspire more women to get active. The project was based on rigorous qualitative research, including that by Dr Fiona Spotswood, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Bristol Business School.
Dr Fiona Spotswood, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Bristol Business School.
Dr Fiona Spotswood, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Bristol Business School.
The research
Dr Spotswood’s research took a practice theory approach, unlike most public health research, which tends to take an individual perspective. This research focused on the way, for mothers, physical activity has to compete with everyday mothering routines that are dominated by caring and attentive love. The first set of findings, published in Sociology of Health and Illness, focused on timetables that dominate mothering, exploring how physical activity often gets ‘pushed out’ of everyday life for mothers. The study found that mothering schedules were affected by a wide array of other considerations including their partner’s work and travel, childcare settings, shop opening times and even bus timetables. There are also strong conventions dictating how mothers feel their time should be spent.
The second set of findings focus on the capabilities mothers need to be able to make the most of the opportunities for leisure time physical activity that are on offer. Dr Spotswood explained “A whole number of factors need to be in place for mothers to take part in physical activity. They need to have the right support, the right amount of time, the right kind of time, and they need to have the right energy to take part. Those things are quite complicated and often lacking for mothers with pre-school children living in the least affluent parts of the city.”
The third set of findings focus on how important mother’s bodies are in shaping their relationship with exercise. Mothers compared their lived experience of a sensing, suffering body with cultural ideals of exercise that are dominated by images of effortlessness, thinness, and fitness. Dr Spotswood explained, “The emphasis on bodies came through all the interviews we conducted. The participants pitted their own bodies against an imaginary ‘exercise body’ that was successful, disciplined, and effortless. Clearly, there was a significant conflict in these mothers’ relationship to exercise as an imagined activity and so exercise was emotional and even upsetting.”
Dr Spotswood’s research was all about understanding and unpicking the relationship between mothers and exercise, in order to drive thinking about the role of marketing in helping support mothers to take part. Dr Spotswood’s research found that “mothers overwhelmingly wanted to see women that represented or looked like them in promotional imagery, rather than fitness models. A focus on fun or small steps within the messaging would help alleviate the pressure they felt to take part. And they wanted to feel part of a community to help support them and help build their confidence.”
The messaging
Together, these findings highlighted the kinds of messaging that would resonate with the target audience of mothers in deprived areas of Bristol and the kinds of physical activity sessions that would appeal. This shaped the resulting social marketing programme developed by the Bristol Girls Can campaign. The project team devised a programme of marketing communications and new services specifically designed to support women who have a poor relationship with physical activity, low body esteem and other barriers to participation including access and cost.
Project manager Claire Nicholls from the Communities and Public Health Team at Bristol City Council told us “Fiona’s research was crucial for this campaign, as it fed into the wider marketing campaign. The social media campaign had a reach of over 100,000 and it consisted of sharing the women’s stories to targeted groups in the communities that we were trying to reach. And their stories and images were created into billboards, bus shelters and posters that were then circulated and shared in those areas with the most health inequalities. This was beneficial because it meant the people that appeared in the campaign could be seen locally by people they knew, and this was hugely successful.”
The campaign
The results of the research also shaped the way the Bristol Girls Can campaign worked with children’s centres. The study found many mothers had a very strong, trusting relationship with children’s centres and their staff which led to the co-creation of activities such as buggy walks, boogie disco sessions and toddler yoga. Activities were designed so that mums could take part in them during their normal routine that already included spending time in the children’s centres in their community.
The Bristol Girls Can website has been developed to meet the needs of the community as defined in Dr Spotswood’s research. It includes details of their #SmallSteps campaign, the inspiring stories of women in the community who have made moves to increase their physical activity, and an activity guide for women that want to get involved. A Facebook page was also set up as a space for women to share stories and support it each other to exercise, which now has over 3,900 thousand followers. The campaign has seen huge success in supporting women to make a change and get moving.
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