"Since the early 2000s, numerous family policy interventions have aimed at improving the reconciliation of work and family life in Germany. However, low-income women often face particular challenges in this regard, which the new measures hardly seem to take into account. This study therefore explores the question of what subjective and objective possibilities these women see for combining work and motherhood. It is based on biographical, guideline-supported interviews with six women from workers' milieus of different generations. The theoretical and methodological framework of the study is formed by critical psychology in Holzkamp's sense, and the interviews were evaluated with the developmental figure of critical psychology. The results show that the six women interviewed find ways and means to deal with the contradictory demands on them as mothers and class subjects, which can hardly be met in their entirety. The focus is on the negotiations along the following aspects, which proved to be central in the evaluation of the interviews: The relationship to (bourgeois) norms of the "good mother"; the mental relationship to the sociality of one's own problem situation; the awareness of the unstable preconditions of the (modernized) breadwinner model; and the care and maintenance of one's own social relationships (outside the partnership). These aspects are highlighted and discussed in relation to the current research situation. "

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