As I sat working in a cafe in South Ken, this group of four mothers and six boys came in. The boys seemed to be eight or nine years old. Maybe it's because I'm the mother of two boys....but I love mother/son outings and was drawn to ask the "mums" if I could photograph them all. I explained that I was a social researcher from New York City who studies childhood and motherhood (obviously I'm not a photographer), in London doing a little fieldwork.

"We've failed!" one of the mothers joked right away. It was very funny — but it's what most mothers tell me when I tell them what I do. The sense that we're not doing a good enough job dogs mothers in the industrialized West. This is in part because we mother largely in isolation, without the kind of broad social support that both childhood and motherhood entailed for much of our history and evolutionary pre-history, when we were surrounded by kin and the kindly disposed, who did just about anything, including nursing our babies, to help out. It's also because our relative affluence affords us so many options, choices and hence obligations and stresses in the childrearing department. Which school, vegetables, stroller or tutor to choose? The anxiety that we may fail our kids is enormous, and the weight of potential judgment — the idea that someone might say, "You're a bad mother" — keeps many of us awake at night, and on tenderhooks when we're out with our kids in public.

It was nice to see these London mums having an easy moment together, and all the boys having fun drawing and talking at their end. "It was the waiter's idea to seat the boys at their own table!" another one of the women was quick to point out to me, and we all laughed. In the West, unlike the rest of the world, we tend to sequester children in school, in a children's world, at a children's table, in children's clothing. Adults have their sphere, kids have theirs. Other places worldwide, children are just there, part of the social fabric and a fact of everyday life. There was a sense here that the mothers were very connected to their kids, separate for the moment, but close in every way.