This article draws on 18 months of residential fieldwork in South Manchester, England. It looks at mothers as targets of state intervention, how they deal with expertise and psy-knowledge. It shows the politics of mothering as everyday resistance and as a genealogy of subjectification. Specifically, it analyses how mothers negotiate "psy-knowledge" and anxieties coming from disciplines and professionals, with their own mundane everyday practices and expertise. It looks at anxieties over parenting styles and childrearing as source of social problems. It shows how meanings about mothering are socially negotiated, reproduced, and sometimes resisted. It explores some ways in which mothering practices resist and overlap with discourses and practices derived from established and legitimized "psy-knowledge," highlighting what may be considered indigenous knowledge.