This article draws on data collected through two focus groups and eight telephone interviews undertaken as part of an evaluation of a local Sure Start programme. Located in the context of New Labour's valorisation of parenting, and specifically mothering, the article explores the impact of Sure Start policy on discourses of motherhood in this setting. Policy is considered as a form of knowledge and knowing, and the article looks at how policy opens up particular spaces of intervention whilst simultaneously configuring particular identities, in this case "mothers". The authors suggest that Sure Start has mapped a terrain upon which mothers" identities have been positioned in various discourses: "responsibility", "respectability" or "fecklessness", for example. The article explores the contested and contradictory ways in which discourse and identity are played out in one Sure Start neighbourhood. (Contains 12 notes.)