Parental emotional well-being is likely to play an important, yet still overlooked, role in heritage language transmission. This study examines how dominant Lithuanian cultural motherhood norms, or motherhood construct, add to maternal guilt in cases of perceived failure to pass on Lithuanian as the heritage language (LHL). Five semi-structured in-depth interviews with Lithuanian migrant mothers residing in Europe were analysed. Mothers were determined to transmit LHL to their children and actively sought to do so, but in their view, they were unsuccessful and felt desperate. Drawing on the critical motherhood theory, the article demonstrates how the strong Lithuanian sociocultural expectation, which requires mothers to transmit the Lithuanian language to their children rather unproblematically, can induce guilt and hinder LHL language transmission.
