The paper examines the concept of “natural mothering” in the twentieth century, which suggests that maternal behavior in humans, although shaped by society and culture, is fundamentally instinctive and biologically-driven. The authors trace the origin of this concept to the studies of “imprinting” by Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz in the 1940s. They follow the development of this idea in the ‘attachment theory’ by the British psychologist John Bowlby in the 1960s and further to the theory of “mother-infant bonding” introduced by American pediatricians Marshall H. Klaus and John Kennell in the 1970s. Finally, the paper looks at a particular transformation of this concept in the modern practices of “natural” or “attachment” parenting, which became increasingly popular among parents around the globe in the 1990s and 2000s, shaping the common-sense knowledge about what constitutes good mothering.