Nancy Reddy in the author of many books, including the award-winning poetry collection Double Jinx. Her essays have appeared in Slate, Poets & Writers, and The Millions, among other publications. She teaches writing at Stockton University.
What’s the big idea?
American motherhood is haunted by outdated research suggesting that moms should be independent powerhouses of parenting. Outside of the U.S., despite many differences regarding raising children, the common thread is recognition and support of shared care. For the well-being of families, it is important for the parenting industry to acknowledge and address all caregivers.
Below, Nancy shares five key insights from her new book, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom. Listen to the audio version—read by Nancy herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Myths of motherhood set us up for heartache.
Before I had my first son, I had a clear image of who I’d be as a mother. I pictured myself sitting by the window in the nursery, the baby cuddled in a sling against my chest as I wrote. I wanted to believe that I’d be totally transformed by the automatic, selfless love of motherhood—and that I’d be able to continue my life as I’d planned. I found out that is an impossible trap.
I’d absorbed a whole lifetime of mythology around motherhood. I’d heard that having a baby was “like seeing your heart walking around outside your body,” and I’d understood that to mean that the love I’d feel for my child would be easy and instinctive. So, when I struggled with breastfeeding, sleep deprivation, and postpartum anxiety, I was sure it was my fault.
Myths of motherhood keep us lonely and isolated, sure that we’re the only ones who aren’t measuring up. These myths obscure the boundary between ordinary struggles and more significant postpartum challenges. They’re bad for maternal mental health. If we give up those myths of motherhood, we can turn our gaze instead to the particular people we’re raising and the meaning and magic to be found in that kind of care and love.
2. What makes a “good mom” has never been about what babies and mothers need.
Many present-day ideas about what makes a “good mom” originated in the work of midcentury psychologists and psychoanalysts who studied what babies need to become healthy adults and productive workers. During World War II, more than a million and a half mothers of young children worked as part of the war effort, and that work was made possible by state-supported daycares. But when the war ended, urgency about getting male veterans back to work, combined with growing Red Scare concerns about the consequences of shared childcare, meant sending women from factory floors to suburban homes. It’s no accident that the science of the day, which argued that what a baby needed most was his mother’s total and undivided attention, echoed those broader cultural concerns: sorry, ladies, science says you have to go home.
“It’s no accident that the science of the day echoed those broader cultural concerns.”
That history has consequences for mothers and families today. So much of what’s challenging about motherhood in America is a product of culture and economics: the absence of paid leave and affordable childcare, pressure on women to “do it all,” and a lack of community caregiving. From the 1950s to today, women have discovered that the actual work of mothering can be joyful and transformative. But the institution of motherhood, with its roots in an outdated and misogynist social order, often feels like a scam.
3. New moms need more support and less advice.
When Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care was published in 1946, its opening line became immediately famous: trust yourself, you know more than you think. The new moms of the Baby Boom loved Spock, and many women who wrote to him reported keeping one copy in the nursery, another in the kitchen, and a third in the glove box so they’d never be more than an arm’s length from his reassuring voice. Of course, there’s a paradox in his imperative to trust yourself: if you already know what to do, why do you need to buy a 500-page book about how to raise your kid?
We’re awash in a flood of parenting advice online. I’m not convinced that any of it has made us more competent caregivers, and it certainly hasn’t made us more confident. For the women in Spock’s day, they at least knew that every time they looked up nap or colic or first foods, they’d find the same answer. But today, there’s an infinite scroll of advice, experts, parenting hacks, and commenters weighing in.
More support and community would be helpful, not a list of parenting hacks or scripts to manage your kid’s tantrums or ease the bedtime drama. Many of us are more comfortable scrolling Instagram in search of a parenting expert than telling a friend or family member we’re struggling, but having practical help from someone who can hold the baby, fold the laundry, or just hang out would do a lot to make new parenthood manageable and even fun.
4. Bad ideas about moms are bad for dads, too.
As I’ve watched my husband and other men enter parenthood, I’ve realized that our bad ideas about mothers hurt fathers, too. If we think women can become “supermoms,” our expectations for fathers are comically low and insulting. The books and websites I turned to for parenting tips and tricks were all aimed at mothers. The parenting advice industry has exhausted and overwhelmed mothers while shortchanging fathers. There’s no clear destination online or in life for men aiming to learn how to become better fathers. This gap in advice (with women presumed to be the ones doing the research and then passing on their findings to their husbands) makes it harder to imagine parenting as a partnership.
“The parenting advice industry has exhausted and overwhelmed mothers while shortchanging fathers.”
The world I want for families is one in which all parents are assumed to be capable caregivers, and where we believe that caregiving is something anyone can learn. When we stop assuming there’s something magic about being a woman or getting pregnant that makes mothers the superior parent, that opens up more space for fathers and non-birthing parents to build loving relationships with kids.
5. Instead of one perfect mom, children need many “warm, friendly people.”
The researchers who have been most influential in shaping our ideas about what makes a “good mom” assumed a very specific kind of family shape: middle-class, straight, married couples where the woman was at home caring for the baby. As a result, their research focused solely on the relationship between the child and the primary caregiver—and tended to ignore anyone else who might be helping.
In contrast, when anthropologists study childhood around the world, they find an incredible amount of variation in how children are raised. The one commonality is shared care or alloparenting, which can mean everything from aunts, grandparents, and older siblings helping out to playdates among neighbors and daycare centers. Families around the world, from the Philippines to Congo to Sweden, raise children in strikingly different ways, but in basically none of them does the mother do the work alone. As anthropologist Margaret Mead put it, what children need most is not one perfect mom but the care of “many warm, friendly people.”
To listen to the audio version read by author Nancy Reddy, download the Next Big Idea App today:
