Right after I gave birth to my girls and we got into somewhat of a routine, it was time for me to return to work. Yes, it’s working from home but my job at the time still included about 10-15% travel. I was planning on tampering off pumping and ending just in time for my first work conference; about 2 months away. I was explaining my travel plans to my mother (who was living with us) and told her that my MIL and SIL were also coming up during that time to help with the babies. She said, “I thought you said you weren’t going to be doing that [traveling for work] anymore. Who’s going to take care of them when you’re gone?”
I was super confused. I had NEVER said that I was going to stop work travel. It was one of the things I loved about my job. In fact, my mother was confused as to why I was even going back to work at all. Keep in mind, I was only going to be gone for 4 days.
First of all, homie’s got bills to pay including student loan debt. Second and this is where I dug deep, the babies have an entire second human who is able to care for them: their father (along with three other people I had already recruited). Of course, she was going to give me the typical he’s-the-one-who-has-to-work spiel, but I hit right back with this:
“I could be a sh*t mom and abandon my kids altogether and I still wouldn’t worry about them because Troy is an amazing father. If he needed to, he would be able to figure it out on his own and be able to raise them just fine without me. That’s how much confidence I have in him.”
She didn’t take too well to that, but having that conversation really made me double down that I would never be the full default parent. That I would reject any societal expectation of a mom because they are in fact bias and full of sh*t.
Enter The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom by Nancy Reddy. I received an Advance Reader Copy of this book from NetGalley.
The blurb: When Nancy Reddy had her first child, she found herself suddenly confronted with the ideal of a perfect mother―a woman who was constantly available, endlessly patient, and immediately invested in her child to the exclusion of all else. Reddy had been raised by a single working mother, considered herself a feminist, and was well on her way to a PhD. Why did doing motherhood “right” feel so wrong?
For answers, Reddy turned to the mid-20th century social scientists and psychologists whose work still forms the basis of so much of what we believe about parenting. It seems ludicrous to imagine modern moms taking advice from midcentury researchers. Yet, their bad ideas about so-called “good” motherhood have seeped so pervasively into our cultural norms.
Luckily, I got an ebook for this review and I’ve got a lot of highlights to share as well as these takeaways:
“I believed that I could handle any challenge if I worked hard enough, read the right books, consulted the experts and followed their advice. This was one of the myths I had absorbed from the mommy blogs and the parenting advice books I consumed alongside my prenatal vitamins and greens throughout my pregnancy: that motherhood was an individual pursuit at which I could excel, in the same way that I had excelled in school, in my chosen profession of academia, in the creation of a picture-perfect life for myself—one in which I believed a child would fit perfectly, by dint of my careful planning and preparation.”
Who comes up with this crap?
Reddy explores the modern concept of attachment parenting through the scientific researchers Bowlby, Harlow, Ainsworth, Spock, and Margaret Mead. Yes, there are a lot of monkeys. Woven throughout is Reddy’s own experience as a newborn mother and the parallels of her own life as an academic.
In the book’s introduction, Reddy lays out her theory that many of the family-centered ideologies that we’ve adopted as a society have developed in order to knock women down a peg and center them back into the home. In this book, we’re particularly in the Post-WWII era of parenting. The country has men overseas, women in vital jobs, and subsidized daycare to make it all possible. So what happened when the men came back?
At the same time, Attachment Theory becomes mainstream. Framed as a revolutionary new way of parenting to make sure no one becomes a Communist, Attachment Theory and “science” says that not only does the mother play a vital role in a child’s development, but ONLY the mother is responsible for a child’s outcome and success. This puts an immense amount of pressure on moms to go back to the kitchen and make raising kids their ONLY priority. And not only that, it should be their ONLY source of happiness. I particularly scoffed when it was mentioned that women should only attend college so that their knowledge could be passed to their sons to help them be more interesting.
“In other words, our expectations of the ‘good mother’ have tended to expand at just the moment when women began to take up space formerly granted to men.”
“A mother whose baby spends more than twenty hours a week in ‘substitute care,’ Karen warns, is ‘running a serious risk of his becoming anxiously attached’. It’s not clear why twenty hours is the magic number used by that study, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s an amount that might allow a woman to keep her little part-time job, enough to earn some pocket money, but not so much that she might actually be competing with men for full-time employment.”
In many ways, we can see it happing now. We’ve reached a point where there are more women than men attending college overall, and women are waiting longer and longer to get married and have children. They have higher expectations of the men they will chose as partners. How is this countered? Trad-wife culture. Cancelling women’s reproductive rights. Offering cash incentives for women having children. A special medal for having 6+ kids… OMFG…
Do as I say, not as I do
Reddy is quick to point out that the main researchers behind Attachment Theory were in fact terrible parents themselves. Most of the research and experiments they conducted were based on pre-existing biases on how families should be run. Data was cherry-picked to corroborate their findings, and anything that ran against these conclusions was rejected. Sample audiences were intentionally kept small and homogenous. No men or extended family were EVER included in the data. No human mothers were EVER asked for input, even though the ground-breaking cloth mother experiment was comprised of only observed monkey behavior.
Bowlby and Harlow in particular were fairly absent fathers, leaving the parenting and child-rearing completely to their wives while they were in a completely different city researching. Would you really take mothering advice from men who knew absolutely nothing about actual parenting?
Personally, knowing this makes me feel extremely justified throwing “you should” and “you need to” out the window.
Reddy compares/contrasts these researchers to Dr. Spock as well as Margaret Mead, who famously studied community child-rearing and later created a co-op family with her close colleagues. Mead very clearly shows the benefits of having multiple kids and multiple trusted adults in the same household. Spock, while still centering much of the parenting duties to the mother, later added the help of men and extended families to his advice. It might’ve been a little late in the game, but the author does commend him for being flexible enough to hear out actual mothers and consider changing times.
P.S. Did you know Dr. Spock tried for a third-party presidential bid?
It’s Not Binary
Just because women are anatomically equipped to give birth, that doesn’t make it easy. It’s still painful, life-threatening, and not everything about it is enjoyable. Similar to parenting, just because you have a baby doesn’t mean you are automatically equipped to raise it. It takes work, patience, practice, and not everything about that is enjoyable either.
“If I am a good mom, then I should like this.”
“If I am struggling, then I guess I am a bad mom.”
“If I don’t like this, then I am a bad mom.”
Liking parenting and being a good parent are not mutually inclusive. None of these statements are that simple, yet they somehow worm their way into our minds when we are struggling.
“It sometimes feels like every generation of mothers from Betty Friedan and Adrienne Rich on has been learning anew that the story we’ve been sold about the magical power of a mother’s love is largely a way to draft us into an enormous amount of unpaid and undervalued labor.”
“That was what it meant to me, then, to be a feminist and a mother: to be the competent and independent one, the one doing all the work. This was the version of second-wave feminism I’d inherited from my mother. I didn’t need a man. I’d absorbed that I could have it all as long as I was willing to do it all myself. And also: the baby had been my idea. I wasn’t sure I was allowed to ask for help.”
Other little gems about daycare that I liked:
“But what often feels lost in all this is the idea that daycare isn’t a necessary evil but an incredible benefit to children and families, a place where kids are taught and loved by people beyond their family, where they learn to interact with other kids and practice new skills. When we see daycare as a makeshift solution to the problem of a mother who insists on working, we end up with the patchy, inadequate marketplace of too-expensive options that plague us today.”
“The next time you’re inclined to worry if sending your baby to daycare will doom him to a life of insecure attachment or wonder if your mother’s occasional inattention in your childhood turned you into an avoidant mess, remember that those labels are undergirded with all the scientific precision of a middle-schooler’s science fair project.”
The book concludes with Reddy’s second pregnancy and child, which goes much smoother than her first. In hindsight, she realized that she did in fact become the “together mom” that she’d initially imagined.
Although it might not look how she imagined, or happened as quickly as she imagined, she realizes that so much of her anxiety and struggle came from the comparison from the mainstream image of how pregnancy and motherhood is “supposed to be” and the unpreparedness for how the first year of parenting actually is. It’s not an easy pill to swallow and more than one mom I’ve known has gone through their “why didn’t anybody tell me” phase.
I did enjoy this book, and it’s definitely a f***-the-patriarchy move; analyzing out-of-date research and blowing all types of holes in it, seeing how flawed and biased it was to begin with.
If you are a new parent or parent-to-be reading this book (because dads should 100% be reading parenting books, too), I hope it gives you a much needed sigh of relief and the confidence to parent without judgement or peer pressure from ghosts of the past.
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