What's a "Good Mother" Anyway?
We've spent too many years trying to be "good" parents and feeling shame when we fall short
D.C. people, Nancy Reddy and I are going to be in conversation at Wonderland Books in Bethesda on Tuesday, April 8th at 7PM to talk about these myths and what it’s like to be stuck under the thumb of some bad assumptions and poorly done research that has lasted for decades. We will be joined by one of my favorite people in the postpartum support space, Mikah Goldman Berg, of Postpartum Support International, who can talk about the way such myths of what motherhood should be have some devastating consequences for the parents who feel they fall short, and Andrea Kleinbard of the DC Chamber of Mothers. Event is free but please register here.
The standards for mothers have always increased at the moment when women were making gains in public life, she explains, and many of these subjective standards were created by men who had little insight into actual child-rearing. Nancy is out with a new book, THE GOOD MOTHER MYTH: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom, which neatly dissects all the literature that we’ve taken as fact for decades that women should be doing more at home and less in the wide world.
It’s time to tell the history of our bad ideas about motherhood so we can begin to untangle ourselves from their grip.
The grip, I’ve noticed, is hard to pry loose. It’s not just mothers who feel this way, but many dads too, as the standards for parenting keep ratcheting up if we want our kids to have a comfortable life, let alone a life that exceeds our own standards of living. Millennials are now the first generation to not exceed our parents’ job status or income. So the pressure to be “good” parents is very much real and in your face.
Nancy opens her book with a pretty amazing dedication:
For every mom who’s wondered if she’s good enough. You’re already doing great.
If you’re a new parent and you’re struggling, you deserve to get help. Postpartum Support International - 1 - 800 - 944-4773 or postpartum.net - is a good place to start.
The next 200+ pages of the book are the detailed research that comes with someone who is comfortable making their way around an academic library, but the beginning sets the warm tone in such an unmistakeable way - we are relying on outdated research that makes mothers feel they are failing, and this shame can have devastating consequences.
Nancy was kind enough to answer some questions for me for this Substack - and you should also follow her online too if you want to read more!
Q. This book reads as the research behind the research, and you neatly and systematically debunk and dismantle all of these academic researchers who professed things about the mothers needing to be at home with their kids all the time, and any detraction from that would be ruinous. And any problem with a kid would absolutely be the mother’s fault. So can you take me through some of your research process? How did you find so many of these things out? At what point in the process did you have your “aha!” moment and know you were on to something?
Nancy: I think this whole project was really a long series of “aha!” moments!
Initially, the project was really driven by my need to understand my own story–why had motherhood, which I’d been led to believe was “the most natural thing in the world,” been so incredibly hard for me? How could I love my kids so much and feel absolutely undone by the labor of caring for them? (The answer to that second question is largely sleep deprivation and untreated postpartum anxiety!) So that initial stage of research was really wide-ranging–I read about parenting practices across the animal kingdom, the evolutionary history of lactation, the development of the Edinburgh Postnatal Scale, and more. It was fascinating but far too unwieldy to be a book.
When I came to the book’s ultimate structure, in which each chapter focuses on one researcher who shaped our ideas about motherhood, my research process was initially a lot less chaotic. I read biographies of each researcher alongside their research and the scholarship about them.
Fairly late in the research process, though, I realized I was missing a huge chunk of the story. The studies and biographies I read focused on each researcher’s experiments and their findings, but I realized there were shadowy figures at the edges of those stories: their wives and children! I’d read Deborah Blum’s excellent [Harry] Harlow biography, Love at Goon Park, probably four times before I really noticed Harlow’s wives and children. But once I started thinking about them, I realized there was a whole other dimension to the story. Harlow and [John] Bowlby devoted their lives to telling women how to mother, but they were remarkably uninvolved, even by the standards of their time, in the raising of their own children.
When I decided I wanted to learn more about the wives, I had to learn to read and research differently. Women’s lives often don’t enter the archives in the same way as men’s, so that poses challenges for research. There’s a concept called critical imagination that comes out of feminist rhetorical scholarship that was immensely helpful as I worked to uncover those women’s lives. I had to notice they were missing, then I had to follow the thin trails they’d left. Bowlby wrote and published so much in his life, and his archives are enormous. When his wife, Ursula, died, she left just 15 boxes to be sent to the Wellcome Library in London. The first fourteen included the letters and diaries you’d expect, but the fifteenth contained a surprise: the manuscript of a book, Happy Infancy, that Ursula spent nearly a decade writing, during the same years she was raising four children. The book was never published, but knowing that she’d been writing it all those years she spent mothering changed so much about how I saw her.
Q. Your book is full of jaw-dropping observations, like the one in which Bowlby lists the “evils” that would contribute to a disaster at home and includes “full time employment of the mother” alongside “war, famine, death of a parent, desertion and imprisonment.” I’m curious why you think this was taken so seriously at the time. Likely there are still people who think such things, but research shows that a full time working mother is not in the same life experience category as war and famine. How did we get there, and why did it take us so long to move away from it?
A. Have we moved away from it?
I mean, clearly we wouldn’t actually put working moms alongside war and famine in terms of challenges facing children, but we’re certainly living in a time of tremendous cultural backlash. We might not explicitly blame working mothers for all our cultural problems, but we haven’t given working parents really anything in terms of meaningful support.
It was easy for Bowlby to claim expertise. He was from a prominent family, went to Cambridge, worked at a research institution. He was a white man in a suit. We’re still remarkably susceptible to the confident proclamations of a man who looks the part, even if what he’s saying doesn’t hold up to a lot of scrutiny.
Q. Bowlby was also the researcher responsible for the idea that “like heliotropy, the way a plant bends toward the sun as it grows, a child bends toward his mother” and then we find out that Bowlby wasn’t exactly the world’s greatest dad. We know care is vitally important for young kids, but we also know that it’s the trusted caregiver, not specifically the cisgender woman/mother figure, that matters. How long did this take to debunk, or do you think we aren’t there yet?
A. I think this is another space where maybe the explicit cultural messaging has moved a little–but the implicit messages and our actual lived experiences haven’t changed as much as they should. Anecdotally, I think just about every mother I know has had the experience of being the one the school calls first when a kid is sick, regardless of how you list the names on the forms or whose work schedule is more flexible. And research shows that even women who are in relatively equal marriages before having kids find themselves doing more caregiving and more domestic labor after becoming a mother, if they’re married to a man. So there’s clearly still some significant cultural baggage about mothers as the preferred source of care for children, and it impacts everything from women’s careers to their physical health to their prospects in retirement.
Q. I remember as a student being struck by the image of the rhesus monkey clinging to the cloth mother. And yet in your book, you show us that Harry Harlow’s research focusing on rhesus monkeys weren’t really the ideal mammal to imitate human interaction. It was chosen because it was a convenient mammal for Harlow! How do you think this changes the way we view maternal attachment?
A. I think animals have a real appeal when we’re trying to figure out what’s “natural” about parenting–but the problem, of course, is that there’s a huge amount of variation in animal parenting! In addition to being well-suited to life in the lab, Harlow’s rhesus macaque monkeys were also just cute, which I think really encouraged the press in particular to leap from those baby monkeys and their cloth mothers to human mothers and babies. Harlow started his primate research at the zoo, doing research with a baboon and two orangutans, and if he’d stuck with them, his experiments would have had really different findings!
Q. My favorite chapter in the book was on Margaret Mead and all she discovered and worked on while being a sort of nontraditional mother herself. What did researching Mead tell you about the ways that women being involved with research can help shape the studies and what we learn?
A. Mead certainly wasn’t perfect as a researcher or a mother, but she’s been an inspiring model for me. When she went to Samoa as a young woman, she took all kinds of problematic white lady attitudes with her – I mean, the subtitle of Coming of Age in Samoa uses the word “primitive” in the subtitle to describe the people she’d studied. That’s offensive, and it’s also an inaccurate way to characterize a civilization that had learned to navigate the Pacific by stars, as Samoans themselves have pointed out.
But Mead took the Samoans’ culture seriously, and the research she did in her twenties shaped her approach to motherhood throughout her life. She came back from Samoa convinced that the shared caregiving she’d observed there was a better model than the ideal of the good mother doing it all on her own inside the single family home. And when she had her own child, in her late 30s, she followed that model, raising her daughter in what she called a “composite household” that included other families. That shared care made her career possible.
Q. Your book has a beautiful dedication to the women who feel they aren’t good enough mothers, and a chapter about your own postpartum mood struggles. How did your own awareness of postpartum mood disorders guide your research and writing of this book?
A. I’m stunned now by how little I knew about postpartum mood and anxiety disorders before I became a mother. I’d heard about postpartum depression, but I pictured it as a kind of photogenic weeping. So when I was having a really hard time after the birth of my first son, but not in a way that aligned with that image, I figured it was my fault and I just needed to try harder and do better.
Once I started reading about the wider range of postpartum mood and anxiety disorders, I was like, postpartum anxiety! That’s me! And honestly, there’s probably half a dozen things in my background that should have flagged me as being at risk of experiencing pretty significant postpartum anxiety, but no one talked to me about that.
Years after my own kids were born, someone I love was having a hard time after the birth of her baby, and she went to a therapist, who referred her to a psychiatrist, and it was honestly such a revelation. Like, you could just get help instead of white-knuckling for years? It inspired me to finally go back to therapy for a while, which was really helpful. I’m really grateful for the way public awareness of maternal mental health has changed in the years since I first became a mother.
One important thing I’ve learned from my research is that early motherhood is a period of profound transformation. It’s entirely normal to struggle through that time. As that dedication says, new parents who are struggling deserve help. I wish that help were more easily accessible, but I’m heartened by the efforts of organizations like Postpartum Support International to support new parents.
Q. I have seen THE GOOD MOTHER MYTH cited everywhere these days, on Substack and in news articles - and I’m incredibly excited to have you come to D.C. and speak with me at Wonderland Books. What has the reaction been like for you, what do people say to you (or report online in the crazy comments)? Are they actually willing to let go of some of these hard-worn good mother myths?
A. I’ve been diligently not reading comments and Goodreads reviews, though I did stumble on one Amazon review that said my book was pretty good except for the “ad hominem attacks” on researchers, which: is it an attack to . . . report what someone did?
I’ve had such incredibly meaningful conversations with readers at events. I’ve talked to mothers of teenagers and young adults who’ve said it’s the book they wished they had when their kids were small. I just got an email from the mother of a two year old who said she’s felt so alone since becoming a mother and that my book finally made her feel like she wasn’t the crazy one.
Motherhood, especially early motherhood, is just so hard in this country. I think we’re exhausted, and we’re looking for ways to put those bad ideas down. There’s a role for policy and legislation in that, of course, but I also think that sharing our stories is part of how we start. I really believe that every time one of us shares our story, it makes space for another mother to tell the truth about her own life. It’s not the same thing as paid leave or affordable childcare, but it’s a step toward solidarity and maybe finding a little more ease and even joy in motherhood.
Want to hear more from Nancy (and me!)? If you’re in the D.C. area, come to Wonderland Books in Bethesda on Tuesday, April 8th. Sign up here - the event is free. and don’t forget to follow Nancy’s Substack too: .
Thanks for this! I'm excited to order this and read this. I think it will be really helpful for me (as a mom), but also as a psychotherapist who works with a lot of moms/parents. I've read a lot of this original literature that you discuss, so I am excited to dig into your work on this. Yay! Thanks for this interview RG!
thank you for sharing this conversation, Rebecca! I'm so excited to be in conversation IRL next week!