Guardian article on the cult of the perfect mother

Yes I wasn't talking about everything, just my experience of some parts of the early motherhood experience.

I was lent a book about breastfeeding as I was struggling - it did have some useful tips, but included 'breastfeeding is the most important thing you can ever do for your child both psychologically and physiologically'. Thankfully I knew even then that this was rubbish - if you look at a class of primary children, and were told half were breastfed, could you pick them out? No. On the other hand if you knew that two had been abused, could you pick them out? Much more likely. Ergo protecting your child from abuse matters much more than how you feed them. But in the fog of struggling to feed a newborn, it's all too easy to be sucked in by statements like the one above. Then the guilt starts....

@MoltenLasagne

Thank you *@childbearinghipsterF* - I'm a natural researcher with anything. I think I tested out 5 ways to make scrambled eggs before deciding on my favourite method So being pregnant meant I wanted to read about all the different approaches to see if one resonated.

I actually found that the amount of contradictions between the books gave me confidence to ignore a lot of the advice. It made it more obviously ideological and in some cases a blatant sales pitch. I can fully understand why women want to believe in one book - it's such a responsibility looking after a tiny human that it would be really reassuring to believe that as long as you follow all the rules you'll get it right.

The line 'babies don't read books' is certainly true. The best advice I was ever given (by my brother no less) was : 'do what works'. It has been very efficient and liberating.

Thanks for the link to this great article!

I'd add that the problem with the tribal stuff is that once you're "in" one of those groups everyone agrees with each other about which things are good and which things are bad. At least, on the internet and in the books, so it can really begin to feel like this is the "truth" and everyone who doesn't follow that very prescriptive script is simply wrong.

I remember the first time I met someone who used slings and I immediately thought oh yes, she's one of "my team", I like her, I trust her. I was (some months/years) later on a night out with her (and a load of other women) and we were talking about parenting and she admitted she smacked her older two kids when they were little. (Although not the younger ones. But not because she was totally against it, just that she never found it necessary.) It totally blew my mind! I'd never met any "sling parents" before who weren't also 100% of the gentle parenting, No is a dirty word, collaborate on every decision type of persuasion. I think that was one of the defining moments when I stopped believing in the arbitrary lines I'd drawn up. I respect her immensely as a parent and as a person, I accept that she made some decisions differently, and I don't believe that she was wrong, nor that my parenting, which was different, was superior. Which is very very different to how I would have seen things in for example DS1's first year.

Yes, very true about the contradictions! I got caught up in a lot of stuff when DS1 was very little - so many mothering things are quite "tribal" and very much "If you are one of us, your baby will grow up to be a wonderful person. If you're like THEM, your baby will become a terrible person". Doesn't really matter whether it's "Routine or you'll never sleep again!" or "Co-sleep or your baby will be cold and rejected!" it's all sales pitch and shit. It's only when he got older that I could really see how none of it actually matters. There's a huge range in acceptable parenting. Basically don't neglect them, don't abuse them, don't totally indulge them/snowplow them. Everything else is absolutely fine and won't harm them. Doesn't matter if you do cry it out or co-sleep until they're 4 or something in the middle. They will be absolutely fine either way.

I actually think there is some better stuff coming out now that doesn't do the whole "demonise any approach that's different" thing. But it's still on the fringes and it's hard to find info sources like that.

Thank you @childbearinghipsterF - I'm a natural researcher with anything. I think I tested out 5 ways to make scrambled eggs before deciding on my favourite method So being pregnant meant I wanted to read about all the different approaches to see if one resonated.

I actually found that the amount of contradictions between the books gave me confidence to ignore a lot of the advice. It made it more obviously ideological and in some cases a blatant sales pitch. I can fully understand why women want to believe in one book - it's such a responsibility looking after a tiny human that it would be really reassuring to believe that as long as you follow all the rules you'll get it right.

TheProvincialLady

I enjoyed the article too. It starts before day 1 with the appalling, dehumanising treatment women are so often given as soon as they have the baby out. Noisy, understaffed, underfunded postnatal ‘care’. Women who have undergone major surgery and often major trauma are expected to carry on as though nothing has changed. Where is the pain relief, where is the rest, where is the care and support? Can you imagine men going through childbirth and then being expected to look after a newborn baby? They mostly can’t step up to the care of a newborn, let alone doing it in pain and bleeding. And the medical profession stands by and encourages women to act like martyrs from day 1. What alternative is there?

So agree with this! My DM is a retired midwife in her early 70s who retired at 65 so her career spanned 5 decades. She is horrified at how poor post natal care has gotten in that time. And mums who have a CS are expected to be running round Asda and doing the school pick up ASAP. And those that push their body to the limit are hailed as superwoman while the rest of us feel like miserable failures.
The IS generation also have the pressure of all the perfect mummies with their designer brands etc. Someone I know vaguely irl cultivates a perfect family image on Insta which would make anyone feel inadequate. But it's a tiny snapshot and ppl dont tend to post pics of their house looking like a bomb site and their kids killing each other. So glad the internet was in it's infancy when I was a new mum!

I'm a new mum (literally posting from the postnatal ward) and I bought reams of second hand baby books over lockdown to compare- everything from attachment parenting, montessori, Gina Ford and all in between. Almost every single one promised to give the answer of how to have a happy baby and child as long as you followed their rules to the letter

Congratulations, @MoltenLasagne How’s it going?

I’m an older (and not first-time) mother to an 8mo. I’ve never read a parenting book and I’ve muddled through well enough. I think it’s ok to bin the lot and just do what works day to day, really.

@moregarlic, hope things are getting easier now the world is returning to some semblance of normality.

Some of the reasons epidurals can lead to other interventions are pretty straightforward - for example it reduced the mobility of the mother, which isn't great for effective labour. As anyone who is involved with animal husbandry would tell you.

I agree about epidurals and interventions - mine was for a very painful, non progressing labour that turned into an EMCS. In many ways, the epidural was simply a symptom.

Another aspect being ignored by many is that working hours have increased across my professional life, from 35 to 40 hours on paper and an expectation of much more. This means that I have to take more of a pay cut to work “part time” as the % time worked has to be lower. Kids don’t need less sleep or get ready for school more quickly just because working hours have gone up. The reality is that increases in working time are pay cuts for working mothers.

I had a high risk pregnancy and was advised to have a c section as my baby wouldn’t survive labour. I’d done hypnobirth and everything. Was all set to have one of those pain free relaxing births. Nope, nature had other ideas. Very glad of c section’s existence and am happy with the birth despite it not being how I’d planned. And then after all that, the perfect mother guilt came in. I think there’s an image that women are supposed to just know what to do with a baby. Like it all comes naturally.

@MoltenLasagne - "How not to be a Perfect Parent" was one of my favourite books too. And Penelope Leach (who I know and who is lovely) but she was a little more prescriptive. There have been an awful lot of childcare books since though and I wonder if some of them just serve to make new mothers more and more anxious.

Personally I think its correlation not causation. Can you rule out whether a mother needed an epidural because her labour wasn't progressing as it should and was painful, and then an intervention was required? It seems to just be interventions are correlated with epidurals, therefore if you have an epidural you are causing the intervention

Today it's about money. Birth wise though didn't things like pain relief and medical intervention increase in the 60s and 70s? And probably represented an increase in safety at that time. It's just that today we recognise that some interventions increase risk for mothers who are low risk to begin with. They only reduce risk if you were in a high risk category. But somehow this has become "interventions are risky" when sometimes they are much less risky than the alternative.

I'm sure I read somewhere that deaths from infections increased when surgeons started attending births, because they didn't wash their hands and wrote off traditional handwashing practices by midwifes as "superstition".

I agree with you Bertie. It’s a backlash to the very medicalised version of child rearing. There needs to be a middle ground with medical interventions saving lives and women feeling in control of their bodies and babies. And with all this, a realistic view of what it is to be a mother and how it’s not all sunshine and roses the whole time.

I think part of the difficulty is this.

For generations parenting (let's be honest, mothering) was a community and generation led thing. You'd do what your mother and grandmother and aunty and sister did and get advice from the midwife who was the only real "expert".

Then men came along and started commercialising things and telling us why we were all wrong and silly and irrational. And women came in on the act as well and the generations of knowledge we'd amassed were suddenly though of as being old fashioned or primitive or pain wrong. This was all the routine, formula, commercial baby foods and products, drugged instrumental childbirth on your back, make your baby independent, that kind of thing.

So then there was a backlash against that. And we're still in the tail end of this I think, although the problem now is that we've forgotten where it came from. Instead of being hang on, formula is great but not everyone needs it, let's get back that lost info about breastfeeding, it's become breastfeeding is the most important thing and formula will harm your child's gut.

Instead of being hey, this very medical model of childbirth has unintended risks and isn't right for everyone, it's become any medical intervention is bad and should be avoided. You're only powerful if you have a natural birth.

None of this is helpful either. We know what it was like back when natural childbirth and breastfeeding were the only options. Infant and maternal mortality were a lot higher. This is not something we need to strive for again. You would think that modern parenting wisdom would be able to take both aspects into account and take the good parts from them. Medical intervention in childbirth saves lives, but it should only be used when medically indicated. As a routine practice it does more harm than good. Actually, most medical professionals and training are of this mindset now, but a lot of parenting literature aimed at the expectant mother are not.

It's money related I think. There's not much money in saying look, this might happen and that might happen and here are some tools you can use to cope or manage. There is much more money in selling a perfect, one size fits all solution (that doesn't exist).

I think that social pressure to be "the perfect mother" is the patriarchal response to women having more time as labour saving house work devices were invented. God forbid women should spend that time doing things for their own needs. Nope, they should spend it on mothering

Totally agree with this. God forbid life should get any easier, so let’s up the ante on expectations for mothers - on parenting standards and on looks and on career. Fathers are expected to be more hands on these days sure, but still never expected to be the main parent.

I've always been very academic and bookish, worked in a professional job where I'm expected to give other people very precise and answers and risk assessments. Pregnancy and Motherhood cane as a big shock because suddenly, I couldn't just read up and get the "right" answer.

Advice, not advise!

A huge absence of trust. I certainly felt this with my 1st child. With my 2nd, I was far braver about asking for help, didn't feel that I knew - or should know - everything, had a great understanding of how imperfect and failure prone myself and everyone else is.

I found something similar. I was really looking for some sort of method with my eldest, and also some practical advice.

By the time my youngest was born, my fourth child, I was much more open to different ways of thinking, I had a good idea what might work or not work for me, and what advise was just stupid.

Interestingly to me though, like you said, originally I was much more suspicious of the kinds of things my mum or nana had done or thought with their kids. By the time number four came I thought that much of the time, their way of doing things was correct and very practical.