Guardian article on the cult of the perfect mother

I like the article. I was so caught up in being perfect, that I was overwhelmed with anxiety and didn’t know it was ok not to know something. I’d barely even held a baby before mine and he was prem, which was totally traumatising. I was told at my hypnobirth class that if you didn’t have skin to skin straight away then you wouldn’t bond with your baby. I didn’t get to hold my baby for 8 hours because I’d had a c section and he was in NICU. I thought I’d ruined it forever. Then he was too tiny to breastfeed and I felt so ashamed that I almost had to hide when I gave him a bottle. Managed to breastfeed in the end but I would have swapped breastfeeding for not feeling so guilty about formula. Other mums judge loads. Men don’t care so much but most don’t seem to be clamouring to do more childcare. Because it’s hard work and dull. But apparently being a woman, it’s supposed to all come naturally and be blissful. I also had no mother’s instinct which made me feel defective. I have it now but that came through getting to know my kids. It didn’t start out that way.

I found listening to "birth stories" completely terrifying before I had my baby and my birth was nothing like the horrors I heard about.

It is important to read the room before enforcing your story on someone who didn't ask, I think. It should be easier to get therapy though. I'm not questioning the women's need to tell their stories but it's so horrible if you're nervous already.

I liked the article. I would like there to be more emphasis that you're having a human being, not a baby. Age 3 up has been so so hard here and we were in crisis by age 7.

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?

Also, when I talk to younger friends they speak of how expectation to be the perfect mum and respond to your childs every action and emotion all the time, has become quite oppressive. Is this just a perception or was it a bit more relaxed twenty or thirty years ago

it has never been easy, but today's young mothers also have to cope with social media too and the habit of posting lifestyle and personal statements for public consumption all of the time.

And maybe, as women have children later in life, and after they have established themselves in careers, there comes to be a focus on 'doing the job' ( of parenting) to some imagined professional standard?

People never used to agonise over having children, or contemplate it for quite so long - so it is understandable how parenting becomes a big looming decision or choice in life.

Plus, there are TV and media experts on everything these days, in a way there simply wasn't in in the past.

A really interesting article and thread - following with interest.

@moregarlic I found reducing my 'mum friends' contact with those who make comments such as "oh, hasn't she tried blueberries yet? I make DS freshly baked muffins for breakfast every day" has helped hugely! I have a couple of friends with babies who are more on my wavelength and that'll do me. I don't have Instagram, I don't follow any mummy stuff on Facebook, I don't go to any groups. I just stay well away from all the competition and pressure and am much happier for it. If I want to know something I ask my mum, friends who have older children or NHS Web pages.

I so enjoyed this article. It resonated deeply; I didn’t stop nodding.

I’m a first time mum and I have this crushing internal pressure to do everything ‘right’. I don’t know how to trust my gut and so I seek validation for all my choices from external sources. It’s crap.

The issue for me (and probably most mums) is it IS such a monumentally important yet woefully under appreciated job, bringing up the next generation. I want her to be sane and kind and resilient etc. and I don’t want to accidentally jeopardise that. I feel clueless. And then there’s the lack of support and a total a absence of recognition of how hard it is.

(I wondered if it had anything to do with the crippling isolation of giving birth and coping with a newborn in the pandemic, but it seems like I’m not alone. Fuck, that was hard though.)

Any thoughts on how to shrug off the cloak of unattainable perfectionism? I know it’s as simple as “just do what works for you”, but my mind cannot get to grips with it for whatever reason.

One book I ended up throwing in the bin rather than giving to charity because it said that allowing a baby to cry for longer than 10 seconds caused brain damage and I couldn't bare the thought of some vulnerable mother reading it and feeling even guiltier.

The only book that resonated with what my friends have told me about their experiences was Libby Purves "how not to be a perfect mother" (or something similar). Lots of women trying different things that worked for them, not always getting it right but adapting along the way. But of course you can't create a best selling parenting solution off "Do your best and give yourself a break if it doesn't always work out"..

So much of this has become about the marketing of parenting and I agree that its linked to mothers having to start from scratch because there's been a loss of background / cultural knowledge about how parenting works due to smaller nuclear families etc.

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

I thin you are right about the gold standard thing in general.

With parenting though, I think another reason people are looking for answers is that we've become cut off from a tradition of parenting or childrearing. Smaller families, people move away from grandparents, communities are mixed and people don't have the same way of doing things as their neighbours. Lots of people have a child and have never really spent any time with children, the whole thing is pretty new to them. And then the way of life people have, with both parents working, being pretty isolated, and so forth, means some of the ways people used to do things won't really work any more.

And there are so many choices about what to do, buy, what the science supposedly says, the best medical choices....

So they are looking for a place to start, a set of rules to guide them, and some way they can make the choices they are being asked to make.

I don't understand why folk think "parenting" (when and why did we start using that fucking stupid term) has to have a philosophy. Just do what suits you and is easier and fits your family. You can use a cloth wrap to carry your child about while they are wearing a disposable nappy, an organic cotton babygro and soaking down an Ella's pouch. Absolutely nobody else will care. I have never given a fuck if someone has a c section or is bottle feeding or uses cloth nappies or has an uppababy fancy pram. Why would anyone care about the choices and decisions you make? No one is judging you. No one gives a shit about anyone else and their kids.

You are judging you.

That's the problem. At work, on social media, in relationships, at the hairdresser, in bed...it's not just mams that have this obsession with there being a gold standard. Everyone does. There's no gold standard. There's no best of anything. There's no medal. No moment where you can go "Now. Now I am perfect. Now I have won." No one is watching you win the prize of most magnificent mam or greatest worker or most fabulous fuck. No one is in the least bit bothered about you so there's really no point imagining that you have to perform for an audience. Suit yourself because you are going to have to do it all over again tomorrow.

What I found though was that it was like the AP people took it all to extremes. So a two year old was in some ways almost seen as attached as a newborn, and there was a weird focus on doing certain things or else you would ruin your baby through stress. So slings weren't just a good tool with some great advantages, if you ever used a pram you were being "detached".

And there was also an extreme focus on being baby-led, and not ever allowing the baby to cry, because babies (and even toddlers!) always know what they really need. So no trying to establish a gentle routine, or even encourage sleeping at night or napping alone so mum can get a shower or have a few minutes to herself, etc.

The problem with motherhood is that the judgement is from other women, not men. Men couldn’t care less usually, as long as the kids are healthy and reasonably happy.

That’s not been my experience. Men who don’t know me well have always been the ones to judge. I’ve lost count of the tidbits of patronising advice I’ve received from men who don’t even have kids themselves.

Could be that I’m a single mum.

Without contemporary perfect motherism, it’d be very much harder to sell us all those ideas and things we don’t need; it’s a big win for consumer capitalism.

I did Gina Ford with a cloth nappy baby!
But got awfully anxious when the baby woke too early from his nap. Moved on to the Baby Whisperer which was less strict.
14 years later I still hold myself to high standards about the amount of fruit and veg the dc eat, how much screen time they have etc. And worry about PILs (especially MIL) judgement on table manners.

Really good article.

Following with interest

When I had my kids twenty years ago the shift to nursery care was coming in. There was a lot of debate about what the consequences of nursery care were going to be.

There seem to be data coming out of Sweden saying the children became more socially conforming and had higher cortisol levels. Now it seems we don’t talk about it anymore - it is taboo to discuss the consequences

On MN 15 years ago there were many, many debates about using nursery care and how potentially harmful it was. The debate has largely gone away purely because it’s now economically essential for 2 parents to work in many families. There is no choice so there’s no debate.

Yes, re attachment parenting. I can remember being told repeatedly (by HCPs, extended family and the awful 'natural parenting' magazine I was given a sub to as a present in the early days) that everything had to be on demand and schedules were really bad
I had children during peak Gina Ford and was thought of as being a bit mental for being a cloth nappy using, baby carrying hippy mum! And I struggle with routine at the best of times, Gina used to make me break out into a cold sweat
Another reason why saying there is a "right" way is unhelpful