Motherhood - I need some analytical help please

[glasgowwean]

Firstly I?d like to add a disclaimer that I really, really don?t want to start a bunfight and secondly, this is an issue that I?m trying to work my way through and am genuinely struggling with feeling disturbed by some of my own views and the feeling that I?m breaking a taboo in even considering this.

Basically I was having a discussion with some female friends about the concept of motherhood and there was sorrow expressed about a mutual friend who had, for whatever reason, decided to remain childfree. There was also an argument about my use of the term ?childfree? instead of ?childless?. The main thrust of the conversation was that, it was natural to have children (agree) but that unless you have children ? you never really experience what being a woman was all about?

This was then followed up by discussion about how women were the more natural of parents and that of course, it was right that women cared more about their babies then men did and that this was entirely natural and not a social constraint placed on woman by society?s expectations.
It struck a chord with me as I remember as a teenager reading The Female Eunuch and being surprised, a little repulsed, and yet convinced by a chapter in there regarding babies or children.

It was the first time that I had come across the view that women perhaps ?overdid? the whole mother thing and that the premise for this was to give themselves value in a society that otherwise didn?t place any value on them.

I think I see this in everyday life with women feeling that it?s unacceptable not to be wholly consumed with their children, that they are somehow lesser women, lesser humans, if they do not buy into the whole idea that womanhood equals motherhood. It seems that this expectation that every woman should be a ?natural? mother and have mystical instincts puts pressure on women and forces us all to pretend that we enjoy every aspect of it and are can only be fulfilled by having a child. Any other attempts at fulfilment are compensatory in some way and women who express dissatisfaction with motherhood are somehow lesser.

It also seems, in my view, to diminish the role of men and absolve them of responsibility for childrearing to a large extent. Men are treated as incapable, not paternal, and lacking in parental instinct. Which of course, sounds sympathetic to men, but really, is this a way of the patriarchy neatly removing men from the ?minor? issue of childrearing and justifying leaving the burden to fall on women ?

I?m not attacking women for being mothers and finding it a wholly worthy occupation but do we overstate the needs of children and understate the abilities of men to carve out a meaningful niche in society or does the patriarchy do this to diminish women and fool them into thinking it?s the natural order ?

I don?t know where I?m going with this, if anywhere, but would welcome other comments to help me clarify my own thoughts.

Lebfg -Dh is looking after our 2 tonight one is breast fed but he is looking after them all night and I am going drinking.In the morning dh is meeting the lads and they bring their babies and they all go to breakfast together.They do it often and the dads are aged 19 to 29. If you go to our town loads of men are out on their own or with a group of male friends with their kids.

I also think it depends on your aspirations dhs has always been to get married, have a family and babies and thats all he has ever really wanted to do.Many men I know are like that you always see stories about men not wanting to settle down but I know loads that love having kids.

Devaluing of childrearing/homemaking is a big factor.
Heard Danish Minister for Children on the radio yesterday and she didn't seem to put any store at all in the parental role in childrearing. She said it was bad for the child to be raised at home, even from when they are really little.
While I admire the way they throw lots of money at high quality childcare,and the way women are not discriminated against in the workplace there, I am uncomfortable to say the least.
I don't see this as feminist or even actually about equality. It is a huge denigration of family life. It seems to me to be more about using your well-educated populace in a way that best serves the economy i.e. in the workforce rather than letting them "waste" themselves.

Am I gone off the point?

My ideal? Hard to say. Different for everyone But I am operating my own ideal here at home. Male and female place high value on childrearing. Male and female partner share the childrearing, homemaking and paid work, not equally necessarily, but according to need/economic necessity.
I didn't do any paid work for 2 years, but now do more of that than DH. We share the homemaking and childrearing between us. It will change again. And again.

Look, doting 'natural' motherhood is a very modern phenomenon - it really only happened around the time of the industrial revolution, and progressed due to the availability of contraception and the huge, huge leaps in medical science that reduced infant mortality. Women used to have loads and loads of babies and expect about half of them to die in infancy so they tended not to get too attached to them; children were also perceived as economic units, not beloved people. A few hundred years ago, it was very much the done thing to use a wet nurse if you could possibly afford to; the prevailing viewpoint was that BFing was boring and a reasonably well-off woman could find better uses for her time; wet nurses were poor women (who sometimes neglected their own babies in order to feed the ones they were being paid to feed).

I think there is a conflict amongst feminists on this OP.

Some feminists focus heavily on the fact that only women can be pregnant, give birth and breastfeed and say that we need special recognition and rights to protect that role, eg enhanced maternity leave etc. This can tip over sometimes into the "cult of the mother" that you describe.

Other feminists say that the view that mothers are more natural parents is wrong, and this view has actually harmed women's rights over the years. They say that what we need is men to take a more equal role in the home and with children.

I think our society is very uncomfortable with anyone or anything that does not fit into a category which the vast majority of people fit into. We have herd mentality and I suppose there must be lots of evolutionary reasons for that. The vast majority of women do want to have children and do enjoy most of it so any woman who does not fit into that category is treated with incredulity and suspicion. Similarly most people do want to meet a partner and live in a loving realtionship and those who don't are equally looked at with disbelief and suspicion. Some of this is partly caused by our intense subjectivity; we have enjoyed being parents/ finding love ourselves and feel genuinely that those who don't will miss out on this - we can't beleive that others are that different to ourselves! However, I think it is true that women who do not fit the norm are generally treated with more disbeleif, suspicion etc than men. Surely this must be because of reproduction. Reproduction of the species, the most important thing ultimately, is largely under the control of women and so women are therefore subject to greater 'control' by the herd mentality.

Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined All Women This book was about the same subject and interesting - you may want to consider it.

Thanks for the recommendation Lime

I do not have and never want to have children. And I don't believe that women are "naturally" caring. I believe that it is socially acceptable for a man NOT to care about raising children and so many of them don't.

I have been told so often that I'll change my mind about kids, my partner never has. In fact, children are rarely mentioned to him. I believe that this kind of "baby" talk that women are subjected to encourages them into having children.

Quite a few of my close friends are childfree, in most cases by choice, so I'm quite comfortable with the childfree worldview. (I use 'childfree' rather than 'childless; because I think the latter has more connotations of infertility). I used to favour the childfree life myself, until getting unexpectedly PG and having DS. I'm not sorry I have him, but nor do I think my childfree friends are 'missing out' or will regret having no children themselves: they are not me and I am not them and I respect their choices. What I do think is sad is the way some people have children either because they think, well, it's just what you do when you grow up, or because they are pressured into doing so by family and friends - and then they find out that they are not natural parents, that they hate parenthood and regret having had the children. That's horrible for all concerned. Some people really aren't parent material; they have another passion in their lives (whether that's art, sport, travel, science, whatever) and should stick to doing that.

Isn't it socially unacceptable to ever admit you wished you never had children? Or that, if you were to make the choice over again, you would chose not to have the child/children? Or that parenthood doesn't suit you? I think this applies to men as well as women.

Dh and I have had this discussion before when at uni: he says all the new fathers he knows would always say: 'oh, being a dad is great' 'i just love being a dad' etc and he was surprised none of them dwelt on the negatives.

Glasgowean -

Good question!

My thoughts on this, both from reading and experience of life (my own and friends) is that there is a fairly big slug of nature driving things in the early years, but with unexpected impacts.

From a evolutionary point of view women have a much bigger investment in a child they have just gestated for 9 months and which may be one of 1O they ever give birth to. For a man they could (if they go the Ghengis Kahn route) have 100s of children in their lifetime, so any one child (which may not be theirs) is worth a smaller "bet" of resources than for a woman.

Of course we don't live like that any more, or think like that, but I don't think we can ignore those drivers (because they trip us up)

The point is not to say that natural must be good and women should be defined by motherhood.

But I think women (in general, on average) are more willing to put everything else on hold when their children are young (whether that means seeking status at work or running around looking for new sexual partners) than men, in general, are.

Then the structures and institutions and assumptions we have end up translating that marginal difference lasting maybe 3 years into a huge absolute difference lasting for 20+.

E.g. - say a woman is 60% willing to give up work when their child is young, and the bloke is 40% willing, they ought to split the time along those lines, but in practice maternity leave and cultural expectations means her work will take 100% of the knock.

After 2-3 rounds of this this her marginal advantage at parenting has been replaced by an absolute advantage of knowledge and skills, whereas his marginal greater engagement with the public world has been translated into an an absolute advantage of experience and earning power. At this point it is hard to switch to more equal parenthood even if they both want to. And social expectations don't encourage it.

My take-away from all of this is that there should be more encouragement for flexible parenthood splits from the start, and more on-ramps to help women get back to education, work and public life after time out. Plus the general expectation in workplaces that both men and women are active parents.

... But also think somehow as women and girls we have to be encouraged to think clearly about what we are giving up if they take on being the senior parent from the start. (is that "the motherhood myth"?)

Great post Himalaya

This is always the issue with equal parenting rights. It still is the women who largely choose to take the leave and, try as we might, it is so difficult to regain those lost months/years on the career ladder. My DH prones equal leave for both sexes. So, lets say the average career women takes two 6 month breaks, childless women or men can choose 2 x 6m 'sabbaticals', like uni professors do.

I am going to disagree, society is wrong not humanity??????

When women choose (it is a choice, not unfettered by society but a choice non the less) to look after their children, "we" prevent women from returning to work and being accorded the same freedoms and privileges as men in the work place, we actively put up barriers to women returning to work. The answer is to get ride of those barriers not to change your individual behaviour to avoid those barriers.

Himalaya, thanks for the input.

You make mention of women generally being more willing to take on the childcare. Why is this, do you think ? What it is about women that causes this or is it just an effect of the patriarchy ?

Is it blasphemy to suggest that actually, once passed the bf or maternity stages, there is absolutely only the need for a parent, not necessarily a woman ? And if this is the case why do women cling on to being the parent better suited for this role ?

Children are important- they are the future and in the need to ensure the species survives then surely it makes sense for the ones that are better suited to do it.
So society during pre-historic times needed strong men to hunt and caring women to nurture.
Society has changed and so have men and women's roles but children are still the future of the species and they still need nurturing and I believe that men and women can both do this job.
I suppose it all comes down to biology- the female gives birth and feeds the baby so is naturally more nurturing.

Glasgow - I think in the early years there is an evolutionary basis. Breastfeeding obviously, but more broadly the fact that our male and female ancestors faced different evolutionary pressures as to the amount on "investment" they put into ensuring the survival of any one child. As I said for men it was a higher stakes game - stay home and look after this child that may not be there's or go out and pursue status with the prospect of being able to father 100s of children.

I agree I think the biological basis passes once kids are past early years. But we have this extended dependency period because of human culture - language, writing, technology...lots to learn for many years.

Since most people have more than one child the early years can last 8-10 + years in time spam and after that it is hard to get back on a more equal parenting footing.

I found answers to a lot of my own questions about motherhood in this book;

Of Women Born by Adrienne Rich

Off to read thread now - I nearly started a thread on Motherhood last week so am very interested in this.

Mini - how do you distinguish humanity from society?

I think the argument that woman are more nurturing has a tremendous impact on women who don't feel very maternal.

My children's mother felt awful that she didn't enjoy the children very much when they were younger.

And there seems to be a taboo to admitting this, which can't be good.

Himalaya, I'm not sure I believe any of that evolutionary stuff. For a start, we don't know that any of it is true. It's pure speculation, and quite often speculation that I believe we use to fit our preconceptions of how the genders are.

And beyond that, how do we know that how we acted 10000 years ago would have any impact on how we act now? Even how we acted 500 years ago (burning witches, lopping people's head off right and left) seems alien to us now. You don't get people saying "well, we don't like women because we used to burn witches".

It also doesn't allow for the huge swathes of the population who DON'T follow these so-called instincts. So why would some overcome these and some not?

Yellow -

It's not speculation that women can have around 10 children in their lifetime, and that men can have 100s. It's not speculation that women know 100% who their children are, but until very recently men couldn't be sure. And it's not speculation that we all come from a long line of men and women who succeeded in leaving children and grandchildren.

Sure, the rest is speculation, but I think reasonable speculation

People overcome instincts all the time - for example thinking ahead,
weighing up options, responding to different incentives. But it helps if we understand the basis of older instincts - otherwise we can be blindsided by them.

I didn't say those things were speculation. I meant more stuff like "women are nurturing because we sat around a campfire eating berries for thousands of years".

Like I said, we don't even know that that stuff's true, let alone if it would have any effect.