Guardian article on the cult of the perfect mother

[ArabellaScott]

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/may/18/parent-trap-why-the-cult-of-the-perfect-mother-has-to-end?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR1sWl3_y6uulvXAeX99eVj8jjdnkuM72FWttwZYDrzGQAsciV22oCsuSlk

Quite a long and interesting article. I definitely don't agree with all of it, but increasingly I think the summation of it is entirely true:

'Motherhood is feminism’s unfinished business.'

@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.

A really interesting article and thread - following with interest.

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.

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?

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.

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 think this is very sad, and rings true.

There is a lot of active resistance towards how previous/older/our mothers' generations did things. We are reinventing the bloody wheel with every child, rejecting our traditions, cultural knowledge, community consensus, general advice. I wonder why?

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.

But with my 1st, it was like landing on the moon with a newborn and a selection of books with strict instructions. One of the books would lead to establishing a successful community on the moon and continue the human race, the other book would explode us all in an agony of physical and mentally damaged failure. It felt like everyone was there to judge, rather than help - doctors, midwives, health visitors, other parents. And nobody agreed with each other. The most isolating, pressured, and difficult experience of my life.

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 think a lot of women it's a trauma reaction, Phiney, it just spills out involuntarily. Or maybe sometimes they are trying to be 'realistic'. But agree, it's not fair to share all that stuff with an expectant mother. My own mother didn't really talk much about her experiences, funnily enough. I think she wanted to avoid giving me good or bad expectations.

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.

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.

Advice, not advise!

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.

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 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 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 don't know if it was entirely money driven.

The 'male midwife' became a thing from about Enlightenment, afair. Mid 1800s. Some interesting books written on it. I'm not an expert, but I think it was driven by moral/religious/medical ideas as much as money.

'Midwifery in the eighteenth century witnessed the rise in men-midwives as fashion dictated male attendants for the wealthy and aristocratic parturient women, deposing the hegemonic female midwife and labelling her ill-educated'

historianruby.com/2016/07/03/the-man-midwife-in-the-18th-century/

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".

' the risk of a mother dying in childbirth was as high in 1934 as it was in the 1860s.'

theconversation.com/drunken-midwives-and-snooty-surgeons-a-short-history-of-giving-birth-16208

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.

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

Isn't the 'cascade of interventions' quite well evidenced?

@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.

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.

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.

@ArabellaScott

Isn't the 'cascade of interventions' quite well evidenced?

Yes, it is.

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'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.