Resisting the Mom Anxiety Industrial Complex
We are Blaming the Wrong People
When I was in college I went to check out a book from the library. When I found the book I was looking for, I couldn’t help but notice the title of the book on the shelf next to it was something like, “Mothers Shouldn’t Work: The Harm Working Mothers Are Doing to American Children” or something. I was like, whoa, that’s an argument I’ve never heard before!
Then I noticed the book next to it was something like, “Against Daycare.”
Then I kind of stepped back and realized that in the section I was in, there were probably more than 200 books all about how women shouldn’t be working and it’s harming kids. Rows upon rows upon rows were dedicated to hand-wringing about working moms.
Working moms are… an issue?!
The High Stakes of Mothering
I was raised by a single mom who worked multiple jobs. We didn’t have a lot of money but we thought we were middle-class. She worked really hard, and while I didn’t know a lot of kids with divorced parents, I didn’t know a single family with a stay-at-home mom. Probably some moms worked part-time, but they were almost all teachers or nurses or they worked in restaurants or retail. Both of my grandmothers worked, and at least one great-grandmother, so the legend goes, solely supported her children during the Great Depression because her husband abandoned them when times got hard. There weren’t any 1950’s homemakers in my family tree. I figured that kind of life was only for very rich people or was just made up for black and white TV sitcoms that only played on Nick at Nite.1
Until that day in the library, I had no idea being a working mother was controversial. Everyone has to work - moms, dads, grandparents - right? Of course, at the time, I was in college, and I had things to do, so I was just like, huh, must have been controversial in the ‘70s or whatever, how weird, and went on with my life.
Before I became a parent, I read a lot of narratives in popular media around how difficult it was to be a working mother - or any mother, working outside the home or not. I read essays that said things like, “the expectations on mothers are crazy” and naïve me thought, well, I’m just going to resist that pressure. I don’t care about anyone’s ‘expectations.’ I’ll be the parent I want to be and who cares if I am judged? No one’s going to be policing my parenting.
What I wasn’t prepared for is that I became the police of my parenting. When you read something like, “children of part-time working mothers may fare better than children whose mothers work full-time”2 it’s not that you’re afraid someone’s looking through your windows and judging you for not playing with your toddler enough. It’s that you read these kinds of things and think “Oh shit, there is so much at stake here. My child’s entire future depends on me doing [insert whatever the popular idea of perfect parenting is at the moment].”
None of Us Are Doing It Right, Apparently
Over the years I have often thought of that moment in the library. I have thought, wow, so many people have dedicated so much time to research and argue against something that is a completely normal state of affairs. Obviously, I was in college so that I could have a career and work, and planned to work even if I had children. Again, I literally didn’t even know being a stay-at-home mom was an option. I had never seen one in real life.
Should I be stressed out about planning to be a working mother? I think about those books now, every time I leave for work and my toddler is mad about it.
I don’t have any social media (unless you count SubStack), but my impression is that there is no shortage of influencers who will give you endless ideas of things to worry about. Are you fostering healthy attachment? Are you setting up your play areas to invite play? Are you overwhelming them with dopamine, through screens and too many child-centered activities? Are you fostering independent play? Are you playing with them enough to develop the essential connections between mothers and children?
Are you? If not, you are the reason for [violence, gun crime, drug addiction, the lack of work ethic amongst young people today; whatever social woe is getting the most attention at the moment].
I see all of these narratives, and again, I do not have social media. I cannot imagine how stressful it must be to be a mom with an Instagram account.
So much digital ink spilled advising moms to be better. To do more. To do it differently. To know that they are doing it wrong but don’t worry, I have a digital download for $9.99 that will tell you how to do it right. To use the latest in scientific momming research to be the exact perfect combination of gentle and firm (just be aware the research will be updated tomorrow, and everything you did today has probably damaged your kids for life - and you’re contributing to the downfall of society generally, because kids today are JUST AWFUL and the problems start at home).
Maybe It’s Not the Moms We Should Be Talking About
The thread between those library books and the ever-changing advice on how to be a perfect mother is this: a ton of time and energy is wasted finding new ways to put pressure on moms, instead of doing literally ANYTHING to resolve some fairly obvious errors in how we’ve decided to structure society.
These things could be cool:
Government-funded childcare and healthcare
Guaranteed paid parental leave
Guaranteed paid sick leave3
20-hour work week so both moms and dads could spend more time with their kids
A giant, government-funded workforce dedicated to supporting people with disabilities and their parents and caregivers
Fully fund schools, so that schools at all levels can support activities like sports and gardening and music, and we can stop having to drive all over the place so kids can participate in this stuff
Basically, a safety net. And a safety net that isn’t constantly being snipped away at by the idea that to struggle is to be virtuous, and we can’t have people freeloading because capitalism.
I was curious to see if anyone out there is advocating for a 20-hour work week. I couldn’t find much, but a quick search reveals a million articles on how to be more efficient at work so you can get everything done in 20 hours. Apparently most office workers are only productive each day for about 3 hours.4 So, I think we’re already working 20 hour work weeks, we just pretend we’re working 40 hours.
But what about non-office workers, you may be asking? What about nurses, doctors, construction workers, airline pilots?
I mean…. I suspect they also would like to work 20 hour work weeks? If you’ve ever been in a hospital, have you ever seen a nurse or doctor that wasn’t completely exhausted? Can we like, let nurses and doctors work less?5 And hire more nurses and doctors? Should laborers and construction workers be doing manual labor for 8+ hours straight each day? The answer is pretty obviously no, right?!
I realize it’s much more convenient to focus on getting moms to do more. Nobody has to figure out how to pay people a living wage for working less. Anxious moms police their own behavior at no cost to anyone. Nobody has to raise taxes to make moms question whether or not they are good enough. That anxiety is actually a money maker!
Look, I’m just as guilty. Look at me writing away about moms blah blah blah and doing nothing to fix the root cause of why moms are drowning.6 I’m certainly not running for office on a 20-hour workweek platform, and I mean, I’m just a rando on the Internet, I don’t know what I’m talking about. But maybe someone out there does. And maybe instead of endlessly asking moms to take on more and more and more, we can envision a future that is actually functional for families; for everyone. Because wasting time arguing about whether moms should have jobs or the optimal way to be a mom is entirely misdirected.
It’s not the moms that are the problem.
This is, in no way, meant to be critical of stay-at-home moms. Solidarity, stay-at-home moms!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9924214/
I realize the United States is uniquely cruel in these three aspects and we really need to get our shit together, in so many ways
https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html
Yes, I know many nurses and doctors work WAY more than 40 hours a week, which is awful. I am afraid that if we all worked a 20-hour workweek doctors and nurses would still be working way more than that, but hopefully much less than 40.
I do annoy my local congressional representative with calls about Medicare for All, but I’m preaching to the choir and he’s kind of busy fighting against other horrendous things that are happening and I’m really not sure where to go from there.