You’re a good mother; your children show you that you are.
Your baby greets you with a thousand watt smile when you pick her up from her nap. She loves to be in your arms when she feels happy and she needs to be in your arms when she feels ill.
Your toddler can’t get enough of your snuggles. You’re the first person he wants to see every day, which for him means cuddling with you in bed at 5 AM as you desperately try to get a few more minutes of sleep.
Your pre-schooler thrives on your praise. “Watch me, Mama, watch me!,” he calls whenever he learns a new skill. And you’re the one he runs to when he is sad, or angry or frustrated.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]We’ve been socialized to believe that children’s happiness and success can only be purchased with the coin of maternal suffering.[/pullquote]
Your children love you, need you and cry for you.
You’re a good mother … so why do you feel so bad?
Because the dominant mothering ideology in contemporary culture, often described as attachment parenting or natural mothering, is designed to make you feel inadequate.
When you stop and think about it, your children themselves aren’t the ones who make you feel bad. They are happy, healthy, growing and thriving. It is other adults who make you feel bad, everyone from acquaintances to Facebook friends to the experts who write the parenting books that you consult. They make you feel inadequate, like you are failing to meet your children’s most important needs, that no matter how much you do, you are never doing enough.
It’s not an accident. It is a product of our beliefs about women. While many of us proudly declare ourselves feminists, we have failed to question fundamentally anti-feminist beliefs about motherhood, sacrifice and how the differing needs of women and children ought to be negotiated. We don’t question them because we have been socialized to believe that children’s happiness and success can only be purchased with the coin of maternal suffering.
It starts with the deep, powerful love we feel toward our children.
As Jana Malamud Smith explains in A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear, our love, as well as our terror of loss, leaves us vulnerable to being manipulated:
The mother’s fears of child loss and the derivative fears of harming children or caring for them inadequately have been continually manipulated, overtly and subtly, even aroused gratuitously, to pressure, control and subdue women for a very long time — possibly millennia.
And it seems as if there are dangers everywhere.
Ironically, there has arguably never been a better time to be a mother. The specter of dying while giving life has dramatically receded. No longer do women have to fear the consequences of traumatic birth injuries. It is the rare mother who has to bury a child. We can ensure our children are healthy, well educated and equipped with the resources to succeed in life and yet we still feel bad.
But you’d never know that if you are part of the natural parenting culture, which justifies its intrusiveness into maternal choice by promoting fear in regard to infant and child health. Natural parenting advocates inflate risks of rare events to monstrous proportions or invent theoretical risks that have never been seen in real life.
For example, childbirth is inherently dangerous, but has been made dramatically safer by the liberal use of obstetric interventions. Yet to hear natural childbirth advocates tell it, childbirth is inherently safe and any dangers that exist are caused by technology.
Infant formula has never been safer or more nutritious. Yet to hear lactivists tell it, breastmilk is lifesaving and formula is deadly.
Vaccines have never been safer or more effective (as evidenced by the bottoming out of incidences of childhood diseases), but anti-vaxxers utterly ignore both medicine and history in denying the public health triumph of universal vaccination. Instead they obsess about rare or even fabricated vaccine injuries.
By promoting fear about children’s well-being, the philosophy of natural parenting causes women to tightly regulate their behavior so it conforms with the “rules” of natural parenting and to pathologize and blame themselves when they fail in conforming to those rules. Hence the outpouring of guilt and recrimination for epidurals, C-sections, formula feeding and other deviations from natural parenting diktat.
The conceit behind natural parenting is that women can only be successful mothers if they lose themselves. Their pain doesn’t count; their suffering doesn’t count; their time doesn’t count. Yet neither mothers nor children are benefiting as a result.
Natural parenting — natural childbirth, lactivism and attachment parenting — were all created by religious fundamentalists who believed that women belong in the home and must be pressured to return to it.
Grantly Dick-Read, the father of natural childbirth, famously said: “Woman fails when she ceases to desire the children for which she was primarily made. Her true emancipation lies in freedom to fulfil her biological purposes …”
The founders of La Leche League wished to convince mothers of small children that they should not work. Promoting breastfeeding seemed the ideal way to pressure them to stay home.
And Bill and Martha Sears wrote: “We have a deep personal conviction that this is the way God wants His children parented.” And just in case you didn’t get the point: “Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything …”
Don’t get me wrong, mothering requires sacrifice. Mothers sacrifice money, time, convenience and indulgences in order to raise children. But it does NOT require maternal suffering. There is precisely zero evidence that women who suffer in labor or breastfeed or practice attachment parenting have children who are happier or more successful. There’s no reason to feel bad for being unable to or refusing to conform to the “rules” of natural parenting.
So if suffering is not integral to raising happy, healthy children, why are natural parenting advocates exhorting women to suffer? Why do good mothers feel so bad?
Because one of the central unexamined assumptions of our culture is that women deserve to suffer. When your children show you that you are a good mother, you deserve to feel good. Don’t let acquaintances, Facebook friends, parenting “experts” — those who profit from or rest their self esteem on the tenets of natural parenting — make you feel bad.
Happy Mother’s Day!
