Mothers feel pressured on the pedestal
Society’s ‘ideal’ can weigh on some women
“I’m married, and my husband and I are full-time entrepreneurs with two active children but no grandparents in the immediate area and no siblings to balance it out either. It’s been very overwhelming.” Amber Aaron Mosley
Mother’s Day brings syrupy ads and greeting card platitudes. Maybe flowers, jewelry, breakfast made by someone other than her.
But there’s dissonance between the ritual and the reality.
We celebrate moms who work to meet society’s demands, who overextend to fill in the gaps, who never cease sacrificing for those they love.
“This ideal of what it means to be a good mom is to put your child’s needs above your own. An ideal worker in the U.S. economy means being fully dedicated and committed with your undivided attention – that you can come in at a moment’s notice, that you don’t have anything that distracts. This doesn’t work if
you have kids,” said Caitlyn Collins, a sociology professor at Washington University.
Economic, cultural and even technological changes have altered the landscape of motherhood in recent decades, piling on new pressures and needs:
❚ In 1975, more than half of mothers stayed home with their kids. Today, both parents work in 70% of families with children.
❚ Child care costs on average $12,350 to $13,900 a year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In some cities, it’s double that.
❚ Dads are taking on more parenting responsibilities, but surveys show it’s still unequal in more than half of households even when both parents work full-time.
❚ Nearly half of grandparents live more than five hours from their grandkids.
❚ Moms spent 14 hours a week outside work on child care in 2016, up from 10 hours a week in 1965, according to the Pew Research Center.
❚ Mothers who compare themselves with others on social media feel less competent and less positive about their co-parenting relationships.
“People think motherhood is inherently overwhelming because we’ve made that idea seem natural,” said Virginia Rutter, a professor of sociology at Framingham State University in Massachusetts and author of “Families as They Really Are.” “We normalize the hardships of motherhood . ... This is now what’s familiar.”
America the outlier
According to Collins’ research, among Western industrialized nations, American mothers stand apart for their stress and feel the most acute workfamily conflict. It starts the moment women become mothers. The USA is the only country in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that doesn’t offer paid leave on a national basis.
❚ Paid leave is available to 17% of U.S. workers through their employer, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
❚ Unpaid leave is available under the federal Family Medical Leave Act for 59% of workers, but many moms can’t afford to take it.
❚ Nearly half of women in the USA took less than two months of maternity leave, and nearly one in four said they returned to work within two weeks of giving birth, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families.
Once women return to work fulltime, most need child care. In the OECD, the USA is one of the five least affordable nations for child care.
More than half of Americans live in neighborhoods classified as child care deserts, defined as “a ratio of more than three young children for every licensed child care slot,” according to an analysis in 2018 from the left-leaning Center for American Progress.
Child care breakdowns often mean at least one parent has to miss work. Over a six-month period, 45% of parents miss work at least once because of a child care issue, according to the nonprofit Child Care Aware of America. When gaps in child care exist, it’s moms who are most likely to bridge them: 75% of working moms stay home when a kid is too sick to go to school.
Dads do more, but moms do most
Despite dads spending more time on child care than they did a half-century ago and 40% of moms being the breadwinner in their families, more than half of two-parent households where both parents work say moms do more to manage the day-to-day of their kids’ lives, according to Pew.
“Even the most egalitarian couples, once they have kids, find it very different and difficult to have egalitarian division of labor,” Collins said. “Marriages turn more traditional.”
Same-sex couples report more equitable divisions of labor, but research shows that in those relationships, the highest-earning parent tends to take on fewer household responsibilities.
Gendered attitudes are reflected in polling on public policy. Pew found 82% of Americans say mothers should have paid maternity leave, and 69% support paid paternity leave. Those who support paid leave for both say mothers should receive more time off than fathers.
The gender pay gap widens when women have kids. Women are paid less than men, even in the same jobs, according to Pew, and the wage gap is worse for women who face a steep “mommy tax.” Motherhood is tied to a 4% decrease in earnings per child, while fatherhood is tied to a 6% increase, according to a study in 2014 by University of Massachusetts-Amherst sociology professor Michelle Budig. The penalty for mothers is worse for low-income women and is especially harmful to the one in four mothers who raise children on their own.
‘It takes a village’ ... where’s mine?
The proverbial “village” it takes to raise a child feels increasingly rare. Forty-four percent of parents over 50 have grandchildren living more than five hours away, according to a study from AARP in 2012. Among U.S. grandparents who’ve helped their kids out with child care in the past year, nearly three in four say they did so only occasionally, according to Pew.
“I grew up in my mother’s village with her parents, her sister and brother and all the extended family,” said Amber Aaron Mosley, 35, who lives in Los Angeles with her husband, 5-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter. “My mother’s family helped raise me. If she needed a break, her parents lived 15 minutes away, her siblings were 30 minutes away. I’m married, and my husband and I are full-time entrepreneurs with two active children but no grandparents in the immediate area and no siblings to balance it out either. It’s been very overwhelming.”
Neighbors and other families are less likely to offer support. Gone are the days of mothers keeping an eye on neighborhood kids from the porch. Those moms are working or driving children to activities or making dinner. If children are seen playing unsupervised, the mother might get reported to police.
Mom shaming
Some moms turn to social media for community. Forty-five percent of mothers who use social media “strongly agree” they get support from friends on networks, according to Pew.
Last month, a mother’s Facebook post went viral for its resonant depiction of the often conflicting advice moms receive, such as “Keep your mind on your work and not your tiny helpless baby” but “Enjoy your kids. THESE ARE THE GOOD TIMES.”
Social media can create stresses. According to a study from Ohio State University, mothers who post more on Facebook report more depressive symptoms after nine months of parenthood than other moms.
Society has long sent messages about what it means to be an “ideal mother” – but the internet and social media have opened new spaces for moms to suffer judgment.
Six in 10 mothers of young kids say they’ve been criticized about their parenting, according to a report in 2017 from the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health at the University of Michigan.
Mosley said that as a mother of color, she has felt a particular kind of scrutiny.
“Sometimes we all have ... complete fail moments in motherhood – oh my goodness, I dropped the ball, I made a huge mistake – and sometimes there can be a feeling that we’re being judged for a lack of capability rather than just
“I’m finding a lot of perfectionism in young parents right now that comes from some of the ways that they were raised. They feel they have to be perfect parents and so sometimes they want every little detail spelled out for them. I think there’s a lot of fear because of that.”
Janet Lansbury
Author of “No Bad Kids”
having a terrible moment,” she said.
Parent educator Janet Lansbury, host of the podcast “Unruffled” and author of “No Bad Kids,” said shame and pressure contribute to moms feeling more stressed these days. “I’m finding a lot of perfectionism in young parents right now that comes from some of the ways that they were raised. They feel they have to be perfect parents and so sometimes they want every little detail spelled out for them,” she said. “I think there’s a lot of fear because of that.”
There is also fear due to the flood of health scares and negative news that comes through social media. Roughly three in four parents say school shootings or the possibility of one are a significant source of stress, according to the American Psychological Association’s 2018 Stress in America report.
What’s a mom to do?
Lansbury said rejecting society’s impossible expectations begins with reframing what it means to be a mom.
“If we’re feeling like we have to keep our child happy and fulfill their every desire and ride the waves of their emotions, all of those things are not going to allow us to have self-care,” she said. “So my focus with parents is helping them to see their child as a whole person, so you can be in an actual relationship with them where it’s not you just servicing them all the time.”
Sally Lipe, a mom of a 15- and 17-yearold from Columbia, South Carolina, said she wishes she’d realized that when her daughters were young.
“In hindsight, I should have made the kids do more for themselves. They could’ve started doing their own laundry. They could’ve been making their own lunches,” said Lipe, who worked part-time when her children were young and works full-time as a human resources manager. “You get into a habit of doing things all the time.”
For working parents especially, Lansbury said it’s important to temper expectations. “I think if parents could normalize what life actually looks like with these challenges, then I think they’d be able to survive them better and actually have more genuine joy,” Lansbury said.
There are things individual moms can do to release themselves from expectations that are at best untenable, and at worst dangerous. Collins said mothers must recognize what they deserve – support, equity and gratitude that goes beyond a box of chocolates.
‘Problems all of us face’
Advocates said one of the biggest obstacles in enacting family-friendly policies is their incompatibility with American individualism, which says people are responsible for solving their own problems. “Somehow the shame moms feel when they’re facing adversity within their families makes them believe this is a problem they must own as individuals,” said Sarah Fleisch Fink, general counsel and director of workplace policy at the National Partnership for Women and Families. “They don’t see that these are problems all of us face regardless of race or ethnicity or socioeconomic status.”
Collins interviewed 32 American mothers for her book “Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving.” She said that during her conversations, moms frequently burst into tears. Many felt they were failing.
“What I heard from working moms was this idea that when things were difficult, it was their own fault, and they needed to try harder,” Collins said. “And if they did try harder ... they could relieve the cascade of stress they were facing. They didn’t expect help from partners or their government, and when they did have equal division with a partner, or when they were allowed flexibility at work, women felt abundantly grateful. We don’t think of these things as rights or entitlements. We think of them as privileges, and when you think of something like parental leave as a privilege rather than as a right, it changes what you think you deserve.”
The majority of paid-leave supporters across the political spectrum say paid time off should be provided by employers rather than the government, according to Pew.
“A lot of people say, ‘I don’t want to pay for your kids.’ I’m confused by that,” Collins said. “We already know this is good for kids and families, good for businesses and the economy. The hurdle we face is people don’t want to pay into a system to support everyone. But we have a public education system for kids 5 to 18 that’s publicly funded. We’re already doing that for kids, raising them in some collective sense of knowledge and values.”
The U.S. Department of Labor said in a report in 2015 that paid maternity leave would increase women’s participation in the workforce. The absence of such a policy, it said, costs the country more than $500 billion of additional economic activity per year. The Center for American Progress said nearly $29 billion in wages is lost when working families don’t have access to affordable child care or paid family and medical leave.
Paid leave and flexible workplace policies make workers happier and more productive, according to a White House report in 2014.
Research suggests expanding paid leave would reduce public assistance spending, according to a report in 2014 by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
“Women have been making things work a long time, but it takes a big toll,” said Melissa Boteach at the National Women’s Law Center. “Somehow everyone figures out how to make it work, but what is the cost of that? Not moving up in a job? Getting fired because you didn’t have paid leave? Not being able to get the degree you want because you couldn’t find stable child care? When you add up the losses, the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of providing parents what they need.”
Where are the politicians?
The paid leave plan many Democrats support, reintroduced in February by 2020 presidential hopeful Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., is called The FAMILY Act, which would create a national fund to provide workers with up to 12 weeks of partial income when they take time off for the birth or adoption of a child, their own serious health condition or one of a family member or certain military caregiving. The proposal would be funded by employee and employer payroll contributions, averaging less than $2 a week for a typical worker.
Every congressional candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination is a co-sponsor of The FAMILY Act.
Republicans have introduced their own proposals. During his State of the Union in February, President Donald Trump expressed support for paid family leave, which his daughter Ivanka has long championed. His 2020 budget proposes paid leave to new mothers and fathers, including adoptive parents.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo., proposed a family leave plan in which new parents could pull from their Social Security benefits to take time off.
Advocates are encouraged more lawmakers recognize the value of paid leave, though sorting through the details remains a challenge.
“There’s disagreement around what the policy looks like, what it contains and how it’s paid for, but it wasn’t that long ago that we didn’t have agreement on the existence of a problem. It was an integral part of the last election cycle, and we expect it to be the same for the next one,” Fleisch Fink said.