“Kids are more important than grown-ups,” Tess, in pigtails and a skort, announced to me one day when she was five, a worldview emerging sharply like a new tooth breaking gum. I love proclamations like these, delivered with such declarative power by my daughters. But I often find their content disconcerting, like when Liv, at four, informed me that, usually, girls are nurses and boys are doctors, and I realized that months of six a.m. Doc McStuffins viewings had not quite hit their mark.
I was particularly struck by Tess’s observation because of what I’d been reading. A fish can’t see the water. Apparently, neither can I. My friends and I sometimes remarked that we didn’t remember our own perfectly adequate parents going to quite the same lengths we often found ourselves caught up in. Full-time working mothers today spend as much time with their children as homemakers in the 1970s. I’d read that, but I’d never given much thought to the notion that modern standards of mothering were just that: some water we were swimming in. To give an idea much thought is to risk conscious conflict. To be conflicted is to contemplate change. To change is to jeopardize one’s status as a good mother, a status to be maintained no matter its prohibitive cost.
The modern imperatives of mothering emphasize that the needs of (one’s own) children are very, very important, while the needs of (one’s own female) self are very, very not—especially when the latter diverge from the former. Kids are more important than grown-ups. What else was Tess to make of my relentless attention to the concerns of her and her sister, a way of structuring our lives that George often acquiesced to but never independently endorsed? Under my orchestration, our evenings were devoted to their homework, their dinner, their hygiene, and whatever mildly age-inappropriate twenty-two-minute show they were currently into on Netflix; our weekends to their entertainment, which often involved no more than the playground behind the school, but still. One winter Saturday, George and I watched the entirety of Wonder Woman on pay-per-view uninterrupted while the kids tromped around our building, and it was the best winter Saturday I ever spent. “Let’s do this every weekend,” we said. We never did it again.
In a 2018 National Review essay critiquing what she called the “motherhood is awful canon,” journalist Heather Wilhelm notes, “Weirdly enough, the most common elements of torture invoked . . . seem largely self-imposed—the fruits of a particularly American earth-mother perfectionism, paired with a strange belief that good parenting involves making yourself as miserable as possible while sacrificing all sense of self. If you decide to co-sleep with your child in your bed until said child is two years old, for instance, you’re probably not going to get much sleep for two years. If you decide against scientific evidence that baby formula is bottled hemlock and can never be used, ever—even when you’re, say, sick in bed with strep throat—well, good luck to you.”1 But even mothers who don’t go to those lengths operate against that backdrop.
Miranda in Vermont half-heartedly rattles off a list of reasons why she’ll never be a perfect mom. “I don’t make everything from scratch. I use plastic containers instead of metal ones. The kids sometimes use the iPad when I’m by myself with them and trying to make dinner.” What makes Miranda’s list worthy of remark is that its items have less relationship to her children’s well-being than to how willing she is to inconvenience herself. Mothering, as Miranda attests, is a task evaluated not only by outcomes (the general health and happiness of children) but also by how much deprivation a woman is willing to endure. Self-denial as a virtue; self-flagellation as a rule. “I was so good today,” I remember the girls in my freshman dorm saying at day’s end, recounting how little they’d eaten—a fixation author Naomi Wolf once postulated was not about female beauty but, rather, female obedience. “I am so bad,” Miranda implies, having let her kids use the iPad so that she could prepare a not-from-scratch dinner in some peace.
The ideology of “intensive mothering”—a term coined by sociologist Sharon Hays in the late 1990s to describe the parenting ethos of the day—mandates: The best mothers always put their kids’ needs before their own, the best mothers are the main caregivers, the best mothers make kids the center of their universe. That’s the way Meredith Michaels and Susan Douglas describe the culmination of intensive mothering over a thirty-year period in 2004’s The Mommy Myth.2
In my own experience a decade later, it was no longer the best mothers who did those things but instead just the adequate ones. The best mothers saw those standards and raised them ten, as if the benefits of parental engagement knew no upper limit. In addition to contributing to their family’s income, they attended inconveniently timed classroom parties, volunteered with the parents’ association, devoted entire weekends to carpooling to far-flung sporting events, provided construction paper and ingredients for slime on demand, never missed a Fun Friday, carried snacks and water in their bags, sneaked vegetables into otherwise kid-friendly meals, made brownies for the bake sale, took part in the math-a-thon, left work early for school performances, and coaxed their kids into reading for thirty minutes a night just like the teacher said.
I was an adequate mother (see description of formerly “best mothers” above). I could not fathom ever devoting entire weekends to far-flung sporting events. I hoped I was not shortchanging my kids. I worried that I was. Here are your options in response to a mothering ideal that journalist Manohla Dargis has called “a noxious delusion, one that isn’t suitable for real women”3: guilt for not trying to live up to impossible standards, or shame for trying to live up to impossible standards.
As Ohio State psychologist Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan says, “It’s not okay to say mothers should prioritize family anymore. What comes out instead is that to be a good mom, you have to do all these things.”
In 1996’s The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, Hays defines intensive mothering as a gendered model of childrearing that is child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive. Hays describes the ideology as “neither natural or a given but . . . a socially constructed reality,”4 charting its rise over two hundred years of steadily intensifying norms. Like others who contemplate modern motherhood, she notes that those norms paradoxically kicked into ever-higher gear as women entered the workforce in greater numbers. The most challenging part for mothers—the contradiction she refers to in her title—is that outsize expectations leave working women in what has been called “the crosshairs of two incompatible ideals: the unencumbered worker and the ever-present mother.”5
Erica in Portland looks at it this way: “I am so grateful that moms who work and work full-time are not as demonized as they once were, but I feel there is now the pressure to work AND be a super mom. The social events, soccer teams, play dates, birthday parties and presents, etcetera are definitely not necessary, but they have become the norm in my peer group. It seems to be a vicious cycle. We’re all so busy and tired all of the time, but so much of this is self-imposed. I need to stop drinking the Kool-Aid and see what happens.” Research out of Ohio State suggests that what happens is this: When parents both set and live up to their own benchmarks of parenting, as opposed to adhering to societal ones, they feel more satisfaction with family life.
In her interviews with women, Hays found that no mother is spared the Kool-Aid, no matter her age or race or class or ethnicity (except maybe the French, depending on whom you ask6). While a working-class woman may not have the resources for so-called concerted cultivation—for karate or test prep or a piano, never mind the lessons—she nonetheless “makes financial sacrifices on behalf of her children. She devotes a good deal of time and attention to making sure that her children are well fed, well dressed, and well behaved. She firmly believes that her children’s well-being is far more important than her own convenience.”7
Sociologist Cameron Macdonald expands on this: “Even mothers who lack the financial resources, time, flexibility (or sleep) to approximate the at-home mother will go to great lengths to produce the image of the at-home mother. They produce the image because in addition to being accountable to others they are accountable to themselves and to the ideal of motherhood they hold.”8
Carissa in Seattle told me, “Part of me feeds off of this craziness of being super mommy. I’m rushing home from court to get the library book that my first-grader cried about forgetting at home, and I’m picking up the class fish that she wants to take home for the summer in the middle of my workday. I do every well-child check. In February, you’re going, ‘What’s the summer plan?’ Men are not thinking about that. The child care plan for next fall, are the forms in, it’s all crazy. A lot of other things fall by the wayside.”
We are both taken aback by and reluctantly impressed with our own efforts. One recent morning I found myself taking a picture of the weekday breakfast I had routinely been making for my kids (from-scratch oatmeal-applesauce pancakes for Tess; eggs over easy, a pan-fried potato, and cut strawberries for Liv). I wasn’t planning to show anyone. I just wanted documentation. The novelist Laura Lippman noted on Twitter in 2018, “When my biography is written (or my obit) (if either is written) I would like it to begin with the morning that I got up at 6 and made mayo because I could not bear to give daughter a dry turkey sandwich for camp lunch.”
In Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life, Annette Lareau found that while class determined the specifics of what parents deemed best for their kids (and, of course, the material advantages they were able to offer them), still, across-categories mothers expressed a tangential awareness of and adherence to the basic tenets of intensive mothering. Sociologist Anita Garey interviewed working-class mothers, who, like all others, emphasized their awareness of the import of acting in accordance with the “dominant-culture conceptions of mother-appropriate activities.”9
Hays pins the tenacity and ubiquity of intensive mothering ideology on our cultural ambivalence about unencumbered self-interest in pursuit of financial gain, the flip side of that coin. It can be balanced only by a class of people who put their own interests last in every single possible regard. As French feminist philosopher Élisabeth Badinter has written, “The tyranny of maternal duty . . . has thus far produced neither a matriarchy nor sexual equality, but rather a regression in women’s status. We have agreed to this regression in the name of moral superiority, the love we bear for our children, and some ideal notion of child rearing, all of which are proving far more effective than external constraints. . . . The best allies of men’s dominance have been, quite unwittingly, innocent infants.”10
Historian Jodi Vandenberg-Daves says, “It’s an ideology that exploits the sacrifices that women have shown themselves willing to make for their kids. Our neoliberal economy makes it so hard for parents, and we’re exploiting those sacrifices in many different ways, in terms of what’s expected of women in terms of holding it together while rent goes up and social programs get cut.”
Throughout the early years of the twenty-first century, the study of intensive mothering was largely anecdotal, based on interviews. Developmental psychologist Holly Schiffrin and her colleagues at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia wanted to parse the impact of the ideology on large swaths of women. “We were struggling with these issues ourselves. Why is there so much pressure on mothers? We wanted to quantify it,” Schiffrin said. So they developed a fifty-six-question measure they called the Intensive Parenting Attitudes Questionnaire.11
“We talk about parents, but when we say ‘parent,’ people think ‘mother,’” she explained.
Each question addressed one of five dimensions, and I’ll use those dimensions here to give you a bastardized version of the thing. Let’s call it a quiz. On a scale from one to five, where one is “strongly disagree” and five is “strongly agree,” rate the following statements:
Tally up your score. It will range from 5 to 25. The more Kool-Aid you have consumed, the higher your number will be.
Schiffrin and colleagues administered their questionnaire to 181 mothers of children five and under, along with a handful of measures of mental health. They found that intensive mothering beliefs and life satisfaction are inversely correlated—as one goes up, the other goes down. Women who agreed that mothers alone have a special talent for parenting felt less supported and more overwhelmed. These respondents also reported feeling generally dissatisfied and unable to cope. Women who strongly agreed that motherhood is extremely challenging also felt less satisfied, and more stressed and depressed. Finally, child-centeredness (mothers should tailor their lives to revolve around their children) predicted lower life satisfaction.12
Schiffrin wondered, “If intensive mothering is related to so many negative mental health outcomes, why do women do it?” She told me, “I don’t know who raised the bar, but once it gets raised, there’s anxiety that if you don’t go along, your child will be left behind. Other kids will have an advantage. My daughter had to do a diorama in first or second grade. When I went to her classroom for conferences, I saw dioramas I couldn’t have done myself. I thought, Is she going to get an F? How can she compete? Her project wasn’t as good as the others because hers was done by a seven-year-old. I try to find a balance, to resist. But it’s hard not to buy in to it when everyone else is doing it.”
With her example, Schiffrin demonstrates how the line blurs between intensive mothering and helicopter parenting. The much-maligned helicopter parent (and when I say “parent,” I mean “mother”) hovers over a child and, later, young adult to ensure that she never fails at anything—from crossing the monkey bars to writing a term paper. Intensive mothering can cover that ground, but its objective is a different matter. An intensive mother is not working primarily to assure her child’s absolute success but to establish her own goodness as a mom—at what is, after all, the most important thing. A good mother, it has been said, is in the mother-appropriate place at the mother-appropriate time.
Schiffrin studies both helicopter parenting and intensive mothering. She’s found that while the former is bad for kids,13 the latter is mostly bad for mothers,14 who then of course are shorter with their kids. Brigid Schulte, whose husband chose beer over helping with Thanksgiving meal prep, remembered staying up until two a.m. one February night, making cupcakes for her kids’ Valentine’s Day parties. “The next day, I was a complete bitch to my children because I was so tired. Who was I baking those cupcakes for? What was important there? I was doing it for the mommy police, as if they were watching me.”
It’s hard to fight the feeling that they are. Working mothers may be the most vulnerable to anxiety about those police—to imagining they must compensate for time not spent in service to their children. As a result, they sign up for what Nebraska comedians Kristin Hensley and Jen Smedley call “momming so hard” in order to make up for pursuing interests of their own. Christine in Illinois said, “When we first moved to the suburbs, it was a culture shock. There were not as many full-time working moms. I was self-conscious. I wanted my kids and us to be accepted. Moms sent home organic treats and homemade whatever, the best crafts I’ve ever seen. So when it came time to do Valentines, I thought we better really do them. I didn’t feel like I could just buy the ninety-nine-cent Pokémon box. I had to make them by hand. Now I’m trying to see where I feel comfortable cutting corners.”
A 2018 Parents magazine headline epitomized the rhetoric that mothers find themselves subject to: “Hilary Duff Doesn’t Feel Guilty About ‘Me Time’ (And You Shouldn’t Either!).” The assumption embroiled there does not need much unpacking. The article itself, like the many it resembles, makes clear that actress Duff’s “me time” is laudable only in the context of her properly intensive mothering. Full-time working mothers traded in demonization for prostrating themselves before their children for all the world to see.
In an article that purports to be about self-care, the writer uses the bulk of her allotted word count to report that Duff teaches her son about philanthropy, takes him waterskiing, plays tag with him to the point of exhaustion, ventures out with him in the rain for the explicit purpose of jumping in puddles, plays with toys, makes cookies, and builds forts. Only once Duff’s maternal bona fides have been established may we celebrate the fact that she doesn’t feel guilty for reading “one chapter of a book while Luca plays Legos in the next room.”15 In exchange for all those forts, there is your culturally sanctioned “me time.” Party on.
Arizona State psychologist Suniya Luthar has done work similar to Holly Schiffrin’s. Luthar has found that the presumed guilt Parents magazine is (not really) trying to absolve you of is linked to maternal distress. So is “role overload,” the outgrowth of momming so hard. Luthar’s research goes a step further, investigating resilience and the adjustment to these challenges. She found that the women who managed motherhood most adaptively had strong relationships with other adults. These women reported feeling unconditional acceptance, comfort from loved ones, authenticity in relationships, and partner and/or friendship satisfaction. Luthar wrote, “These findings are extremely encouraging in showing the strong protective potential of close, authentic relationships in buffering women through the myriad challenges of motherhood.”16 Her conclusion reminded me of something an older male professor told my class during grad school: “It’s the mother’s job to take care of the baby, and father’s job to take care of the mother.” Before I had kids, this struck me as benignly sexist. Now it also feels incomplete. Because what is a father taking care of a mother if it is not also taking care of the child?
But here is where we lose them: Fathers do not swim in our water. In fact, as the traditional pressure on men to be primary breadwinners has lifted, the traditional pressure on women to be primary caretakers has not. George often sees my prioritization of our kids’ needs as absurd. He’s nice about it. “You’re a very good mommy,” he’s taken to saying, and I am startled by how much I like to hear it.
On the other hand, his almost unflagging focus on his own needs feels equally outlandish to me, and my response is often testier. “I’m going to go get an espresso when we get home,” he says in the car late one Sunday afternoon on the way back from our family lice recheck as I am planning dinner in my head. I pause before responding with language we learned in couples therapy: “I’d prefer it if you took the kids to the playground while I cook.” He complies but with some irritation, because really, he feels no more compelled to meet my parenting standards than he does to give up carbohydrates to fit into his oldest jeans. If his pants get tight, he buys a bigger pair. If there’s an hour before dinner, he plants the kids in front of the television. If he wants an espresso, he goes off and gets himself one.
“My ex can sleep through the kids saying ‘Daddy, I’m hungry,’” Nancy, thirty-eight, who works in communications in Las Vegas, told me. “I can’t.”
Erica in Portland said, “I wonder if my husband and I just have different expectations. He’d be okay if they didn’t go to birthday parties. I want them to have fun things to do. And I want to spend time with them. I don’t want to sit on my phone with them while they watch TV. I don’t know whether he has the same desire. If I lowered my expectations, perhaps I’d feel less resentful.”
It’s hard to relax into that if one is a woman, living in a culture that purports to celebrate motherhood while actually propagating ineffable standards. We are no longer demonized for working. In exchange, we prostrate ourselves before our children for all the world to see. We beckon our partners to join us. They have no interest in dadding so hard. Yana in California told me, “I think men tend to be more relaxed. They don’t think well ahead or foresee problems. If a problem happens, they handle it, but so far as it hasn’t happened, they’re free to do something else until it does. Women are more proactive. We don’t let kids eat too much sugar or watch too much TV. We’re in hyper-prevention mode. A lot of times guys look at us and go, ‘You just make up all this unnecessary work for me.’ And we feel like they are not caring enough or involved enough.” Heather, thirty-nine, a lawyer and mother of a four-year-old in Las Vegas, was more blunt: “Men are lazy and have lower standards.” I couldn’t help but think: Might it not be nice to try that?
Boston College psychologist and psychoanalyst Usha Tummala-Narra put it more gently: “I know it can be very frustrating. Mothers think, How come you don’t feel this? And I think a lot of fathers wonder, Why do you have to do this so intensely? When one parent is attuned to the needs of the child and responds in that way, and the other parent holds the capacity for letting go, the two are in different psychological positions and need to learn from each other—how to nurture and how to let go. Both are necessary.” Women might relax their standards, but only alongside partners who are working to raise theirs, who are stalwart in their own commitment to the role of being half in charge.
With all the pressure on women to rejoice in puddle jumping in the rain, mothers might be forgiven for giving their male partners a hard time about half-hearted fathering. When a boy is carelessly dressed by his dad, it’s the mother who gets a gently chiding text about the getup from the school. The conversation around women’s supposed tendency to critique men’s parenting work is often reduced to this: If your male partner doesn’t do his share, it’s probably for the best, because you are so controlling. That’s what a mom friend of mine told me years ago when I lamented wanting more at home from George. “Oh, you wouldn’t really allow that,” she said in a just-between-us-girls whisper. “You wouldn’t be satisfied with the way he did things, and you’d just end up arguing about it. It’s better in the end the way it is.” My friend was then a (recently laid-off) stay-at-home mother, living a life of separate spheres. When she was in the other room changing a diaper, her husband, whom I never saw change a diaper, liked to grumble to me that my friend had forgotten how exhausting it was to work. They had two kids under four at the time. He somehow imagined I’d be sympathetic to his experience. The interactions warmed me to neither of them.
My friend’s wisdom was part of the water. Dads are incompetent, and moms are intolerant. It’s the stuff of old commercials and lazy sitcoms. It’s also got a name in academia, and that name is maternal gatekeeping. There is this gate around children, and mothers police it, keeping hapless fathers out. Or, rather, it is maternal characteristics that hinder paternal involvement. Per the literature, gatekeeping is “a collection of beliefs and behaviors that ultimately inhibit a collaborative effort between men and women in family work,”17 and “a phenomena that either encourages or discourages fathers from acting on their paternal identity.” If your baby daddy doesn’t do that much, rest assured it is your fault.
Vidya in L.A., whose husband does all the cooking and cleaning while she cares for their son, has seen how this can work. Her husband gets tense when she tries to roast a chicken. She does not roast it the way he likes. “Women need to chill out. My husband and women need to chill out about things being done well. If you don’t want to do everything, you can’t say, ‘This is exactly how you need to do this.’ It has an impact. You’re digging your own grave. Even if dinner is terrible. Women in my mothers’ group take photos of bad dinners their husbands make and post them online. It’s discouraging. It’s understandable that you want to feel better in the moment. But it’s such a self-fulfilling narrative.”
The study of gatekeeping behavior has found that the way women feel about their partner’s domestic role may impact men’s involvement. A mother’s beliefs and attitudes aren’t the whole story, but they do have a moderating affect. One 2005 study out of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign determined that a father’s perception of himself as a highly committed parent manifested in high father accessibility only when his wife believed that he should play a significant role. On the other hand, a father’s perception of his parenting commitment was not significantly related to his involvement when mothers reported more traditional beliefs.18
Complicating the matter further is the chicken-or-the-egg question. Are fathers holding back because mothers convey that they should, or do mothers with partners who hold back arrive at the convenient conclusion that fathering is best done in moderation? A 2008 study out of Ohio State seemed to suggest the latter. It found that when fathers held egalitarian values, mothers were more likely to facilitate their participation.19
An Israeli study in the same year determined that the typical female gatekeeper was characterized by low self-esteem, a strong feminine gender identification, and a salient maternal identity.20 A 2015 study by Ohio State’s Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan and her colleagues likewise determined that maternal expectations and psychological functioning were better predictors of gatekeeping than gender attitudes. Mothers with perfectionistic standards, unstable romantic relationships, and poorer prenatal mental health were more likely to close the gate on their children’s fathers. For their part, less confident fathers also seemed to invite more gate closing on the part of their partners.21
To illustrate maternal gatekeeping, Ohio State sociologist Claire Kamp Dush shows her undergraduates videos of couples interacting with their babies. “A grad student comes in and says, ‘Here’s a onesie. Someone undress the baby, someone dress her. You decide who does what.’ Men will get the baby, put down the baby, take off the baby’s clothes. Mom has a mortified look on her face. She tells him where the snaps are. She’s telling him what to do. He’s playing with the baby. She grabs the baby. Is she bossing him around because he isn’t doing it right or because he never does it? Is he doing a bad job because he never does it because he’s rejected this kind of caretaking, or is he doing a bad job because she’s always standing over him telling him what to do? Society puts all of the pressure of having perfect children on women. We translate that into micromanaging men’s parenting. It’s not our fault, exactly. It’s society’s fault.” Sociologist Sharon Hays writes that maternal behavior is “. . . neither a choice made by women nor a symbol of love and progress in society; rather, it is an indication of the power of men, whites, the upper classes, capitalists and state leaders to impose a particular form of family life on those less powerful than themselves.”22
UK author Rebecca Asher concurs. In Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality, she writes, “‘Shellshocked by the realization that the childrearing will be largely left to us, mothers become brittle and standoffish. The parenting efforts of men are routinely mocked and derided, with snarky comments about their ineptitude. . . . [T]his permitted and infectious caricaturing of men is a coping mechanism for women who have thrown in the towel on equality. . . . Gatekeeping is not the prime mover for pushing men out of the home: they were on the periphery or absent anyway. But it exacerbates a situation that already exists.”23
The women I spoke with acknowledged some micromanaging of their children’s dads. Molly, the foster care worker in Tennessee, said, “I do sometimes wonder if we disempower our partners. I’m kind of a perfectionist. I want it done the right way. I take his power away. And so I wonder, as a strong female, if that doesn’t play in to this. But I also watch more laid-back women, and I see the same situation.”
Natalie, from the suburbs of Los Angeles, said, “My husband, unless he gets cues from me, he’ll just be doing his own thing. This morning I’m rattling off what’s happening after school, and he’s like, ‘Where is their practice?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know, you have to look it up!’ But then I know it’s easier if I just take care of it, so I look it up. I enable him, but for my own sanity. For our own sanity, we take control.”
Courtney, thirty-four, a teacher in Atlanta with a two-year-old, said, “I see women who want things done their way, so they just do it. I see my husband doing things different a lot, and I try to correct him only if it’s necessary.”
Others have felt similarly compelled to rein in the impulse to keep the gate. Laura, the business owner in New York City, told me, “Before my son was born, I went to this class, and they said, ‘If your spouse is not harming the child, do not say a word.’ If they are not changing the diaper the way you would do it, you shut up and let them help. I’ve adopted that.”
The story of maternal gatekeeping is more complicated than the easy parable of the uptight, type A mom. As Kamp Dush acknowledged, it’s hard to draw clear lines between a father’s passive refusal and a mother’s active constraint. Women who can’t count on their partners to execute their duties in good faith may feel little choice but to keep the gate. Yana, the mother of three young boys in California, said, “I want us to be on time. I don’t want the kids to be late for school. If a teacher complains that our kid was sleeping in class because he’s not well rested, I care about that, and I want to fix it. I care about those things, so I have to be the one to be on top of them.”
Laura in New York said, “I’ll be out of town for work, and I’ll call my husband at ten at night, and our son, who is four, is still up. And I’ll say, ‘Why is he awake?’ And my husband answers, ‘He told me he wasn’t tired.’ If I suggest to him that this isn’t acceptable, am I nitpicking, or am I asking him to behave like a responsible adult? It’s hard putting a kid to bed when he doesn’t want to go. Accepting that our son is not tired is a good excuse. It’s complete self-absorption. They prioritize themselves.”
Ohio State’s Schoppe-Sullivan is one of the leading researchers on maternal gatekeeping. I raise the issue of mother blaming when we talk. It’s a concern she’s heard before. “That’s the criticism I experience in my work. But if you just say fathers need to do more, it doesn’t recognize that we all exist within systems. Multiple people in families need to change in order for us to get unstuck and move toward greater equality. Including children. My daughter thinks only Mom can do certain things. It bugs me that she’s gotten this message. In some circumstances, it may be true, but that’s a fraction of the things that she comes to me with. And yes, fathers need to step up, to consider whether what they do is best for their child’s development. But then what if a father gets more involved and a mother feels threatened? If she lets go, she can lose the only source of validation she’s getting from the outside world.” She is sympathetic to that conundrum. Schoppe-Sullivan believes that excessive criticism and controlling behavior can grow out of a mother’s concern about losing maternal standing, the one thing a woman who’s borne children might reliably feel valued for.
In Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself, Third Wave Fund co-founder Amy Richards writes, “Just saying ‘parenting’ rather than ‘mothering’ can threaten some women—and it can also be seen as disrespectful to those who see mothering as their primary identity. Some mothers have reclaimed ‘mother’ because using ‘parent’ felt dishonest—it was leading people to believing that the tasks and responsibilities were mutually handled, thus rendering their work less visible. . . . Not everyone believes that women are as smart or as strong as men, but a woman’s maternal instincts are rarely questioned; therefore women hold on tight to that responsibility.”24
There is no socially recognized model of a mother who is a secondary caregiver. Danielle in Boston knows this because she is one. Her husband is around more, and he and their daughter have the tighter bond. Danielle says, “On one hand, I’m happy they’re as close as they are. On the other hand, I don’t really belong to the mom club. There’s the feeling of being the odd one out. It brings up anxiety for me. Am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing? There are all these messages out there. In TV shows. In how people interact. Even after Jeff has taken Nora to play two or three times with someone, even if he’s connected with the moms, they’ll still email me and only me about birthday parties. The school calls me rather than him. I notice it a lot because our roles are reversed. All those things communicate that I’m the one who’s supposed to be in charge.”
Having stepped out of bounds, Danielle experiences unease. Sociologist Lisa Wade believes that men feel similarly on the other side. She says, “When push comes to shove, men want to be an equal part of children’s lives, but not more than they want to be successful at work. Their identity as breadwinner is more important to them than their identity as an egalitarian parent. I think men still have a really difficult time imagining themselves as parents first and workers second. Women have seen themselves that way for a long time.”
For her 2005 book, Competing Devotions: Career and Family Among Women Executives, Mary Blair-Loy looked at three cohorts of highly educated, high-achieving women forced to decide which role came first. Many of the successful older women she interviewed had eschewed children or spouses altogether, assuming they could not have both families and careers. In the younger generation, Loy watched women with kids struggle to choose between two options: that of devoted worker or that of devoted mother.
While parenthood and work satisfaction need not necessarily be in conflict, Loy notes, the intensive mothering and intensive working standards that dominate our culture often are. She writes, “If it were just a question of survival, families and companies would not demand so much of their members. The devotion to work and the devotion to family schemas are institutionalized: they create taken-for-granted rules of thought and behavior in everyday life.”25 Loy’s so-called devotion to work schema valorizes intense career commitment and dedication to one’s job or earnings. The devotion to family schema demands that primary commitments remain with family and children. The stereotypes of the type A mother and the bumbling father are underscored by the gendered devotion to family and devotion to work ideals. Taken for granted in the social order, these roles acquire the air of the inevitable, with hardly an alternative to be found.
When actual lives diverge from the schemas, some research suggests that men and women feel the pull to declare fidelity to traditional postures. In the 1990s and 2000s, family researchers in the U.S. found that women who outearned their husbands were doing more housework or a greater share of housework than other women. The findings were understood to evidence so-called gender deviance neutralization, or the attempt to exaggerate gender-typical behaviors in order to offset atypical ones.26
In 2004, a close look at families in the U.S. and Sweden found that men who earned as much as their wives did more housework than men who earned less than their wives. A 2012 study proposed that it was no longer a woman’s greater income that predicted attempts to neutralize gender deviance but, rather, whether she worked in a predominantly male field. In 2015, University of Southern California sociologist Jennifer Hook compared time-use diaries to other kinds of self-reports about housework. From her comparison, she concluded that “gender deviants” were not actually spending any more or less time on housework; they were simply reporting their contributions in ways that hewed closer to gendered norms.27
In 2013, a study of seven countries (Cameroon, Chad, Egypt, India, Kenya, Nigeria, and the UK) determined that women “ease the stress” their higher earning caused by doing more women’s work at home. That study’s authors conclude: “A woman’s earning may seem like a burden rather than a gift to her husband. . . . In a society in which breadwinning is a social representation of manhood, wives whose husbands are not good providers often submit to their husbands’ dominance because they feel guilty for contributing to [his] sense of failure.”28
While careful handling of the male ego might (or might not) go down smoothly in Cameroon, it’s difficult on the coasts. The comedian Ali Wong answers “with a snap in her voice” when she is asked “with a note of concern” how her husband feels about her success: “He feels great. It’s not hard to feel good about your spouse making money.”29
Laura, whose New York City business is the source of most of her family’s income, tells me, “My husband is resentful of my professional success. When he lost his job, he finally agreed to come to one of my networking events, a cocktail hour with high-level people with big jobs. It just made him sad that he didn’t have what I had. Instead of saying, ‘I’m really proud of you,’ he said that it made him sad.” The two shy away from discussions about how much money Laura is making. “We don’t talk about it,” she says. “He knows how much I’m bringing home, but not how well the business is doing at all times. I told him at the end of the year last year that I’d had a good year, but I don’t talk about it throughout the year. I’m protecting his self-esteem. I don’t hide my success—I just talk about it in other places.” Laura is not an outlier.
Psychologist Francine Deutsch’s fieldwork with dual-earner couples led her to ask, “If men get praised for changing diapers, why don’t women get praised for earning money? In the economy of gratitude, money doesn’t do much for women. Women are as likely to have to apologize for their incomes as to be appreciated for them.”30
Clearly, it requires some mental gymnastics on the part of women and men to restore an ephemeral rightful order to lives that are not quite traditional. Mothers control and fathers bumble. Fathers earn and mothers take care. Families agree to see a mother’s employment as less essential than her parenting, even when she’s an equal or greater earner. “It’s nice that your mother makes money, but really, it’s just extra,” I remember my father, a lawyer in the public sector, saying to my sister and me when we were kids. It seemed a point of pride for him. And I heard it as the gender rule it was. I made careless financial choices in my twenties because of this message, which in truth came from everywhere. Why would a young woman bother to save when she’d someday have a man to do it for her? “It is so hard to give up the illusion that someone will always take care of us,” Betty Friedan has said. Gender rules are rock, paper, and scissors to economically rational behavior. In Blair-Loy’s study, it was always the woman who left the workforce to care for children regardless of which half of the couple was earning more.
Women and men also characterize their professional responsibilities through a gendered lens. In her study of 150 dual-income couples, Deutsch found that no matter a woman’s profession, husbands and wives described her job as more flexible. In one pair she spent time with, the wife was a doctor, the husband a professor. In another, the genders of those occupations were reversed. Both couples independently explained that the wives’ professions allowed them more leeway at work. Gretchen, forty, a mother of two and a reporter in Baltimore, is often on deadline but nevertheless told me, “My job is more flexible.” Her husband works for an event planning company. When I asked her to say more about their relative flexibility, she went on, “I guess, you know, it’s interesting. Women will be flexible when they need to be. And men hope that others are flexible. I work at an NPR news station. If I finish a story after the kids go to bed, my editor is understanding. But my husband has clients that are going bananas. I could say I’m not going to be flexible, or that I can’t be, but it would make things very difficult.”
Deutsch said, “I had somebody else in the post office telling me his job was so inflexible. Then it came out that a woman in his office had worked out her hours around her child care. Men are less willing to ask.” As Deutsch writes in Halving It All, flexibility is in the eye of the beholder. And we see it in the glimmer of each mother’s watchful gaze.
Contemporary mothering ideologies leave us with the idea that women must naturally and joyfully eviscerate all personhood for the sake of those they love so fiercely. This is what the poet Adrienne Rich refers to as “the invisible violence of the institution of motherhood.”31 Intensive mothering is in the way—a thorny living thing between us and the nongendered parenting we’d like to live to see. It is the fantasy delivery system for what anthropologist Sarah Hrdy has called 24-hour lifelong shifts of unconditional love.
Intensive mothering directs mothers, and not fathers, to constantly strive to optimize every opportunity for their children, to tailor every move to meet their needs. We leave fathers in our dust, and they do not protest. I am not suggesting here that women be more like men. That is a model whose time has long since passed. But recall that fathers’ time in child care has increased, and that mothers have failed to adjust with a correspondent downshift in what they themselves have taken on. Was this a missed opportunity? A chance to redistribute the 65 percent? The ideology makes that hard. Erica in Portland said, “I have a ‘healthy’ dose of mom guilt, the constant feeling that I’m not doing enough or doing it well enough. If I did less, I can only imagine I would have more of that.”
Mothers in overdrive are an impediment to equity, but more so is the throbbing belief at the heart of the whole impossible system, the idea that women are better able to rear children. (“As if there were any other job on earth for which you’d argue that one half of the population as varied as it may be was uniquely qualified!” sociologist Kathleen Gerson said.) No evidence supports this, and some even contradicts it: In studies of single-parent families in the late 1990s, the sex of that parent was shown to be unrelated to the children’s well-being.32 I’m not suggesting here that women be more like men. In our current state, few families would function well. I am suggesting, rather, that moms be more like dads. That mothers, like their partners, revere the fact that the child has another parent, and that their relationship is sacrosanct. Mothers—and here’s Hrdy again—are an easily acquired taste.33 But they need not be the single, solo most important thing. Maybe that’s an honor best shared by two.
Said Schoppe-Sullivan, “We can move toward equality and involved fathers, but not to the point where we can accept the fact that mothers and fathers are interchangeable for children. People don’t really believe that. There’s implicit bias, no matter what people say in surveys.”
The widespread belief in mother knows best—the reigning philosophy among parents across class lines—must be overwritten if gender equity in the family is ever to take hold. Its grip helps to explain why norms have shifted outside the family but remain powerful inside it. Parenting is both so private and so public. We hold ourselves accountable for its proper performance and risk condemnation if we go off script.
Those scripts are intimate and increasingly visible. In 2014, Pew Research found that 75 percent of parents in the U.S. use social media. Of those, 80 percent of mothers and 65 percent of fathers agree that they receive parenting support from their networks.34 Women bowing to the cultural prescriptions of the times also often appear to be using the medium to present evidence of their Herculean parenting efforts in beautiful pictorial displays or fifteen-second videos. Facebook and Instagram have become outlets for mothers who love to mother to share their love of mothering with the world. And they often have tens of thousands of followers (click here to shop the collection).
A 2014 survey of two thousand mothers by the website BabyCentre found that Facebook was driving mothers in their thirties to “new levels of competitiveness.” Publisher Mike Fogarty said, “The word ‘competitive’ came up time and time again when we asked millennial mums to sum up their experience of motherhood. The pressure to be perceived to be an alpha mummy has rocketed since they all signed up to Facebook. Some said they felt [pressured] to go to baby swimming classes or baby singing and music classes because they felt if they didn’t they were looked upon as a bad parent.”35 Social psychologist Lisa Lazard at the Open University in the UK interviewed mothers about their social media behavior and found that social demands placed on parents (and to be clear, when she says “parent,” she means “mother”) drive public expressions of pride in their children. She concluded, “Social media becomes one way parents can visually demonstrate how they are meeting these parenting demands.” It can also be another task for mothers. In one survey, 87 percent of moms report that it is their job alone to share photos online for extended family to enjoy.36
Schoppe-Sullivan, Kamp Dush, and colleagues at Ohio State also looked at the impact of Facebook but restricted their sample to new mothers. They surveyed 127 women from the Midwest with Facebook accounts to see how “New mothers, in particular, may use Facebook to practice behaviors that align with their mothering identity and meet broader societal expectations, or in other words, to do motherhood.”37 They asked: Are individual differences in new mothers’ psychological characteristics associated with their use and experiences of Facebook? And are these psychological characteristics associated with greater risk for depressive symptoms via their experiences on the site? Analysis of the data found that mothers concerned with external validation and those who believed that society holds them to excessively high standards were more active on Facebook; they also responded more strongly to the comments they received there. Mothers who were perfectionistic and prone to seeking external validation experienced increases in depressive symptoms the more time they spent online, where images of hard momming live on in perpetuity.
We’re rewarded with likes and positive regard when we “do gender normatively.” Even in Scandinavian countries, where work-family policies are engineered specifically to foster gender-equitable work-life balance, the ideology of intensive mothering encourages maternal sacrifice—and has shown inimitable resolve.38 In France, where women have largely refused to take up the ideology, they have the benefit of their unique history, of a long-standing recognition of their extramaternal identities.39 Most everywhere else, as Deutsch explained to me, “Someone might believe in a theoretical way that men and women should be equal but still believe that mothers hold a special place in a child’s life that can’t be duplicated by fathers. A number of things go along with that, like the belief that mothers have a special ability to nurture. And deep down, women believe it is their responsibility. They don’t feel it’s fundamentally a shared responsibility.”
The position we are in is not our fault, exactly. As Kamp Dush says, it’s society’s fault. The psychoanalyst and podcaster Tracy Morgan has expanded on this idea. Describing a female patient’s retelling of a difficult morning (her babysitter had canceled as she was supposed to leave for the dentist), Morgan recounted: “[She said,] ‘I never think to even ask my husband if he would come home from work and watch our child so I can make it to the dentist. What’s wrong with me that I don’t think to ask him? It’s so stupid of me.’ Her attack on herself was very difficult to sit with but also very common—this turning a situation that we could understand as institutionally arranged, as politically arranged, and personalizing it, and saying, ‘This is just me. What’s wrong with me?’”40
The particularly American ideal of nuclear-family self-sufficiency (as opposed to the one where it takes a village) requires an intensive parent, and then all that can follow are the gender inequities inherent in that setup. Women who stay in their rightful place can take pleasure in the stereotype of the strong woman—selfless, nurturing, supportive—the one who undergirds her family’s success. Men don’t make this easy to set askew. Erica says, “My son comes home from school every day with a folder with a homework sheet and notes from the teacher. I look at it every night. I went out of town for work. I asked my husband to make sure he did his homework and put it in his backpack. My husband didn’t do it. He tells me, ‘I don’t think of things, you have to remind me.’ But I lay things out for him, and they still do not happen.” And women, despite their resentment, can’t always envision giving up the honor. They hesitate to do what fathers have long been able to do: revere the fact that the child has another parent, and that the relationship is sacrosanct.
Nicole in Portland said, “I’m not sure I would ever give up being the primary parent. The unconditional love is very, very addictive. I like the idea of being irreplaceable. I can be replaced in my job and even in my marriage. No one can replace a loving mother.”
Christine in Illinois said, “I feel a sense of accomplishment and pride in being the primary parent and being a supermom. I never anticipated that, but since the responsibility arose, I’ve given a hundred percent, and now I just own it. When I was pregnant with my first, I was actually really reluctant about any identity change with regard to being a mom. If my husband had stepped into the role, I may very well have welcomed that. However, since he didn’t, I went full in. Now, seven years later, I find so much self-worth in my role as a mom, even though it can still feel like too much or unfair, even though there is still resentment.”
Like all labor, the job of most important is divided with some difficulty. To give up one’s primacy is not effortless, no matter if it’s a privilege fraught with strain. It’s hard to admit, though I know it to be true, that I relish being my daughters’ best parent (they adore George, but adoration is no substitute for need). If George had stepped into the role, I may very well have welcomed that, but when he did not I ceded sleep, leisure time, and a feeling of fairness in my home for the fantasy that my daughters would choose me first, love me most. Too often my husband absents himself, and then I’ve also responded by closing him out—not with criticism but with omnipresence. With chocolate chip pancakes and ponytails and dance parties and Friends binges. The data supports this contention of scholars, that we must challenge the perception that women are inherently better at parenting in order for things to change. But what will we be giving up when we do?
Men, for their part, don’t seem to get quite what they are missing. April, the New Yorker raising two children with her wife, was the secondary parent when her kids were first born, and remembers the experience like this: “When Jill was primary-parenting, I felt so restricted. I felt like the sidekick, the fifth wheel. They were moving in a groove together, and I was left flailing behind.”
Mothers and fathers may both have something to lose when men become co–primary parents. But likewise, there is so much that they’ll gain.