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'Postpone or even forego motherhood'
Want to improve the birth rate? Stop being so harsh on mothers.
In their quest to make motherhood great again, conservatives have set a very high bar for those wanting to make a go of it. Enter the all-or-nothing mother.
She must breastfeed baby, and if she’s unable to produce milk for whatever reason, she’s just not trying hard enough. She can’t leave baby in a crib, or sleep-train baby, or leave baby alone with his father or extended family, because Mama must be with baby at all times, lest she give baby a lifetime of attachment-related trauma.
Rather than purity-spiraling and leading the birth rate into further decline, conservatives could simply tell women the truth: that they can relax, because there are a thousand different ways to be a good mother.
She must feed baby exclusively organic food, but she can’t have a job to help her afford it — that might require the ultimate dereliction of maternal duty: day care.
Not that preschool, full-day kindergarten, or half-day kindergarten is much better. Come to think of it, homeschooling is really the only path for any mother who cares about her children. And so on and so forth.
Domestic girlbosses
In theory, such all-or-nothing motherhood applies the tightly wound, busy-busy-busy culture of high-status, white-collar professions to the domestic sphere — where the stakes are the lives and souls of one’s own children, far greater than corporate presentations and spreadsheets ever could be!
And yet, in practice, this vision of motherhood makes it seem intolerable — not to mention impossible — to the only audience that matters: impressionable young women and girls. Far from convincing them of the value of motherhood, making motherhood out to be an all-or-nothing ordeal makes young women wonder if the feminists really were right, if being a mother is incompatible with being a full person.
I say this as a member of that demographic: I’m 23 years old and single, and while I am quite conservative and have always wanted children, I’m surrounded primarily by moderate to liberal, professional-class women my age who don’t know what they want.
Child-hating hags?
My peers, for the most part, aren’t the child-hating, travel-obsessed hags they’re all too often made out to be by conservative media — they happen to actually like children, sometimes in spite of themselves.
While some of their apprehension toward motherhood is absolutely driven by a culture that eggs on adult narcissism and extended adolescence, much of it is driven by the opposite extreme: the expectation that not only will they have to give up their friends, their hobbies, and their careers when they have children, but they will have to become completely dependent on their husbands for their financial and social life and will spend every moment hovering over their children with no self left besides “mother.”
When young women feel like motherhood is all or nothing, that either you stay “child-free” and keep yourself or become a mother and lose yourself, is it any wonder they’re choosing to keep themselves in greater numbers?
More time to spare
While this failure to create tolerable motherhood norms is nonpartisan — it’s telling, for instance, that conservative mothering and hippie mothering have basically become one and the same — conservatives have a special responsibility here.
After all, unlike liberals, conservatives are interested in getting more women to have more children. Instead of tilting at the windmill of middle-class maternal neglect, conservatives should acknowledge the reality that working mothers today spendmoretimewith their children than stay-at-home mothers did a generation ago, and yet children today are more anxious and less self-sufficient than ever before.
Conservatives would do well to keep in mind that women in traditional cultures have the proverbial village to help them raise their children, something American women, even those with traditional values, usually lack.
As a result, while many of the demands conservatives make of mothers ostensibly resemble traditional culture, they deviate from traditional culture in the one way that counts: Rather than enmeshing mothers in the fabric of society, over-intensive conservative mothering norms often alienate mothers from everyone else.
Love's legacy
Why drive mothers crazy — and deter would-be mothers from having children — all for the sake of what is essentially a neurotic, individualistic ideology that doesn’t even seem to improve children’s outcomes — and might actually make them worse?
Rather than purity-spiraling and leading the birth rate into further decline, conservatives could simply tell women the truth: that they can relax, because there are a thousand different ways to be a good mother. And that, when we think of our mothers as adults, we don't remember the lifestyle choices they made — day care or not, organic or not, home birth or not — but rather the love they gave us — the deep, unconditional love that only a mother can give.
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Implausibly, October is here. My eldest turned four yesterday. Dare I say that disbelief at the pace of the passing of time — whether the unbearably long days or the unfathomably short years — is a universal maternal experience?
Oh, the melancholia of motherhood ... the slippery seconds, the diamonds raining from the sky, the inability to catch them in your hands for longer than a moment.
Because our social lives as moms have been so hollowed out by technology and the changing participation of women in the workplace, all of these little things in their little ways now require courage, consistency, and creativity.
Now that I no longer have three three and under, I thought I’d share my lessons learned from the experience, because people often ask how I manage.
I don’t know if I’ll ever feel fully qualified to proffer parental wisdom. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and my kids are underbaked. But in terms of keeping one’s sanity and smoothing day-to-day operations, I think I have some helpful tips to share. My advice boils down to three virtues: courage, consistency, and creativity.
Courage
Victim mentality is the antithesis of courage. It is pervasive, and it is practically, spiritually corrosive. Reject it.
One of the defining spirits of the modern age — unfortunately for everyone — is that which defines the self as a perpetual victim of circumstance and makes appeals to others, for pity or provision, on those terms.
This is the heart of identity politics, and of leftism generally, and so plays a major role in formal political discourse domestically and internationally. But the political right is not a stranger to this pattern of thought. In fact, self-identified right-wing people often indulge it while they denigrate it in others.
Take for example the ascendant “meninist” movement, which in many cases has retained the icon of victimhood but simply switched its subjects from women to men. As a Catholic, I cringe to see the same tendency in reactionary traditionalist movements that seem to relish their status as perpetually persecuted. Social media enables it by structurally prioritizing talk over action.
Victim mentality is dangerous, especially at scale. I would argue that it paves the way for totalitarianism. This mindset arrests the individual’s capacity to self-govern and achieve real things in the real world by redistributing responsibility through externalizing locus of control. It relieves persons and groups of the culpability and consequences of their actions.
To a mind colonized by a victim narrative, free will is alien, and the triumph of the will over challenges big and small is regarded as impossible. If someone succeeds, it must have been either a matter of luck or corrupt scheming.
But rarely does victim mentality result in true openness to the circumstances of life; instead, it encourages what Nietzsche called slave morality: cowardice, passive aggression, pathological consumption, and parasitical claims on the goods and services of others to compensate for one’s own impotence and discomfort.
Modern mothers are no exceptions to the zeitgeist. We are all subject to mainstream media and cultural narratives encouraging us to indulge our own sense of victimhood when things get hard. The nature of modern technology encourages passivity. And if we aren’t careful, we can wallow. Life is unfair. No one is helping me. My husband doesn’t do enough for me. Society doesn’t do enough for me. My kids don’t do enough for me. There’s no sense in trying; things will never get better. This is too hard.
It’s easy to indulge because it’s plausible and because selfishness is wired into humanity’s genetic code. Raising children under the current socioeconomic conditions can be a real challenge.
Sometimes our kids scream through the grocery store from entry to exit without ceasing, responding neither to discipline nor to desperate pleas for cooperation. Sometimes our husbands disappoint us. Sometimes our efforts seem futile, and the “payoff” for maternal investment remains unclear for a very long time, by definition.
But it has been so unspeakably important, in my experience, to resist the temptation to indulge these kinds of thoughts because they lead directly to passivity, despair, and consumerism.
We can confront and negotiate the problems in our lives, and even the selfishness of other people, without allowing ourselves to self-identify, explicitly or implicitly, as victims. In order to resist, we must put ourselves in the driver’s seat.
- Stop complaining. This is the one-way street to victim mentality. Realize that however much we may be disappointed by others, we disappoint them too. If we must negotiate our problem, orient speech toward action.
- Evaluate circumstances objectively, and wonder at, first and foremost, possibilities for action. Seek, and ye shall find. If you seek reasons to despair, you will find them. If you seek reasons to push, to reach higher, to go deeper, to forebear, to love, and to have courage, you will find them. This is a fundamental mindset shift toward positivity and production rather than negativity and consumption.
- Find the courage to fail. Believe in the possibility of action and results, and make goals — but choose action despite the possibility of failure. Objectively observe your own role in the order-to-chaos ratio of your life. How can you improve for the sake of improvement regardless of how you might be immediately gratified?
Consistency
An object in motion stays in motion. Take this literally and figuratively.
One of my earlier essays covers how retraining my brain to operate like an athlete’s made me a better mom. In terms of mindset, this dovetails perfectly with what I’ve just written about victim mentality and goes farther to emphasize the importance of literal physical activity.
I cannot overstate the degree to which prioritizing my physical health, mostly by lifting heavy almost every day, has given my days structure and magnified my energy in every other area of my life. This principle works just as well for intellectual goals as for bodily goals.
Whenever I feel depressed or anxious, exercise is the silver bullet. But how do you find the time?
Simple: Choose it, and stop making excuses. Establish routine and structure, buoyed by the resolute determination to get out of the house every single day. Holding myself to this simple principle by continuously making the choice to embrace the annoying transition from the house to the car to the stroller and back again has done wonders for my mental and physical health. If you can simply make consistent movement a habit, it compounds. Over time, it becomes pleasurable.
Creativity
Find your community, no matter how unconventional the means.
The final helpful lifestyle shift that I believe is foundational to a good motherhood experience is twofold: creativity and community. These things go together. Creativity fosters community, and community fosters creativity. When you find what you love to create, it attracts like-minded people. When you find people you love, you will be energized to create on their behalf.
To make community work in the modern world, one must be willing to be creative in pursuit of it. A combination of the previous mindset shifts (“I have agency over my circumstances, and I can move freely in the world to achieve my goals”) must be present as well as a willingness to try new things in order to meet people and maintain friendships.
Loneliness is one of the primary factors in poor mental health for modern moms. Isolation feels baked into the cake of American society, but this isn’t inevitable! No one ever said fellowship would be easy.
The victim mentality would have lonely people believe that they are lonely because no one is reaching out to them. The couch potato mentality would have lonely people believe that because getting out of the house to commune with friends is difficult that there is only one way of doing this and that it is unworthy of doing.
Here’s where all the principles dovetail together. The COURAGE mentality encourages lonely people to find friendship in the world despite potential rejection. The CONSISTENCY mentality fosters a willingness to fail or to be rejected, and once friends are found, keeps them close through a sense of mutual duty and sacrifice. And CREATIVITY helps on the front end to find your people, and all throughout, to keep in touch with them.
Start the group chat. Start the playgroup. Ask someone to work out together. Attend birthday parties. Bake the cookies. Deliver the postpartum meals. Volunteer. Throw the cocktail parties. Buy outdoor art supplies for the kids and invite moms over for tea.
These actions seem mundane, perhaps antiquated. Because our social lives as moms have been so hollowed out by technology and the changing participation of women in the workplace, all of these little things in their little ways now require courage, consistency, and creativity. Despite whatever difficulties I endured moving from zero to one, they are what have made my life as a young mom of three boisterous little children not only bearable but deeply enjoyable.
Hope these were helpful. I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments section: What helps you persist in motherhood?
‘A baby is like a sunlamp’: Why having babies might cure depression
Feminism has undoubtedly given way to a generation of women who view giving birth as a detriment to their careers and freedom.
Dr. Catherine Pakaluk, professor of social research and economic thought, author of “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth,” and mother of eight children, and Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable,” believe those women may be making a mistake, especially regarding their mental health.
“Do you think that childlessness is contributing to the explosion of dependance on SSRIs, especially among women? Anxiety, depression, deaths of despair. I mean, it’s women over 40 that really are taking, it seems, the lion’s share of these antidepressant, anti-anxiety medications,” Stuckey asks Pakaluk.
“I’m not an expert on the connection between those two things, but it came out of my conversations with so many people that, I think the language a lot of people used, was sort of like ‘a baby is like a sunlamp,’” Pakaluk responds.
And the women who don’t have children end up attempting to replace their desire to nurture with less fulfilling alternatives.
“They mother through politics, and sort of social justice causes, and to borrow a phrase, kind of toxic empathy,” Pakaluk says. “We are meant to have these incredible empathy muscles. I mean, this is part of being a great mom.”
“Misplaced mothering absolutely manifests itself in a lot of women who would probably call themselves liberal women, thinking that they are defending the least of these, or the most vulnerable, because they believe that whatever victim, or proclaimed victim that the media hoists up, needs their defense, needs their nurturing,” Stuckey agrees.
Pakaluk notes that these things are not as “naturally fulfilling” to women, “which leads us back to where you started this question of ‘is this fueling our anxiety, our depression.’”
“These are really big questions, but I think they’re questions we’re not asking to our peril. They’re also very awkward questions, I would say, for a country that has been committed to abortion rights,” she adds.
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How a beloved children's cartoon turns fathers into mothers — and what the Bible says about it
As the Western world catches collective amnesia around the profile of the historic father, we’ve begun to move past portrayals of fathers as the bumbling idiot of shows in the 1980s and 1990s to a new kind of engaged, empathetic, and present father.
There’s only one problem with this new ideal father: He embodies almost all of the elements of the traditional mother, purged of the essence of elements from the historic father.
The poster child for this new depiction can be found in the mega-popular kids program "Bluey." The dad, Bandit, is seen as a constantly nurturing, always-present playmate to his two daughters, Bluey and Bingo. He’s so present, in fact, that fans of the show often joke about when Bandit finds time to work, and in the show, it’s clear that the mother has less time to play than the dad.
Our culture LOVES this depiction of fatherhood. It empties the father character of all the elements of the traditionally masculine father we’ve grown uncomfortable with, and at the same time, it provides freedom for the mother to get out in the world and explore her individual passions.
Everyone wins, right? Well, it depends.
God created the concept of male and female to create the kind of family that would maximize fruitfulness and multiplication and that over generations of collective effort would subdue and rule the created order.
It depends on whether there’s an objective ideal of fatherhood and motherhood, and if there is, then symbolic depictions seeking to reverse these objective profiles are problematic.
Embracing these kinds of portrayals, especially in a highly symbolic medium like in a cartoon, will go a long way in shaping our intuition around the essence of these roles.
Now today, almost no one thinks there are objective ideals to these archetypes, and if they are right — and they personally resonate with the father, mother, and daughter depictions in "Bluey" — then everything I’m about to say will be dissonant and probably offensive.
So let me say from the outset that, even in the conservative Christian world, my position is a tiny minority, maybe less than 1%. So feel free to stop reading if you’re getting triggered.
Let me lay out three premises I believe about this topic, and if you disagree with any of these, you’ll likely disagree with my conclusion.
- Masculinity and femininity are not social constructs or primarily biological concepts but are family concepts designed to create a certain dynamic and to construct a highly functional multigenerational family team.
- The Bible presents meta descriptions of masculinity/fatherhood and femininity/motherhood through symbolic characters primarily rooted in the story of Genesis.
- Meta depictions of these roles are good and necessary to give culture at large something concrete to aim at even, though all of us as individuals will find some elements of these roles dissonant with our desires or even our innate wiring.
I derive my first premise from the theological principle of first mention. When God created male and female, he actually revealed the purpose for gender, and that was to create a certain kind of family team.
“So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth" (Genesis 1:27-28 ESV).
God created the concept of male and female to create the kind of family that would maximize fruitfulness and multiplication and that over generations of collective effort would subdue and rule the created order. Genesis 1 does not yet give us content around the different male and female roles, only that male and female combine to achieve the purposes of the family.
The second premise is that Genesis gives meta descriptions of the various parts of the family, and these meta roles can be seen in the Hebrew names given to the people.
"Adam" = Man or Humanity
"Eve" = Giver of Life
But since we’re focusing here on fatherhood, the most important person comes when we meet a man named Abram.
"Abram" = Exalted Father
Abram is literally described in our language as a meta father. As he progresses in this role, his name is elevated again to Abraham, or father of many nations.
One struggle that Greek-minded people often have is to think "meta" means ideal or model. Abram is not the perfect father. He’s the meta father. We understand the elements of how God interacts with both the specific father Abram and the concept of fatherhood through the Genesis narrative.
I’ve learned that this idea is highly intuitive to people native to the Middle East but endlessly confusing to Western thinkers. That’s why of the three “Abrahamic religions,” Christianity is the one least influenced by Abraham’s depiction of fatherhood — and this is the West’s primary source of fatherhood confusion. Jesus, in one of his parables, referred to Abraham as “Father Abraham,” but — besides a particularly annoying youth group song — Christians do not think of Abraham through the lens of fatherhood. We see him more as an individual historic man of faith.
This lack of a symbolic depiction of fatherhood has untethered the concept of fatherhood and masculinity from anything objective and leaves us vulnerable to following the ever-changing depictions of fatherhood and masculinity invented by modern cultural sensibilities.
This brings me to my third premise and back to "Bluey."
I first heard of red flags in "Bluey" from my two teenage daughters, who watched an episode after hearing from so many Christian families who loved the show — and they immediately saw what was happening.
You might think that 'Bluey' is a wonderful depiction of fatherhood, but please don’t be naive about the power of symbolic depictions, especially ones aimed at children.
Their first statement was something like, “They treat their dad like a plaything.”
I then watched one three-minute clip on YouTube from a different episode and saw what they were so alarmed by.
There are hundreds of interesting elements of fatherhood that one can glean from studying how God interacts with the meta father (Abram), but I’m pretty sure Bandit is in no way tethered to this understanding of fatherhood.
And this tethering is not hard to do. When I’m in the Middle East, I see it everywhere. All the good and toxic depictions of fatherhood I see from those native to this region I recognize as coming from these Abrahamic stories. It’s increasingly hard to see in the Christian West.
We need to get into the details of the beautiful biblical balancing of the life-giving presence of motherhood and the training, territory expanding, and leadership of fatherhood.
But let me say one more thing that concerns me.
One reaction I’ve received is from people who think it’s absurd to criticize a cartoon. You might think that "Bluey" is a wonderful depiction of fatherhood, but please don’t be naive about the power of symbolic depictions, especially ones aimed at children.
We spend almost one-third of our lives experiencing symbolic depictions in our dreams, and most of our entertainment is created by watching stories filled with meta characters and what they symbolize. Symbols tend to bypass our conscious awareness and form our intuitions about the nature of truth and reality. These symbols include things like numbers, colors, animals, objects, shapes, and storylines. The Bible is full of these kinds of symbols, and most Western Christians are totally unaware of their power. When Jesus says things like “how many baskets did we pick up” after the feeding of the 5,000 and 4,000 and the disciples reply, "12" and "seven," he expected his disciples — and us — to immediately get the symbolic significance of what he did. But we don’t.
And in the same way, creating a daughter named Bluey using the color blue is totally lost on us. It goes right past our conscious awareness. If we do think about it, we think it’s cool that they’re reversing the gender stereotype of colors. We’re playing checkers with those who are playing chess, and we’ve been checkmated over and over again.
Editor's note: This essay was originally published by Jeremy Pyror on his Substack and was republished with permission.
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