Everything you've been told about being a "good mother" is wrong
Scholar Nancy Reddy on the contentious history of motherhood
When my child is particularly angry at me for one reason or another, they’ll sometimes yell in full voice, “You should read a book about how to be a parent!!”
LOL, little do they know. I have read every single possible book about how to be a good parent: books about peaceful parenting, books about raising self-confident babies, books about “positive discipline.” I don’t know a lot of things, but one thing I know how to do is read a book about parenting.
And to quote an old Onion headline, Study Finds Every Style Of Parenting Produces Disturbed, Miserable Adults.
The truth that we all learn eventually is that there is no, one, right way approach to raising kids, other than providing them with safe homes and safe foods (not a given these days, anywhere in the world).
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What there is, however, is a whole complex of experts who want us to believe otherwise. And there is some particular frameworks that try to identify the root cause of all future adult happiness…or pain.
Guess what that root cause usually is?
You guessed right!
The root cause is: Mama!
Enter Nancy Reddy.
Reddy is a scholar, a poet, an educator and someone who has dived deep into the archives of motherhood. She unearthed troves of dusty letters and research papers to ferret it out just how ideas about being a good mother came to be — and why so many of them are just…so…wrong.
She’s written about the intersection of class privilege (“Motherhood has always been political, now books about it are, too,”) and white privilege (“We need to talk about whiteness in motherhood memoirs”) as well as two books of poetry. She’s also the author of a popular newsletter about writing, Write More, Be Less Careful.
In her new book, “The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning our Bad Ideas About How to be a Good Mom,” Reddy set out to excavate the origins of some of our stickiest ideas about how to get motherhood “right.”
(She’s talking about “motherhood,” not parenthood, because what she discovered is that research about the role of any other caregiver — a father, an uncle, a grandparent — certainly not another mother — is, unsurprisingly, completely absent).
Take attachment theory, for example: This is a very powerful idea that a child’s early relationship to their primary caregiver sets the stage for all future happiness. It was developed and promoted by a researcher after World War Two, whose methods were sketchy at best, and who, himself, had no direct experience raising children.
How would our contemporary understanding of motherhood be different, Reddy asks, if it hadn’t been “so shaped by these men who had such little experience actually caring for children or listening to the people who did?”
She spent time going down rabbit holes of research and finding dozens of examples of this kind of faulty research. The book also weaves in her own experience of early motherhood. Our conversation touched on just a few of the highlights of the book and I’ve edited it for length.
So you introduce us to a stream of researchers from the 1940s and 1950s whose worked still shapes the way we think about what it means to be a good mother. The British psychoanalyst and researchers John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth developed this idea of “attachment theory” — a specific framework for the best ways for children to bond with their mothers.
And to be honest, I had never heard of most of the people you write about, but their ideas are still with us.
Yes, so John Bowlby is this British, upper crust, kind of guy. His father was a doctor in the Royal households. They were not actually royalty, but they were close to it. He goes to boarding school. He is basically raised by nannies, and sees his own mother one hour every afternoon. I say all of this because I think that really influences his own approach.
He eventually ends up studying delinquent children, immediately after World War Two. Many were homeless. They were orphaned. They had seen bombings during the war. Terrible things had happened to them. In a later study, the World Health Organization sent him around Europe to study other homeless children.
And he concluded, after all that, basically, that it was mothers who were to blame.
Right. Of course.
Which is an insane conclusion, from my perspective — when there are all of these very literal and material traumas, to say that it's insufficient love on a mother's part that is causing these problems for kids. It refuses to acknowledge these mothers' personhood at all.
From that research onward, his line was really that it was a mother who would make or break the future of her child.
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At one point you quote him saying that “full time employment of the mother” is as bad as living through a famine. This is a person who traveled through Europe and conducted what he thought of as research in the years after World War Two. And mom having a job is supposed to be the worst thing a child could possibly face?
He has this list of things that are devastating for children, and full time employment of the mother is one of them. It’s a little bit comic from this vantage point, to refuse to see any nuance between those things.
How is it that those ideas continue to resonate? Why does it have this continual hold?
For me as a parent, and I think this is true for lots of people, it has this appeal of feeling like common sense. “Look at how essential this mother is. Moms are magical. They can do everything.”
But, historically, they were doing their research at a time where these findings about the centrality of a mother aligned really neatly to a cultural and economic agenda. It's not an accident that after women have been working to support the war effort and their children have been going to state-supported daycares, once male veterans are coming home, there was a lot of anxiety about getting them back in the workforce.
So suddenly this science is saying, “You know what, ladies? What you need to do is leave your job and go home. Daycare is slightly Communist-seeming, you know?”
Bowlby especially was really smart about circulating his research. The popular press picked it up. He and Ainsworth did an incredible job of amplifying anything that seemed to agree with them and then just ignoring things that didn't. So they were really good at creating what seemed like consensus around their research, even though it was actually really contested at the time.
There were a lot of people at the time who were saying, “Hey, wait, that doesn't actually make sense. These findings are not as conclusive as you're saying they are.”
It's really fascinating as a history of science, right? How science gets made.
How these ideas that seem rooted in science and in research actually are all a piece of whatever else is happening in the culture.
Which makes me think of how you write about the anthropologist Margaret Mead and how, if her work had really been acknowledged by Bowlby – who knew her work well – it could have just totally changed attachment theory.
Right, Meade took what she had learned conducting research in Samoa and applied it to her own mothering.
What she discovered, and the argument that she made to Bowlby, was that it's actually dangerous, this idea of this one mother who's the essential thing. She's like, that's crazy, actually.
Mothers die, they get sick, sometimes they just abandon their kids. Sometimes they can't nurse. It's actually dangerous to have there be only one caregiver.
And so when she had her daughter they never lived just in their own house. They always shared houses with friends.
She kept working, she traveled a lot, and she had this idea of “many warm, friendly people.”
That was actually what a kid needed. Not one, totally adoring mom, but a whole community. She really built that for her daughter in a way that I think is really beautiful.
She's also the only one whose kid, as a grown up, had anything good to say about them. All of the other kids really had some harsh words later on, which I found pretty satisfying.
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You also look at research by a woman named Jeanne Altmann, who studied baboons.
It had been assumed that primates are competitive and they're fighting, and that's how they get their resources. Altmann was not sure if that was true. Do we know that for sure? So she had a different research method, where instead of recording a predetermined set of behaviors, she just recorded everything.
So she found really different behavior from baboons that had been previously studied, because her research design wasn't built around those faulty assumptions.
What she found is that with lower status baboons, the way that they were able to protect their offspring from aggressive higher status females was through friendship. That was how they cared for their children – by looking out for each other's kids. I just found that to be such a compelling discovery.
And also I just love that she went into the field, and found something new by looking better.
There were these other studies by a psychologist named Seymour Levine who, in the early 50s, wanted to see how stress in infancy might be linked to psychological disorders in adulthood. What he found ran counter “to the model promoted by Bowlby and the attachment theorists who followed him,” you write. Turns out that a little stress is key to growing a healthy rat.
Yes, the rat research was really fascinating to me. The rats were raised in one of three experimental conditions. In one, they were just with their moms, in total bliss all the time, cared for, what we think of as the ideal. In another, they were taken out by the researchers and kind of handled a little. Then in a third, they were taken out and handled and actually given little electric shocks.
And it turns out that the only way to really mess up a baby rat is by never stressing it. The rats who were left totally with their moms all the time just could not handle life on the outside.
I love what you say about this, “What love really is: the daily work of connecting and falling short and making repairs. Attachment theory, as Bowlby and Ainsworth first articulated it, makes such an appealing promise, that if you’re good enough to your kids in childhood, you can wrap them in layers of security that will keep them safe throughout their life. But even if I had become the kind of perfect mom I had dreamed of becoming, that wouldn’t have been the best thing for my kids.”
I think there's something really powerful about that idea that a little stress is actually really protective and really beneficial. Trying to spare our kids from any sort of stress, or harm, or bad thing, or mistake that they might make out in the world is actually not what they need from us.
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Ahhh this is so good. It explains SO MUCH! Finally I know why so many older people seem to think daycare is terrible. And why we have moved away from a shared caregiving model which just seems bananas if you have ever actually raised children. Brava Nancy!
Thank you Allison! Your piece is a breath of fresh air!!
As a Social Worker, trained in the 1960s, attachment theory was heralded as truth . It certainly created guilt in me for working and as " never being a good enough mother."
In your piece, It was especially important to me to learn about Bowlby's own childhood and how that had to affect his research. In those days of hierarchy and patriarchy, people thought scientists were "objective," and researchers didn't publicly acknowledge their own issues or biases. I think we are more aware now that you can't separate the person from their actions. The baboon research also fascinated me. I am so grateful to your generation for challenging stereotypes and doing research anew.
Thank you!