blame lies with a patriarchal society that ensures moms remain divided

May 21, 2021 8:13 AM

"The real reason American parents hate each other: A lack of support splits parents into warring factions. Here’s what could stop the fighting (Vox): "Essentially, the culture and politics of parenting in America all but guarantee unending conflict by setting up impossible (as well as racist and classist) standards for good parenting and then giving people absolutely no help to meet them." Related: Science Isn’t Here for Your Mommy Shaming: When people sensationalize research, parents pay the price (Nautilus)

"And cultural stigma against working moms — indeed, against any parents who fail to fit a white, middle-class ideal — also translates into policy. Efforts to expand child care assistance in America have been stymied by conservative claims that they would harm nuclear families, with the result that the US doesn’t really have a child care system — more like a patchwork of programs that leave many working parents spending more on child care than they do on rent, or forced to cobble together a series of informal arrangements because they can’t afford formal child care at all. [...]

Overall, “a country shows what it values by the policies that it has,” Schulte said. By failing to provide support in the form of paid leave and child care, the federal government is basically telling parents, “you’re on your own, and we don’t know how you’re going to do it, and we don’t really care.”

This isolation, in turn, pits parents against each other. “We’re all competing,” Garbes said. A lack of funding for everything from paid leave to public school leads parents to feel like they “need to hoard resources because there’s not enough to go around.”

And when all the responsibility of raising children is put on individual nuclear families, not shared communally, it leads to an intense focus on individual parents — often moms — and their perceived failings or shortcomings. Abetz, the communication scholar, has identified what she and her team call an ideology of “combative mothering,” which reframes being a mom as a “competitive exercise in very personalized decision-making.”

posted by not_the_water (12 comments total)

It distresses me that an official government position of "you’re on your own, and we don’t know how you’re going to do it, and we don’t really care." is exactly what many Americans seem to want and actively be working to achieve.
posted by Wretch729 at 8:17 AM on May 21, 2021 [44 favorites]

Toxic masculinity is a hell of a drug.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:25 AM on May 21, 2021 [19 favorites]

I remember the day I finally had enough and dropped every parenting book in the house into the recycling bin, even if I thought some were relatively "good." My wife had collapsed under the weight of the whole thing, was already suffering from depression, and was looking at returning to work after leave: I worked from home and was going to be handling the parenting during the day.

Getting rid of the books was my way of saying "we're done with all of this, and since I'm the one handling this stuff, our official family position on the passive-aggressive nonsense around parenting choices is 'go fuck yourself.'" It mattered, because even though we were the first parents in our local peer group, our friends were in with the suggestions, observations, and unconcealed judgment from the get:

"When we decide to have a baby, we don't want any western medicine or hospitals -- we'll do a natural water birth. I'm surprised you didn't choose a natural birth. I guess it's not for everyone."

"You're always worrying about sleep hygiene. When we decide to have a baby, we're going to some parenting framework I can't even remember."

Breast feeding, responding to crying, sleep, winter clothing, etc. etc. Every. single. decision. analyzed and commented on. We cut ties with a few people because we simply hadn't known them long enough to care to extend them any grace, and were sick of hearing about it from them. Older friendships were strained.

I appreciate the systemic analysis this piece offers, and I'm on board with it. I guess I think two other things:

There's something else in the culture besides precarity, policy, and economics. I think that because none of the bystanders we had seagulling our early parenting experience had any experience of any of it themselves, yet. It just felt intensely cultural/ideological, and it seemed as if our choices -- which we didn't talk about much -- were read as some challenge to their own preconceptions of how parenting should work, even though they hadn't even parented yet, and even though their worst experience of our choices was "well, we like to get Ben down on time each night, so we'll have to bounce a little early tonight." Somehow, that was deeply antagonizing, and we heard about it all over again once they finally had their own kids and needed us to know they were making different choices.

And while I appreciate that women are doing the bulk of the parenting labor most of the time, I'd like to put my hand up as an outlier and suggest that while "Mommy Wars" is catchy and perhaps statistically fair, it has the effect of ignoring and erasing a portion of the population's experience, and reinforcing the notion that the only combatants -- and hence stakeholders -- are women, which is exactly the frame a certain kind of troglodyte would prefer around any discussion about how we should think of parenting.
posted by mph at 9:28 AM on May 21, 2021 [29 favorites]

I spend a lot of time babysitting for a single mom friend, who finally finished school and now only has a chaotic nurse’s schedule to deal with, but it literally wouldn’t have been possible if I and another friend and her parents hadn’t seen what she needed and committed to help out until the kid is grown. It’s impossible and brutal.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 9:29 AM on May 21, 2021 [7 favorites]

The second article's focus on keeping a hand over your wallet, metaphorically speaking, about how thoroughly science reporting gets telephone-gamed into gibberish by a storm of intersecting perverse incentivizing is especially welcome, and a lesson everyone should probably just use as a daily mantra:

"So, if you read something that sounds suspiciously mommy shame-y, or otherwise conveniently flatters self-serving beliefs you already hold, take a few minutes to dig deeper."
posted by Drastic at 9:31 AM on May 21, 2021 [10 favorites]

At the risk of promoting someone who is problematic, I really like the theory of the ¨good enough parent" (Bruno Bettleheim) I also think that the fact that someone is worried about if they are doing the right thing means that they will do the right thing. The plague is the idea of one right way or one perfect answer; there in no such thing, in parenting, politics, economics, or anywhere as far as I can see.
posted by olykate at 10:49 AM on May 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

Toxic masculinity is a hell of a drug.

True enough, but it surprises me how little I’m seeing (on a quick scan) of the role of toxic capitalism here. In particular, the 40 hour workweek was predicated on a single full-time “breadwinner” supporting a stay-at-home spouse (okay, wife) and kids. Increased participation by women in the labor force (to which I am in no way objecting otherwise) allowed wage stagnation, while employers reap the profits of nearly double the available workforce, at far less than double the wage cost, so now most households need to be dual income just to get by, but the full 40 hour week is still the standard for both. Bottom line, on a per-household basis, roughly twice the hours go to employers, at roughly the same household income (mutatis mutandis), and those extra industry hours are directly stolen from time previously dedicated to maintaining a household (irrespective of equity in division of that work).

Blaming and dividing the parents for not being good enough to keep on top of it all under those conditions is just the standard deflection away from a root cause that makes a few people really rich.
posted by gelfin at 2:44 PM on May 21, 2021 [24 favorites]

Is part of the problem the sheer number of decisions that you have to make (or don't get a choice in practice about) with a small child who didn't come with an instruction book? Like, you have to make each decision 'correctly' as if there is only one right way of doing things when most of the time there are many right ways of doing things and relatively few definitive wrong ones.

Of course, other important reasons are almost certainly the patriarchy, society, capitalism, classism, racism, etc but in terms of why it lends itself to this problem.
posted by plonkee at 3:23 PM on May 21, 2021

Part of it is also the Just World Fallacy where if you make the right decisions your kid will succeed and if they don't you must not have made the right decision. This is particularly the case in the US, where toxic optimism and positive thinking run rampant and there is no safety net for anyone that screws up.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 3:43 PM on May 21, 2021 [26 favorites]

plonkee, when I had my first child eons ago, I bought every baby book I could find. I soon realized that they contradicted one another. Frustrating.
posted by olykate at 3:43 PM on May 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

I guess the thing about the Mommy Wars -- and the total exclusion of Daddies from them, which is shitty -- is that by being a solo mother with no allomothers or societal support, except what you can scare up yourself, is so fucking exhausting that you've got no energy left to be furious about the way the system is rigged against you. Especially if you have a child with a disability. How am I even going to complain about any of this? I need too much sleep to complain.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:54 PM on May 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

It's amazing how much of all of this crap gets thrown out the window when you've got a kid with challenges. You're just trying to get by, and the squabbles about all this stuff seem so petty when you're just hoping your kid won't throw the lamp downstairs tonight again. Of course, there are plenty of people who will line up to tell you you're doing something wrong when they have no idea.
posted by mollweide at 8:46 PM on May 22, 2021 [3 favorites]