Highlights
Recently, I found myself having a conversation with a young married woman who revealed she was worried about having kids. Worried may be the wrong word. Apprehensive and unsure might be better, especially regarding how it would change her life. She admitted that she and her husband hadn’t figured out how they would handle child care—specifically whether they would do day care or a nanny or a nanny share, or whether she would just stop working altogether. She wondered how it would affect her career and their lifestyle. And so on.
I could almost feel the weight of the anxiety she was clearly bearing. And I felt for her, coming out of the other side of that myself with five children, the youngest of whom is still in diapers. It can be a daunting thing to navigate.
My response, I could tell, surprised her. I suggested, gently—but rather firmly—that she take the jump and figure that all out after the baby was born. You simply do not know, and will not know, I pointed out, what will work for you and your family until that baby is in your arms. I told her I knew women on aggressive career paths who surprised themselves by dropping entirely out of the work force and never looking back after having children; and women who had big families in Big Law; and every family size and work-life arrangement in between.
I once likened my own journey of work and motherhood to a river. It bends and turns with each child. I never tried to control its path but rather let it take me where it will. That has liberated me from a lot of the angst that seems to stalk mothers today, most especially the guilt so many seem to bear.
In some ways, who can blame would-be mothers for being fearful about taking the leap? The internet and media noise negatively framing motherhood is almost deafening. I’ve written about some of it here, the recent spate of pieces about maternal regret, in particular. But the theme of guilt is another one. Mothers are constantly being framed as wracked with guilt.
Mothers or would-be mothers would do well to skip over the links on mom guilt and regret—along with all the angry rants about division of labor, mental load, and other navel-gazing pieces that drum up resentment.
“Why we need to end ‘mom guilt’ once and for all,” read one headline in the corporate magazine Fast Company. The author, a CEO, describes feeling guilty about not volunteering for a single of her kids’ field trips that year, and cites polling that found that 78% of moms report feeling guilty for not spending enough time with their kids.
The field trip bit caught my attention, because I can count on one hand the number of times I have chaperoned one of my kids’ field trips. Not, however, because I am a CEO; I work part-time from home. But for more than a decade, I’ve still had young children at home that inhibit me from doing so, and I’ve never viewed managing a bus full of screaming kids on the way to a museum as a way to spend precious, quality time with my kids. There are plenty of things full-time, stay-at-home moms miss out on, in particular those with bigger families.
But the headlines abound:
“Millennial Moms are the Most Resentful: Poll.”
“Mom guilt: 94 percent of us have it. Can we ditch it for a week?”
“‘Mental load’ is pushing moms to the brink. Here’s how.”
“Jenna Bush Hager Breaks Down in Tears as She Says She Needs to Spend More Time with Daughter Poppy: ‘What’s Wrong with Me?’”
Is it any wonder that women view motherhood with trepidation? It’s portrayed as one giant guilt trip punctuated by regret. This understandably only exacerbates some natural worries potential mothers have about how having a baby will change their lives.
And yet from my anecdotal experience, as a mom surrounded by countless other mothers from different walks of life, while we all have our moments of fleeting guilt, it is in no way the dominant theme of our lives. Rather, we fit the profile of recent IFS data that finds that married women with children are the happiest cohort by a significant margin. Meanwhile, a seemingly growing group of young outspoken mothers like Emma Waters or Isabel Brown have used their platforms to promote a more positive portrayal of motherhood, which is a welcome trend.
Indeed, as I have written about elsewhere, there is clearly a shift underway toward a more constructive conversation about motherhood more broadly. Mothers or would-be mothers would do well to skip over the links on mom guilt and regret—along with all the angry rants about division of labor, mental load, and other navel-gazing pieces that drum up anger and resentment. As one of my favorite mom-writers once said of mom guilt, “It’s an industry.”
Because the reality is, as recent research bears out, the family unit is the ultimate human industry, and mothers who are engaged in raising their families are the happiest women to be found.
Ashley E. McGuire is a Contributing Editor at the Institute for Family Studies and the author of Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female (Regnery, 2017).
