A State of Motherhood report in the US has discovered that the mental health of mothers is plummeting, with financial stresses, the pressure to hold down a successful career and societal expectations truly mounting on mums. Are we horrified by the findings? Yes. But are we surprised? No.
Welcome to our series, The Motherhood Diaries – a safe space for you to share your experiences, advice, hopes and heartbreaks. We’ll be hearing from industry experts giving practical advice alongside Capsule readers (You!) sharing your firsthand experiences. We’re looking at everything from fertility, trying to conceive, pregnancy, the fourth trimester, newborns, toddlers, children’s mental health and teenagers, fertility issues and everything in between!
A few weeks ago I got hit by a hideous virus. Thankfully, I’ve got great support, so for the thick of it, I could stay tucked up in my deathbed. But eventually, as I got better, I had to rejoin the real world and look after our toddler while my partner went back to work. Being under the weather is rarely fun, but, as many of you will well know, it’s even less so when you have to keep a small lemming-of-a-human-being alive.
For the next two days I stuck to activities that involved solely being on the floor of the lounge – building Duplo towers, playing with playdough, stacking cups, reading books. I barely moved, except to make the most basic of lunches and dinners I could think of. At one point it got too much, and I laid down on the couch and put on my dear Youtube friend Ms Rachel (a genius and godsend).
At the end of the two days, I should have felt proud of myself for getting through it. But instead, I somehow felt the exact opposite – so much so, that when my partner came home from work I burst into tears and explained how guilty I was feeling. I hadn’t been up running around, dancing and playing with him, I reasoned. I hadn’t even left the house! And I was well behind on work.
He looked at me as if I had gone mad (in the kindest possible way). “Are you kidding?” he eventually asked. “You’re sick!?! And anyway, that sounds like an amazing day! He would have loved it, getting to spend all that time just with you, playing. You’re being way too hard on yourself.”
On one hand – let’s call it the ‘sensible, rational’ side of my brain, I knew he was 100% right. But on the other – let’s call it the ‘deranged Instagram-influenced, heavily pressured by today’s society’ side – had its serious doubts.
So where were these doubts coming from?
As soon as I started probing the inner workings of my brain, I immediately did a roll call of all the pieces of data I had about what I ‘should’ be doing as a mum.
I thought of the weekly classes I’d taken my son to for a while during his first year, where the teacher asked every week what ‘new playgrounds/libraries/experiences/sensory adventures’ I had expanded my baby’s brain with since I was last there (I often panicked and made up a lie).
I thought of my Instagram feed which was filled with ads for Little Kickers, sensory classes, and the latest must-have gadgets, as well as my feed of actual real mums who seem to be constantly taking their little people to Wriggle and Rhyme, Space, sign language classes, trampoline classes, ballet classes, trips to the zoo, parties and face-painters. I thought of the parenting experts who say things like ‘get your kids out in the sunshine for an hour each day so they sleep better’ and ‘engage in sensory play to improve their IQ!’
Far out. I was drowning in ‘shoulds’.
Now, I know I’m prone to being quite self-persecutory, but in 2023 you really need little assistance in giving yourself a hard time for not living up to what is considered to be the perfect parent.
I say parent, because I don’t want to offend anyone here, but really, I mean the perfect mum. Because unfortunately the rules are still very different for mothers. You don’t hear people talking about ‘dad guilt’, for example – and while I know a lot of dads do really struggle with the juggle and experience guilt, I’d argue that those fathers are struggling more with the pressures they apply to themselves about what they should be doing, rather than the intense external pressures that mothers face (on top of their own expectations of themselves, of course).
The problem – well, one of the many problems – is that, perfection simply does not exist. It can’t possibly, because all the info we’re bombarded with about what makes up the perfect mum is made of hugely conflicting, contradicting information.
It reminds me of the monologue America Ferrera delivered in the new Barbie movie about the insane – and often hugely hypocritical – expectations that are put on women in 2023. Those pressures feel like they’re on steroids for mothers.
There’s the pressure to have the perfect birth, the perfect child, perfect relationships and do it all – all while holding down a meaningful career.
Mothers are told to make a birth plan, even though it’s often really only up to the bloody universe or an obstetrician who may end up having to make the calls. But even still, make sure you don’t have any pain-relieving drugs, otherwise you’re not as good as the other ‘natural birth’ mums.
You might be in the thick of a huge hormonal/physical/mental/emotional transition after birth, but you absolutely must have the perfect going home outfit (for you and your baby). You should take care of yourself and rest during the fourth trimester, but you should also get back to your ‘pre-baby weight’ as soon as possible.
No matter what, you absolutely have to breastfeed – but make sure you don’t breastfeed for too long, that’s weird.
Your baby absolutely must sleep in their cot, but they must also absolutely co-sleep with you. You should never let them sleep on you during the day, that’ll form bad habits, but they’re only little once so you should do as many contact naps as possible. They should be able to sleep through the night immediately. If not, you should throw money at sleep specialists and sleep train them and let them cry it out, but you should also never leave your baby to cry.
You can’t smother your children, or be a helicopter mum, but they must feel a strong attachment to you in order to grow up to be independent humans and the world is a dangerous place so you must always be within reach. Give them lots of new colours, shapes and textures to explore – but make sure you keep your house looking Instagram perfect in an assortment of shades of beige.
You shouldn’t send your kids to daycare – you should stay home and look after them yourself. But you must also go to work and carve out an impressive career. You need to be a girl boss who makes her own money too.
You might be time poor, but you have to be up to date with every new piece of parenting info, make organic, nutritious and beautiful meals three times a day for your child, clothe your baby in perfect organic cotton and merino keepsake items, keep your home perfect, have date nights with your partner, meet up with your friends often, do yoga, meditate, make time to go to the gym/hair dresser/hair removal expert/facialist etc, sleep for eight hours each night, eat well, drink eight glasses of water daily and well, DO IT ALL. That’s what our mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers fought so hard for.
Is there any wonder that a lot of us are feeling ‘less than’, when we’re actually doing a stellar job?
And when I say a lot of us, I mean a lot. The latest annual ‘State of Motherhood’ report by US company Motherly, was one heck of a sobering one.
The report found that the mental health of many mothers is seriously suffering. Nearly half (49%) said they were burnt out, with 46% also saying they were currently seeking therapy. Poor mental health was found to be the number one issue currently facing mums – even higher than financial stress, which was something that concerned 80% of respondents.
Here are some other alarming findings:
- 78% said they sacrifice sleep to take care of their families.
- 80% said they turn down social invitations due to parenting responsibilities.
- 51% said they hadn’t gone out with friends or their partner in the last month without their children.
- 70% said they’d had to make sacrifices in their careers to accommodate their families needs
- 58% said that they are primarily responsible for the duties of running a household and looking after children, which was up two per cent from the year previously.
- 72% also saying that the sheer cost of childcare causes a significant financial burden.
- Alarmingly, as a consequence, twice the number of women became stay at home mums in 2023 versus 2022.
So, where the heck do we go from here?
Personally, I’m doing an Instagram cull and staying off it as much as I can. Surely there’s a way of tricking the algorithm into thinking what I really need are just more clips of baby goats?
I’m also switching the parenting books back to true crime and fun silly books, to quieten down some of those ‘shoulds’ I’ve been feeling. And I just listened to the last parenting podcast I’m going to listen to for a long while. It was one of Oprah’s Super Soul conversations – this time, with clinical psychologist Shefali Tsabary, and it really struck a chord, giving me just what I needed this week.
Shefali, the author of The Awakened Family, talked all about the expectations that we have on ourselves, and on our children and in turn how stressful our lives in adulthood have become. Yes, there’s all these things we think we should be doing, so that our child grows up to be a “success” – enrolling them in all sorts of classes, before they can even walk. She believes the opposite is true and told a wonderful story about the anxiety she still felt about enrolling her daughter in a ballet class for the first time when she was eight (which she still thought was perhaps a bit young).
Our expectations are what are killing us, she reasoned. And they’re often not what is actually best for the child, or what the child even wants? Children – particularly those under five – only know how to live in the moment. They don’t even know to worry about what’s ahead in life, or what might be expected of them.
It’s a hell of a hard hill to get over, but maybe, just maybe, if we can stop living our lives thinking about what we ‘should’ be doing as a parent we might be able to feel more joy.
