The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas about How to Be a Good Mom

The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas about How to Be a Good Mom by Nancy Reddy, St. Martin’s Press 

With every review I write for Porchlight, I wonder if I’m starting to sound like a broken record stuck on the words: we are better together. We are better together. We are better together. Yet there’s no denying it: we human beings really are better together. We thrive in all aspects of our lives when our social bonds are strong, from the earliest ties we establish with our families to the friendships we build through our formative years to the sense of belonging we get from a good workplace. Through data and through anecdotes and through firsthand experience, we continue to find proof that we are meant to live in community, not in isolation. 

And yet, there seems to be a glaring exception to this rule. Though we thrive in community, motherhood has been presented for several generations as a solitary pursuit requiring a woman’s full-time, single-minded devotion to her child. Maternal love is portrayed as an instinctive biological response that arises upon childbirth, a seemingly magical force that alone can provide a woman with the strength to tackle the challenges of parenting, against all odds. Mothers, in this worldview, sustain the future of society while effectively stepping away from it. Where did this vision of motherhood come from, and how did so many of us come to believe in it? 

Writing professor Nancy Reddy found herself grappling with these questions upon the birth of her first son. Despite all the preparation she’d undertaken during her pregnancy, despite the reassurances that her maternal love and instincts would guide her and make all the challenges of motherhood feel bearable, Reddy found herself feeling deeply frustrated and worried that she was failing to live up to the ideal of being a good mother.  

I hadn’t been made milder, willing to give up sleep, ambition, the time to finish writing a sentence because I loved the baby so much. I was a bleeding, leaking mammal, weeping in the produce section and fighting with my husband in the parking lot of Costco, but quietly so as not to wake the baby who had finally, finally fallen asleep in the back seat. I was a mother, and I was a beast. 

In her latest book, The Good Mother Myth, Reddy investigates where these ideals around “the automatic, selfless love of motherhood” stemmed from, why the responsibility for a child’s care seemed to rest solely on a mother’s shoulders, and how these impossible standards have managed to take such deep root in our society.  

What she discovered was that many of our ideas around so-called “good” motherhood came from research conducted overwhelmingly by white male psychoanalysts who wrote extensively about what proper child-rearing entailed yet often left their own children to be raised singlehandedly by their stay-at-home wives, several of whom had cut short their own flourishing careers to do so. Many of their research methods ranged from flawed to outright biased, drawing from limited sample sizes and observing examples of motherhood removed from the context of the broader world.  

Reddy also notes that several of these researchers seemed to be responding to their own childhood trauma in their work, pushing forth the ideals for motherhood as they perhaps wish they had once been parented, rather than adjusting their conclusions to new information about what constituted good caregiving. For example, the psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who was raised in an upper-class family by a distant mother and a team of nannies, later became an avid proponent of the idea that mothers and children were designed by evolution to be paired together, and any interruption of this bond could put a child’s wellbeing at dire risk. Even when other researchers later found data to the contrary, Bowlby remained steadfast in this conclusion. 

Despite methodological flaws and personal biases, conclusions about proper motherhood were extrapolated and established as unassailable facts based on cold, hard science, and they have continued to be passed down even as the researchers themselves have largely faded into obscurity. 

One historic figure that serves as a sort of foil to figures like Bowlby is Margaret Mead. Having immersed herself in Samoan culture as a young anthropologist in the late 1920s, Reddy notes that  

Mead came back from her fieldwork with genuinely good ideas about parenting, most notably that children did better not in the locked box of the nuclear family but when cared for by a whole community. 

One of Mead’s arguments, based on her observations, was that a newborn wasn’t in need solely of a devoted mother. What they needed to survive were practical things like shelter and food, which could more easily be provided by a network of people sharing caregiving duties rather than by a single person. Putting this into practice, Mead formed a communal household with a fellow academic and his family, establishing a broader network of caregivers and childhood companions for her daughter Catherine, and she became deeply involved in Catherine’s school life, constantly forming strong relationships with other families that Catherine could feel safe among. 

For Mead, a mother wasn’t someone who stayed home with her child, but someone who brought her child into a community and worked to make that community stronger for every family. 

Had Mead’s ideas of community-based care rather than the image of the devoted mother taken hold, Reddy posits that the whole of society might have been upended. “Such a theory of caregiving would have consequences for culture and policy,” she notes, imagining that such a theory would have kept alive what had already arisen temporarily during World War II, such as state-supported childcare and equal pay for women. We might have seen the creation of new policies, such as expanded parental leave for fathers and non-birthing parents, who today are often still treated as secondary, backup parents rather than as equal caregivers. If anyone can be a caregiver, then everyone should have equal access to the material resources needed to fulfill those duties. Instead, women are still largely left to serve as society’s safety net, sustaining the work of several people and institutions entirely on their own. This isn’t meant to cause despair; understanding how we got here, Reddy argues that we can begin charting a different path. 

Reddy is unflinching about her early foray into motherhood and the difficulties she faced. “I’ll tell you how I survived: by asking for help and accepting it when it showed up,” she writes. Throughout the book, Reddy points to instances where the people around her eased the burden of childcare, from a professor holding Reddy’s son while she workshopped her dissertation, to fellow mothers in a postnatal Pilates class being the first to recognize signs of Reddy’s postpartum depression and encouraging her to find professional care. By finding her way back into her community, Reddy achieved a far more sustainable version of motherhood where everyone could thrive together. “Instead of one good mom,” Reddy writes, “my sons have two parents who love them, a web of family and friends and neighbors who listen to them and watch them grow.” 

And of course, by turning away from the pursuit of an unattainable ideal of motherhood and finding strength through her community, Nancy Reddy gets to exist as the full and complex individual that she is and bring her talents to the world through works like The Good Mother Myth. Reflecting on the life of Clara Mears, who, after marrying researcher Harry Harlow, had to leave graduate school and become a full-time wife and mother, Reddy writes: “I wonder what we’ve lost by edging generations of brilliant women like her out of the lab and back into the home.” If insisting that we are better together feels repetitive, perhaps the next step is to recognize that we are better together especially when everyone gets the chance to be at their best.