A figment of our imagination

Nancy Reddy's 'The Good Mother Myth' exposes the dubious origins of what we think we know about motherhood.

Imagine a ‘good mother,’ and it’s likely you’ll conjure up a June Cleaver-like figure: domestically gifted, perpetually available to her husband and children, full of sweetness and light. But is this good mother real? And is it true that being a good mother means being these things?

In her new book, “The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom,” Nancy Reddy’s blend of personal narrative and scholarly research explore where this notion of motherhood comes from (spoiler alert: from men, mostly, who sought out evidence to confirm their biases and rejected data that challenged them). Reddy highlights how a shaky, biased foundation of bad science took hold in the popular consciousness, helped along by people like Dr. Spock, thus cementing the myth of the ‘good mother’ in our minds for decades.

I interviewed Nancy Reddy about the book, the myth, and the truth about being a good mom:

As concisely as possible, define what the good mother myth is. What are its salient features?

The “good mother myth” is the idea that, as a mother, you should be able to do it all on your own and that there’s some combination of maternal instinct and biology and love that will just power you to know how to take care of a baby all on your own.

And briefly, where did this myth come from? How did it get entrenched in our culture?

I locate it in the postwar era. A lot of women had worked a lot, a lot of them were mothers, they sent their kids to state-supported child care centers. When all these men returned from war, there was a lot of economic anxiety about getting them back into the workforce. There was a real imperative to get these women back home. It became this real reinforcing or re-creating of the ideal of the traditional family as one where there’s a wife and a husband and there are children and the mother is home taking care of the house and the kids.

What’s striking to me, as you say this, is how recent this all was and what a small sliver of time we’re actually talking about, compared to the balance of human history, where this small nuclear family could be supported by one income and two adults.

I think it existed in a sliver of midcentury America, and only for white families who had access to certain government-provided benefits like the GI bill and VA loans. The idea of the “traditional family” is really this kind of figment, this moment where it was possible for a portion of the population, in part through governmental benefits. That’s the part that we forget when we talk about a social safety net. It was a very different economy, where a man, even without a college degree, could support a wife and children on his salary.

How does this myth show up now?
I think it’s still everywhere! I think the idea of maternal instinct is still really with us. I do think there’s something to be said for paying attention to what’s going on with your kid, but I also know there’s nothing specifically magical about having been the one to give birth or being biologically female.

An instinct is also something you develop through care, but when you say that, people get really mad. Chelsea Conaboy wrote the book “Mother Brain,” and she published a piecce about that shortly before the book came out, and people were big mad.

It’s men who are like, That’s crazy, you must be a terrible mom, but I think it’s also women. I think for a lot of women, the idea that we’re specially equipped and can do something no one else can do can be a real sense of power and validation in a country that doesn’t give us a lot. I think there are a lot of women that are unwilling to give up the idea that we’re special as caregivers.

Who is this myth hurting, and who do you think benefits from it?

I would say it hurts everybody. Clearly this mythology is damaging for mothers, because it amps up the pressure in ways that are not helpful. It keeps us anxious and isolated; it keeps us from showing up and asking for help when we need it.

It took me a while to get here, but I think it’s really bad for dads too. I think women have this whole arsenal of the parenting-advice industrial complex aimed at them from the minute you’re a tiny girl, so you have lots of models, lots of information, lots of podcasts and books and Instagram accounts, which is way too much.

But for men, their cultural ecosystem is so different and so sparse in that way. I know so many men who are just trying to be better than their own dads, and that’s great, but they don’t have the support in a lot of ways, and they don’t necessarily have the models. I had an array of different ways of thinking about mothering, and I think men don’t have that. I think we lack the cultural imagination to provide that.

I know so many men who are just trying to be better than their own dads, and that’s great, but they don’t have the support, and they don’t have the models.

You write about what those early years were like for you, when you had a newborn baby. What’s something that surprised you about the reality of being a mom, vs. what you might have thought it would be like?

Everything! I was sure I wanted a baby, but I hadn’t really spent any time with babies. Because I had a baby without any day-to-day experience of babies, I think I was kind of shocked by everything. I was like, What are you?

To be slightly less stupid about that, I was really very surprised by the difference between intellectually knowing something, and living through it. I read books about babies, I read all these blogs and things, and so I had knowledge about how you’re supposed to take care of a baby, and what safe sleep was, and how they were supposed to nap. But I did not have the lived experience at all, and that was so wildly different. All of that intellectual work I had done did not really prepare me at all.

Years later, my best friend had a baby and I remember being at her house when he was very little, and she was like, I just need you to take him. I was like, Wow, what if he doesn’t stop crying? But then realizing, this is ok! He’s crying, but I’m not responding to him physiologically the way that I did with my own babies.

And to me, that really demonstrates how important it is to have shared care. Yes, you have a special bond with your baby, AND having people that are not as close to it all is so important. It’s actually really life-saving. And that’s one of the things this mythology about the superhero mom prevents us from accessing.

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You can follow Nancy Reddy right here on Substack, or check out her website at nancyreddy.com for news, updates, and links to her socials.