The following is a talk I presented at the 2016 Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement Conference this past October in Toronto, ON. I enjoyed my time at the conference, but will add that I was a little dismayed to see that many of the people there were still so focused on mothers, that babies were being completely left out. If people who want to represent mothers can’t get behind the dyadic nature of parent-child then the root of our problem is far bigger than I feared. I hope we can move towards a matricentric feminism, but only insofar as it manages to represent all of motherhood (or parenthood really as you’ll see in my talk below) and that includes the child.
INTRODUCTION
About a year and a half ago an article by Lauren Apfel, the editor of Brain, Child Magazine, made the rounds arguing that sleep training – namely extinction sleep training like crying-it-out and controlled crying – is a feminist issue. In it she states that arguing against leaving babies to cry (presumably in hopes of teaching them “good sleep habits”) isn’t right as it sets women back. How? Because women do most of the nighttime caregiving and to “fully function” in society they need a full night’s sleep.
Given I spend a lot of time talking about extinction sleep training and why it’s wrong, this was that was brought to my attention by many different people. I know the science well enough to tell you in detail how extinction sleep methods do nothing for our infants’ sleep and why children sleep the way they do. I can and do regularly work with families to find methods that respect their infants’ biological needs while respecting the family’s need for more sleep. But this was actually the first time I had heard a feminist argument in favour of sleep training. Most feminists I know are against the practice, but I know the type of feminists we would call matricentric feminists.
What struck me with this article is that it highlighted two assumptions that are central to the marriage between patriarchy and liberal, or neoliberal, feminism. When I speak of liberal feminism, I speak of the feminism Andrea spoke of yesterday which began in the 80s and has continued to today: A feminism driven to show the world that us women can do whatever it is that you thought only men could do, that we are not slaves to our biology (in fact, should we even care about biology?) and can be “so much more” than mothers. The feminism, in short, that flourishes on the patriarchal playground.
These assumptions – which I’ll get to in a minute – expose how both patriarchy and liberal feminism have merged to create what I refer to as “the detached mother”. I know much of what I say may raise eyebrows and may elicit strong feelings of defensiveness based on the position I take, but I want to assure you that I don’t think the mothers of this generation and before are “bad”, but rather we’ve done what we can with the playground we’re playing on, yet we likely struggle more than any other group on the playground because the two forces driving our narrative – patriarchy and liberal feminism – don’t have us as mothers, or our children, in mind.
THE ASSUMPTIONS
So what are these assumptions?
1) The first assumption is that whatever is happening during the day, or what Ms. Apfel calls “fully functioning”, is more important than what happens at night, specifically nighttime mothering. This has implications for both work and mothering, neither of which benefits the mother (or the person doing “mothering” as it not always the mother)
a) The argument put for by Ms. Apfel and other liberal feminists is that mothers they need to be “fully functional” for work; heck, most people will tell you the same. The difference lies in how we value this need to be “fully functional” and the need to care for the weakest members in our society. The Industrial era brought about an increased push for this type of daytime productivity that led to massive wealth, and therefore the devaluation of anything that didn’t produce this type of wealth. Despite new studies showing us that money doesn’t make us happier (I can cite the work of my friend Dr. Lara Aknin at SFU for this), we live and work and raise our children on the patriarchal playground in which the only game available is Monopoly. Our culture is obsessed with money because we can view it as the measure of the work we’re putting in to our society. How well we’re playing in the system.
Liberal feminism hasn’t disavowed us of this notion, instead it has decided to roll with it. Instead of arguing against the notion that monetary output is the be-all and end-all of society, of the family, of success, it simply has said, “Us women can enter that game and win at it too.” The value for mothering – at all times – is still low which is why I’m sure every one of us who is a mother and has identified herself as such has been asked, “When are you returning to work?” or “But what do you do to contribute?” or “You’re not just a mother are you?” or some variant. When someone asks you what you do, if you have not ever answered “I’m a mother”, I suggest you try it – it’s eye-opening.
b) This second implication of the assumption regarding the valuation of daytime productivity is specifically on mothering or mothering. Often you’ll hear parents say they need the nighttime to be “better” parents during the day. If the focus is still on mothering, how can this be a detriment to mothering? Shouldn’t we want to be better parents?
I want to quickly unpack this idea of abandoning nighttime mothering or mothering to be a “better” parent during the day. The first issue is that, like the workforce, we are somehow gauging our productivity – our daytime productivity – as parents or mothers. We have “good productivity” and “bad productivity” and we only reward the times that fit within our cultural norm despite the fact that our infants and children could care less what time of day it is when they need us.
The second is that we are now putting arbitrary value on how we mother. We are turning mothering into the contest that leads to the ideal of the “perfect” mother which can only exist if we aren’t mothering half the time. It’s the continuation of the fallacy of quality time over quantity time.
Finally, it shifts the focus of mothering away from mothering our children’s needs when they arise to mothering only when it is culturally acceptable which then bleeds out into other areas of mothering mothering, as we see with backlash against nursing in public, handling of tantrums, babies crying in public spaces, and so on.
So this assumption that daytime “work” – whether it is work or mothering – is more valuable than what happens at night is the first step in detaching women from their role as mother.
2) The second assumption, related to the first, is that nighttime mothering isn’t “necessary”. Not only should we value daytime work and mothering more what happens at night, but the idea behind leaving a child to cry is that nighttime mothering has no value to the child or the mother-child dyad.
I have heard the argument that the value of extinction sleep methods is really in self-care for mom, but to pull a quote from one of my favourite mothering experts, Pinky McKay, “Why did you want a baby if you want to sleep 12 hours?” Self-care means saying “me too” not “me first”. But of course, our patriarchal playground is structured such that “me first” is the name of the game.
An even larger problem with this assumption is that once it is established, it is very easy to make the leap from “nighttime mothering isn’t necessary” to “mothering isn’t necessary”. If you think that leap is insane, think about the rise of prominence of daycare, the wages that we pay daycare workers, and even more so, the idea that children who don’t attend daycare will somehow be worse off; that it’s “necessary” for their development. Think about that: Mothers aren’t necessary, daycare is.
How little value do we put on mothering if we’re saying that poorly paid strangers are better off raising our children than we are? Yet this is the idea that runs rampant on our playground. Patriarchy relegated women to “mothers only” because it doesn’t value the role of mother – and even includes a male overseeing his wife in this role because she can’t be trusted to it. Liberal feminism hasn’t fully changed this mindset, instead continuing to devalue mothering as something to be passed off to others as women reach their masculine potential in the work force. But if they don’t pass it off, they’d better prove their worth by being the perfect mother – one without flaws, whose children conform to what our cultural ideal is of children (no matter how far from their biology it is), and who will compete as mothers just as we compete in the workforce. If you aren’t being productive, at least you can pretend you are.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Before I talk about the effects on mothering and how these views lead to maternal detachment, I want to talk a bit about how we got here. After all, most women are mothers. How did we end up in a situation where we are so devalued? How did we end up with a feminism that has not only ignored us, but turned on us as well?
This is where our cultural norms come into play. If you’ve spent your entire life playing on the playground we have, being told how meaningless the work you do is, it’s impossible not to internalize that. So of course when you go to fight for change, it’s probably going to be to try and show that you too can do what is of value instead of trying to tell them that they’re missing the value in something else.
I liken it to some of the fights we see parents and children battle in the classroom: If a child isn’t doing well, rarely do the parents go in to say, “Hey, this system you have isn’t working and doesn’t reflect my child’s abilities or worth”, but rather they try to shape the child to the system. Liberal Feminists have done the same thing: They are focusing on how women and mothers can have value on the patriarchal playground instead of saying, “Hey, this playground doesn’t work for those of us who are mothers and we need a new one”. So all of us continue to be bombarded with the idea that we are less-than if we are not contributing in the way our society prefers. Whereas early feminism fought for women to be able to walk onto the patriarchal playground, liberal feminists have fought for the ability of us women to climb just as high as the men can.
Being the one who is home mothering (whether man or woman) on this playground is like being the kid who is sitting alone on the teeter-totter waiting for someone to come play while everyone else is busy climbing. At some point you’re probably getting off the teeter-totter and joining the rest because they can’t all be wrong, can they? When you’re friends tell you that you have to climb like the rest of them because we’ve been fighting to be able to climb and that’s what matters, you’re likely going to believe them.
So we have this culture that is built upon a patriarchal ideal of valuing the masculine while devaluing the feminine and a liberal feminism that has upheld this ideal. What effect has this had on our mothering? I argue it’s led to the “detached mother” – seems pretty harsh, doesn’t it? Let us first examine what this means.
THE PILLARS OF DETACHMENT
When talking about “the detached mother”, there are four pillars of detachment that I want to discuss. These pillars are intricately linked to the cultural mothering practices many mothers and fathers engage in and are based on – you guessed it – patriarchy and liberal feminism.
These practices include formula use over breastfeeding, scheduled feeds over feeding a baby on demand, babies sleeping in cribs instead of next to or on their mother or another carer, the use of extinction sleep training so baby fits the parental world instead of us fitting into the baby world, unnecessary medicated birth and numerous birth interventions, the use of toys and gadgets to entertain baby instead of human contact, strollers instead of wraps or carriers, and daycares over the village. It’s important to note that these are not all “bad” – some can be downright great – but they have their roots in the joining of patriarchy and liberal feminism and as a whole, these practices work to detach mothers.
a) The first pillar of detachment that stems from these practices is the act of physically detachment of the child from the mother – keeping the physical distance that enables others to care for the child, freeing mom up to pursue the masculine ideal of work outside the home.
Traditionally – and I mean looking at human history, not the last few generations – the child’s biological need for touch was respected and mothering respected this. Children were physically attached to a mother (again, including male and female) and expected to be for an extended period of time. Dr. Barry Hewlett has covered research on infant touch in his book Diverse Contexts of Human Infancy and whereas in traditional societies babies are held or touched approximately 98-99% of the time, that number falls dramatically to between 12-20% in our own North American culture. This is for young children in the first few months of life and shouldn’t be too surprising when we think back to what our culturally-normative practices include.
b) This physical detachment can’t help but lead to the second pillar of detachment: emotional detachment. This is because of the immense importance of touch to our emotional well-being. One just needs to look at the work of Dr. Tiffany Field to see the negative repercussions in our society that exist because of a lack of or reduction in touch on a larger scale. For our infants, touch helps regulate them physiologically and if they do not receive enough, especially not in stressful situations, this results in a physiological stress response which influences later neurological development.
Notably, in research, we know that separation from a caregiver is one of the surefire ways to elicit stress in any mammalian infant. Yet the continued push to separate ourselves physically means our children experience more stress than they should and is likely one reason why we have seen a dramatic decline in empathy in our society over the last 40 years.
As children are forced to detach, they lose the capacity to care for others, including their own parents. If we think about how our elders are being cared for – something that is often cited as a problem in our society – we can see they are cared for in ways similar to how we care for our children: Their basic needs are being met by strangers or “professionals” in an institutionalized setting, but lacking the emotional connectedness that would help them thrive.
c) The third pillar of detachment is the detachment from our role as mothers. Women’s identity as mothers is ignored or dismissed. It’s not a valid identity yet how can it not be? Whether a woman grows a child inside her for months or adopts a child with the choice to take on this vital role, or is a father taking on the role of mothering, the rest of society has decided that this identity is not “enough” and pushes – subtly and not-so-subtly – women and men towards other endeavors outside the home.
This isn’t to say that work outside the home is bad. Far from it. When we get into the “work versus raising kids” debate, we often forget that most traditional societies have women doing both and are able to do both somewhat simultaneously. They would forage, either leaving their children for a bit or sometimes bringing them. Their other contributions to the well-being of their tribe coexist with childrearing. Men mother in teaching children vital skills and nurturing when needed. Some men even allow babies to dry nurse on them while mom is away.
This idea that we must separate ourselves for work, that we cannot coexist as mothers and workers, coupled with the devaluation of mothering leads many to detach themselves from their mothering identity completely. And for those that don’t, we return to the issue of justifying the choice to mother. This means competition and judgment and a further move away from the proverbial village that is needed to really support families. If you decide to break free, you’d better show us that you’re doing something amazing with it.
d) The fourth and final pillar is one that subsumes all of the above: a detachment from biology. One of the great pushes from liberal feminism was and is to fight for women to be seen as separate from their biological role as mother in contrast to the patriarchal argument of keeping women out of the workforce – we weren’t biologically made for it (though again they also held a hand over us as mothers too). However, instead of it being a fight for women to be seen as “mothers and more” (thinking of the aforementioned identity crisis) it has come to be a means to simply deny biology with depressing results from a mothering perspective.
To deny biology for us means to also deny biology for our children and for the dyad of mother and child. Our children are biologically wired to expect certain behaviours when born – touch being one of the most prominent and one we are moving away from – and if we dismiss biology, assuming we can move beyond it, we fail to provide what our children need to thrive. This includes the physical touch, emotional connectedness, and round-the-clock care that research has, time and again, shown us matters. One of my favourite quotes of all time on this issue comes from Dr. Helen Ball at Durham University who has said:
“100 years of rapidly changing infant-care fashions cannot alter several million years of evolutionarily derived infant physiology.”
In short: We can change the way we parent to fit our cultural ideals – which we are doing – but that does not mean our children will adapt to this in the way we would expect or hope.
CONCLUSIONS
What we have ended up with here are several ways in which we are detached – how we have become “detached mothers” – thanks to the practices and cultural ideals that are encouraged and pushed by both the patriarchal society and the liberal feminist movement within it. I believe these practices are unsustainable and will result in a societal implosion as our empathy weans, mental illness rises, and we become more detached from one another on every level.
But we can change this but it means changing our entire concept of motherhood and what we value.
This new mindset can only come if we move playgrounds. We will never make the changes needed if we continue to play on the patriarchal playground – it is why liberal feminism has taken root, it’s the only type that could. We need a playground that respects both the feminine and the masculine and this begins with mothering. The more we can return to raising our children with a focus on attachment, love, compassion, respect – for them and their biology – the better the chance they will enter a world they feel connected to instead of detached from. A world they want to nurture and respect. This doesn’t mean any one practice over another, but rather an appreciation of what our children need and learning how we can provide it using ways that don’t dismiss them or ourselves as mothers.
We also need policy changes that flip the patriarchal and liberal feminist narrative on its head. Notably, we need policies that respect mothering as the valuable role that it is. Just a few ideas include:
• Parental leave options for up to 3 years as they have in places like Finland
• Paying parents who are at home taking the responsibility of their children instead of only to daycares
• Flexible work policies that allow women and men to work from home and work off-hours to blend work and family
• Programs for new parents that are based on peer-to-peer assistance (like LLL) instead of professionals stepping in
• Start educating our children in high school about infant biology and attachment, just as we teach them about accounting and Shakespeare
At the end of the day, when we make sure people realize the immense value of raising children and provide a framework in which this can happen, we all do well. It doesn’t mean saying work outside the home is meaningless – a fully matriarchal playground is just as unequal as a patriarchal one – but rather that we can find ways to value the ying and yang in our society so we can work together to thrive. This starts with our mothering and how we treat the most vulnerable members of our society.
Laurn Apfel was right – sleep training is a feminist issue – just not in the way she believed.
thank you for this. it echoes my own feelings so clearly. i am a feminist—a radical, intersectional ecofeminist, to be precise—and i have felt all my adult life that mothers, children, and maternity generally have been left out of the feminist narrative, to the detriment of us all.
I really enjoyed this article and it articulated a lot of ideas I have discussed with other mothers. It really resonated with me.Thank you.
Thank you for an interesting article! As a new mother, a self-declared feminist, and a biologist I still struggle to know where I stand on many of the issues you mentioned.
One more thing about modern-day motherhood connected to what you wrote is that in our society motherhood can be a socially isolating experience due to the dominance of a nuclear family. So not only being a mother is separate from being a worker, often it is also separate from being a social creature. For this reason I do not think that it is right to expect women to find fulfillment in motherhood alone, especially if it implies the “children, church, kitchen” model (or just children and kitchen). This is not how we evolved 🙂
I felt and still feel the isolation. But isn’t it the competitive parenting to justify being a full-time mother that’s leading to the isolation. If we just relaxed and invited each other over for coffee and a chat instead of running around to strict weekly and daily playgroup and other activities and strict snack/sleep/meal times, we’d be much happier and feel part of a social group.
You are so right!…and I’m feel so guilty when I’m ‘just chatting’ (while my husband is working)
OMG YES!!!! I LOVE this! It is everything I have been thinking for years but not able to articulate so clearly or confidently.
Our society is not set up for the integration of babies/children and work. Or for the integration of women as mothers and workers.
I could say so much more, but for now, THANK YOU.
Brilliant! Like other commenters have said, you have expressed my thoughts exactly, but far more articulately than I could have.
Brilliant! I was a consultant to Mothers & Babies Association in the late 1970s and through the 1980s. I am a social worker and we promoted attachment to mother and father and significant others. We intoduced baby touch and massage, the baby mai tie and co sleeping. This was geared to helping baby develop a safe secure attachment. I took my babies to work. I worked 15 hours a week outside my home. The work environment supported me. What I taught with ithers in my team was viewed as weird by many particularly the patriarchal beliefs around me.
I loved being a mother and I loved my work. I had a great blend and my babies flourished. I taught mothers to say “I am a mother, just a mother”.
To be a mother is the greatest gift of life and to be in tune with infant’s needs is essential. The stress at going against the ingrained patriarchal belief system was and is stressfull. Many a time I was I was torn between my babies needs and the external pressures of an often silent somtimes vocal pressure to turn away from my babies needs and towards the needs of others. As you have said so well patriarchy and liberal feminism have impacted the infant/mother relationship in ways that I believe against the evolutionary process of safe attachment which leads to an inner safe place and ulimately adults capable of developing sustainable deep empathic cnnections with each other infused with love, dignity and honor.
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Thank you for articulating exactly what has been in my head these past many weeks and adding information to support. I work with mothers and am frequently asked to sleep train and have NEVER seen it as a positive. It ‘works’ – in as much as ignoring your child/children and forcing yourself to sleep through the night works. And it ‘works’ provided you force a later embarrassing and hard to break habit of artificial nipple sucking constantly. It works if you make up things like ‘sleep regressions’ to constantly explain away the times that it doesn’t work. And it is such a herculean effort on the part of multiple people to ‘sleep train’ (and re-sleep train) or to force an infant and young toddler to sleep away from a comforting human presence that I simple honestly do not see the point. And I came to this neutral after being taught to ‘sleep train’ and to help parents ‘sleep train’. It’s a ridiculous circus and now that I’ve had my own child I see it is most certainly a cruel and unusual expectation for both babies and mothers. I didn’t bother with it for one second with my high needs (and medically special needs) baby and had great sleep right from the get-go.
Every contemporary american practice seems to undermine and detach the primal mother-baby bond. Breast pumps – an abomination to my mother – try and ‘give the benefits of breastfeeding without the actually breastfeeding’, swaddling – forces babies to make do without the comfort of being carried or sooothed, lack of maternity leave, early day-care, long absorbency diapers, white noise machines that shush and drown out babies’ noises and their ability to hear the lack of their caregivers proximity, cribs, strollers. Sure these things sometimes are a boon and save your back – but the training of mothers to ignore, and leave their infants alone as much as possible so they can return to productive work at great emotional and psychosocial expense to mothers children and families is just horrendous. So glad others are able to see this too.
This is bang on! Thank you for writing about such an important topic. Since having my daughter I have felt all of these things you write about and am proud that I have resisted the “kool-aid” and stuck to my intuition about raising my daughter. As mothers, we can stop this by honouring our roles and seeing the incredible importance they have in our world.
Thank you so much for this! I’ve been doing things differently than my parents and family and it’s really encouraging to see I’m not as alone as I thought.
I’m not a mum but I have been heavily involved in looking after baby siblings and this is something I have talked to my mum (and lots of people who will listen!) a lot. Seeing the way motherhood is undervalued in our culture breaks my heart especially since it reflects how undervalued women and our abilities are. I loved how you connected it further to people becoming ‘detached mothers’, I hadn’t thought of that but have defiantly seen it. Everything you said was spot on and thank you for talking about it xx
Excellent article. One of the many problems with third wave feminism. I’m not sure it’s ‘patriarchy’ but rather capitalism that is the driving force? A subtle difference for some maybe, but an important one for me personally.
But I wonder how much our idea of capitalism is driven by patriarchy??? 😉
I have been trying to find a label for the feminist I am…because I am not a feminist at all by the definition of feminism most commonly known. I struggled with explaining to my daughtera that equal doesn’t mean same — it means same value. I have found my term!! Thank you!
Great article.!!!
Thank you so much for the accurracy of this article. It is brilliant and should be spread around the western world. I’m from Brazil, and this is also the reflection of what goes on here. I’ll pass it on to the people who are ready to hear this and make a change. One by one we can better the way our children are raised and spread the respect lacked these days. Much love
Any chance you would change the image? I’ve shared this in facebook and feedback is many are put off reading it by that headline of abolishing feminism and then miss out on a very important read!! I definitely consider myself a feminist and also and attachment parent. This neo-liberalist feminism is a whole other breed that does not represent me.
I will see what I can find. However, sometimes FB just pulls whatever photo it wants 🙁
I agree, I’ve had several separate discussions of this article where people have reacted to the picture and have let it colour their interpretation of the whole article. I have just had to correct someone (a perfectly intelligent person, I might add, whose views I normally respect) who has claimed you are “arguing in support of an article entitled “feminism must be banished to support the family”!! Please change the picture as it is massively affecting the way people read this!
Wow! Thank you!
Wow. brilliant. tears of wow.
Thank you 🙂 I’m blushing.
I agree , amazing article.
This is a fantastic analysis, and really resonates with my experiences on trying to blend mothering (breastfeeding, baby-wearing, co-sleeping – because it feels right and my babies thrive that way) with work (in academia). You’ve articulated the kind of feminism we need as mothers and as people so confidently and clearly. Thanks for this. I’m returning to work after my third next year and know I will struggle, isolated in an alienating and hugely competitive environment. I’m keeping your thoughts to the fore to help me always ‘meet my child at the point of his or her need’ – another beautiful phrase about strong parenting I read today.
In my work of more than 2 decades with women suffering grief and regret following termination I would argue the existence of a fifth pillar of detachment that begins when a woman finds out she is pregnant, particularly in circumstances where pregnancy is unintended or undesired: a psychological detachment that denies the nature of, and even the existence of another human being. The use of euphemism in settings of pregnancy termination and the use of blatant misinformation seeks to deny women the right to any connection to their unborn and promotes the idea that women can only be successful in the ‘playground’ if they deny their reproductive ability.
Just come across this – very interesting (though could do with a proof read to correct sometimes mystifying typos….). What is omitted, I think, is an appreciation of economic realities. Parents do not necessarily return to the (paid) workplace because they ‘feel’ undervalued if they do not. In the towns and cities of the western world, two incomes are essential to pay for adequate housing – not holidays or cars or restaurant meals or other luxuries, but housing. Roof over head. Basic warmth and protection from the elements! Addressing this is implicit in the call to subsidise in-family childcare not just nursery care, and the extension of shared parental leave (which I think should go way beyond the age of just three)….but I would have liked it to be explicit. And costed out. Housing costs should not be left to the market but should be controlled by the state. Now that would be a real challenge to patriarchal capitalism!
Note on typos: This was a spoken presentation so I didn’t do much proofing 🙂 (In my defense!!)
Thank you for writing this! So many points i can relate to.. You have reminded me to say ‘i am a mother’ instead of ‘i am a mother and we run a business from home’ because the Mother alone seems lame these days. How sad that we (me, clearly) have been slowly conditioned that our most important job of raising children is not enough for our audience. MUST REMEMBER: Mine is the most important job in the world! Teaching and caring for my child takes up most of the time, running the home – the rest, THEN, there’s helping with the business (usually during my child free hour off each – but not every- day) in the evenings.
Is it only me who feels angry each time i hear from a new mother how “well. i’ll TRY breastfeeding…” or “Eugh, couldn’t do the breastfeeding thing, yuk!” it makes me so so sad.
Fantastic article, Tracy. Thanks for a great read. My question to you – I found my way to gentle parenting quite by accident. I hadn’t planned on my baby needing SO much from me around the clock. But to ignore his needs felt wrong and still does over a year later. My own mother considers my approach to be opposite her own and chalks it up to generational defiance. Any idea how to distinguish between objective benefits for mother-baby dyads vs rote rejection of prior norms, when discussing this with older parents? It is easy for people of my parents’ generation to dismiss my methods as overly idealistic and rebellious.
I think the push to say they are overly idealistic and rebellious can only work if you ignore all of human history. Parenting as you do is how we have parented children since the dawn of humankind 🙂 It’s really what children biologically expect. In that sense it’s neither overly idealistic nor rebellious – it’s about as normal and non-rebellious as you can get 😉
A wonderful read – thank you! Like others who have commented above, it articulates my present thoughts & feelings exactly. I consider myself a feminist, however have certainly felt dismissed by others in this arena as someone who is ‘not pulling their weight’ for choosing to devote myself to mothering full time. I repeatedly deal with comments which subtely imply I must be lacking ambition and/or intelligence to gain satisfaction and fulfillment from ‘just’ being a mum. It is refreshing and encouraging to know that there are others who value the role as much as I do. Thanks again
A great read, thank you, this articulates so many frustrations I have! However I feel like your argument could go a step further; this issue isn’t restricted to mothering but to all traditionally female roles, I feel it nearly as much in my paid work as a care assistant as in my mothering role. Did you see the recent BBC documentary about gender in the classroom? In an effort to compensate for inequalities in how girls and boys are brought up they did a spatial awareness exercise every day, which helped the girls catch up with the boys. Nothing was mentioned about how the boys might improve in the areas where the girls excelled!
A question – by “Paying parents who are at home taking the responsibility of their children instead of only to daycares” do you mean the federal/state government should provide parents with social safety net, i.e. give them a carers’ allowance? Or are you suggesting a familial arrangement – whereby the bread winner “pays” his wife/her husband to stay at home with kids?
I personally am completely with attachment parenting and enjoyed your defense of it. But I didn’t think it was right to link your arguments to such lofty topics as “patriarchy” and “neoliberalism” without actually trying to delve into the way them impact the family.
This is fine as a parenting blog aimed at people who have a particular base income anyway, and have very specific lifestyles, but to claim your argument is universally valid is not only short-sighted, but actually counter productive from many angles, including a feminist angle. All to often manuals on parenting that don’t consider people’s own diverse circumstances and backgrounds disempower rather than empower.
Here’s my take. It feels mean, because you say some very valid things, but I think you need to consider how what you say is tailored only for a very specific demographic:
http://isisdeblois.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-gb-x-none.html
I completely agree with your comment. As a feminist and first time expectant mother, the article was enlightening in some ways but alienating in others. I feel so much guilt about having to give my infant up to the care of underpaid “strangers” at 3 months old. I like to think parents do the best they can for their children given their individual circumstances. I hope that doesn’t make some of us “detached” parents.
[…] They could have babies and go straight back to work as if nothing had happened – the domestic shackles had been released! Enter formula, daycare, and microwave […]
I resonate deeply with everything expressed here in this brilliant piece of writing! In fact, it completely answers why I have NEVER felt attracted to feminism at all; something has always felt “off” for me about the whole notion of “feminism” being anything other than a “reaction” …. as distinct from “response”…. to patriarchy! Truly, feminism is the SAME as patriarchy; just the other side of the “same coin”, because the main focus seems to always be on adult men versus adult women. I am using “versus” here broadly, to include a divisive kind of competitive, comparative attitude between the sexes/genders, instead of a unifying co-operative, appreciative attitude.
And for this, the main focus needs to be on children and how they are cared for, because it is during the early formative years when children learn these basic ways of relating.
It never ceases to amaze me how callous some parents are towards their newborn sons for example. How do parents and physicians, politicians, educators NOT understand the FORMATIVE years of early childhood, and how these first days, weeks, months are the very foundation of ALL future relating.
THE CHILDREN’S FIRE …
“What kind of a society is it, that does NOT place the Children’s Fire at the very centre of its institutions of power?
It’s an INSANE society!”
~ Tim “Mac” MacCarntney
https://youtu.be/1JchSac-VP0
#TheChildrensFire
yeah. some people value their child having a rood over their head and put this as a first priority, obviously this is not from a single mum who has to pay everything for her child. As a single mother you have to prioritize your job or you could lose it and then BAM your child has no food and you could be homeless. But yeah. thanks for the shame trip because no matter what women do other women will put them down.