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

Flawed mid-20th-century child development research helped create unrealistic expectations for mothers, according to this incisive treatise. Poet Reddy (The Long Devotion) excoriates British psychiatrist John Bowlby’s 1950s studies on juvenile delinquents and children orphaned by WWII, suggesting his conclusion that the “most important factor in a child’s mental health was the constant care and devotion of their mother” was undermined by the fact that he didn’t collect data on how poverty or other social factors affected the kids. Much of the research implicitly encouraged pushing women out of the workforce after WWII, Reddy argues, describing how generations of researchers have used variations on Mary Ainsworth’s “strange situation” lab setup, in which the psychologist observed how children reacted to their caregivers’ absence, to suggest that sending kids to day care might cause long-term emotional harm. The sharp analysis sheds light on how child development research’s individualistic focus unfairly blamed mothers for children’s outcomes while letting economic inequality and other political factors off the hook, and Reddy’s candid account of struggling with feelings of inadequacy after having kids demonstrates the deleterious effects of the impossible expectations set by such studies (“I cried and raged and cried. I felt terrible, and I felt alone”). It’s a perceptive argument that flimsy science has been used to guilt-trip mothers for decades. Agent: Maggie Cooper, Aevitas Creative Management. (Jan.)