Our commitment to being 'good mums' leads us to make very different decisions, and it shouldn't be that way.
The first night after we brought our son home from the hospital was a long, rocky one. Every 20-30 minutes, he woke, screaming, and, in a groggy haze, I brought him to my breast precisely as the lactation consultant and all the nurses had instructed me. But after a few moments, he would unlatch his tiny mouth and throw his head back to shriek. His face turned bright red with all the effort he was expending. It was clear that I was failing in my primal duty to feed my baby.
What made a mother feel like she was doing a good job, Fielding-Singh found, depended greatly on her circumstances. Most of the lower-income moms she spoke with had endured at least one occasion, like my night with my newborn, in which their child was inconsolably hungry. In the book, she recounts in painful detail how one mother held a crying baby all night long because she didn’t have enough money to buy more infant formula.
“Parenting, in a way where you have to say no all the time to your kids’ requests because you can’t provide them, not because you don’t want to, but because you literally cannot, is extremely emotionally distressing,” Fielding-Singh said. All of the moms Fielding-Singh interviewed and observed felt the pressure of what she calls “intensive mothering.” The phrase was coined in the 1990s by sociologistto describe the “unattainably high standards to which mothers in this country are held, specifying that moms need to be children’s primary caregivers, that they should be self-sacrificing, that mothering as an act should be labor-intensive and resource-demanding,” Fielding-Singh said.
“Lower income mothers can be seen as not caring or complacent about their children’s diets,” Fielding-Singh said. “It’s actually not that at all. It’s that they’ve found a way to navigate the extreme challenges of treating their kids within a context of, often, deprivation, and also be able to keep going each day, keep putting one foot in front of the other.”
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