Suzanne Harrington: Stop trying to be a 'perfect' mother — here's why it's bad for you and the kids

Snowplough parenting — where you seek to clear all obstacles from your child’s path so that they experience zero disappointment or setback — kills their ability to develop resilience and gumption, and has led to jokes like how many Gen Z / Gen Alpha does it take to change a lightbulb? None — their parents will do it for them. Then we unfairly label them snowflakes.

Free-range parenting is when you let younger kids do whatever they like so as not to oppress them or stifle their spirit, which means they will never be invited back, because they are a rampaging nightmare with no concept of boundaries. And tiger parenting — where you relentlessly push your children to overachieve, regarding anything less than total excellence as failure — will crush their self-confidence, rob them of childhood joy, and make them hate you.

When we say parenting, we really mean mothering.

Mothering is still the one we focus on, gimlet-eyed, ever ready to criticise and judge. From yummy to slummy to crummy, we create made-up categories in which to pigeonhole female parents; on screen, we laugh at mummying via Motherland, Amandaland, Catastrophe, Bridget Jones, Outnumbered, Pramface. We pitch mummy stereotypes against each other.

Despite feminism helping to dismantle some of the rigid gender constructs around parenting, it’s still far worse to call a woman a bad mother than it is to call a man a bad father. Even when it’s toxic fathering, not mothering, which has unleashed upon the world entities like Musk and Trump.

“Fred [Trump, Donald’s father] perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it,” wrote psychologist Mary Trump, niece of Donald, in her book Too Much And Never Enough, while Elon Musk and his father — who has two children with Elon’s step-sister, 42 years his junior — publicly loathe each other.

Try to imagine a world in which a mother having 13 kids with four men, like Musk, or a mother serially cheating on a succession of husbands, like Trump, and people still revering them, adoring them, giving them all the power. Can’t envision it? Me neither.

Mothers, from the Virgin Mary to Madonna, have always been held to very different standards from fathers. We deify, fetishise, elevate mothering to impossible levels of perfection, and when actual flesh-and-blood mothers fail to meet these made-up expectations — by showing themselves to be ordinary, fallible, flawed — we trash them.

We pit women against each other in manufactured culture wars: Stay-at-home mothers versus working mother (because unless you have a fleet of staff, every mother is a working mother), and then further divide women into those who are parents and those who are not. Ruby Warrington, in her book Women Without Kids, writes about what she calls The Mommy Binary — “the false divide that exists between moms and non-moms,” the latter subject to “pity, envy, disappointment and judgement.”

Yet, for a myriad of glaringly obvious reasons, more and more women are electing to remain child-free.

Counteracting the increasing number of women choosing to not reproduce, the conservative pronatalist movement has imported a new category of motherhood from Gilead — sorry, the US — known as Trad Wives. Think Ma from Little House On The Prairie with an Instagram account.

Trad Wives are a social media phenomenon where wealthy women cosplay at traditional housewifery, complete with a brace of kids, and lots of baking, pickling, flower-arranging and other domestic pursuits; a kind of inverted Kardashianism. Which, in itself, is fine. If you can afford to stay home to have babies and make jam, and it fulfils you, good on you. Knock yourself out.

However, the so-called Trad Wife becomes problematic within the context of the misogynist mega-backlash currently engulfing the US — Trad Wives are being presented as aspirational, ideal, politically correct. You know, like the Wives in a certain Margaret Atwood novel.

“It’s like performance art,” says cultural commentator Sophie Gilbert, author of the forthcoming Girl on Girl.

“There are plenty of women who have productive and lucrative careers playing stay-at-home wives and mothers online. They’re doing work! They photograph themselves, present themselves a certain way — they have branding deals, agents. They are performing wifehood online.

If they were really ‘trad wives’ none of it would be photographed. It’s political, it’s performance — a fetishisation of traditional motherhood.

Hannah Neeleman — online as Ballerina Farm — is a 34-year-old mother of eight from Utah. She shares snippets of curated domesticity to her 20m Instagram and TikTok followers from her farmhouse kitchen — she is currently attending the Ballymaloe cookery school in Co Cork — in posts about homemaking, farming, and parenting. She likes to wear gingham.

“She is fascinating,” says Sophie Gilbert. “So many followers, so many children. Really unapologetic about presenting her life as an ideal — and it does look beautiful, it looks easy. She doesn’t post pictures of the crazy messy reality that is parenting.” 

Neeleman’s husband is heir to the JetBlue aviation billions. Imagine our reaction to her if she were raising her eight kids on a council estate?

Back on earth, the nearest most mothers get to being a Trad Wife — whether they are married, partnered, or lone parents — might be spending an evening wearily batch prepping school lunches. In an era where monthly childcare can — and frequently does — cost more than monthly mortgage repayments, being a stay-at-home mummy has become an option only for the affluent. 

What we term the ‘free market’ has made it impossible to live on one income when the other parent stays home, should they wish to, unless the earning parent is earning a packet. In his podcast, economist Jaron Lanier says: “The economy only works now if you are young, healthy, and childless.”

I’d add, ‘and rich’.

Ironically, post-feminist culture has shifted massively to include dads more in parenting — a lot of dads want to spend a lot more time with their kids, as the parenting gender divide continues to (slowly) dissolve within the home. Active dadding is more culturally supported than ever, normalising dads being hands-on in a way their own dads never were.

Yet economically, it requires two parents to keep things financially afloat. And women are still losing out — while, according to the CSO, women account for 49% of the Irish workforce, only one quarter of the top 1% of Irish earners are women. They make up 29% of the part-time workforce, compared with 13% of men, while the gender pay gap remains at over 9%.

We never talk about dads ‘juggling’ work and home. Juggling is what mummies do — not just the paid labour of our actual jobs, but the unpaid domestic and emotional labour too.

As a lone mother living away from traditional family networks, I spun plates. Working from home saved my kids and me — I could work when they were asleep. 

Unable and unwilling to put my small children into daycare, I relied on a mummy network of friends and other single parents, where we would look after each other’s kids for reciprocal blocks of time, and a local child minder, unofficial, unregistered, and unflappable, with four kids and a menagerie of animals of her own, who would step in when I needed a break.

Also, my kids — born in 2000 and 2003 — predated social media. The whole performative online parenting phenomenon was another decade away, the word sharenting— when parents share images of their kids on social media — not yet invented. There was no pressure to upload images of pretend perfection rather than the odd-socked, jam-smeared frazzled reality. Instead, we celebrated muddling along.

While Mumsnet was born the same year as my eldest, the go-to resources — apart from other parents who had been at it a bit longer — were still parenting books, each generation with its own selection of gurus. 

From Dr Spock (who told 1960s mummies to trust their instincts) to natural birth advocate Sheila Kitzinger (who told women that giving birth is like orgasm) to Penelope Leach (who advocated child-centred parenting) to Gina Ford (who didn’t, instead encouraging “controlled” crying — the baby’s, not yours) to Supernanny (who advised placing them on a step), the advice was endless and conflicting, depending on what was currently fashionable.

Perhaps the go-to parenting guru who never goes out of fashion is British paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) who, in the 1950s, gave us the “good enough” mother and encouraged the “sound instincts of parents”. The good enough mother is the antidote to the perfect mummy. She has the sense to put her own oxygen mask on first.

“Mothers don’t need to be perfect, and can’t be,” writes Jasmin Lee Cori in The Emotionally Absent Mother.

“Winnicott sees the primary job of the good enough mother as adapting to the baby… how the good enough mother starts off with almost complete adaption to her infant’s needs and subsequently adapts less and less as the infant can tolerate more frustration.

“A mother who continued to satisfy all the infant’s needs perfectly and immediately would rob the baby of the need to learn new behaviours, develop new skills, and be able to handle delay and frustration.”

The desire to be a perfect mother tends not to stem from something as fatuous as wanting to look gook on your socials — unless you’re monetising it, of course. Helicopter parents are not trying to ruin their children’s lives — they’re doing their best to navigate what behavioural scientist Thomas Curran, in his book The Perfectionist Trap, calls a “toxically competitive meritocracy”. 

Subsequently, Curran reports how a study during covid of 10,000 US students found that, more than grades, workload, time management, or lack of sleep, “the biggest source of stress, according to young people, was their parents’ achievement expectations”.

Helicopters are becoming tigers, and while it may be based in wanting the “best” for our kids, it’s not doing them any favours.

Nor is the wall-to-wall structured activities for younger kids which now counts as normal “good” parenting, with little time to do nothing, to develop that most old-fashioned of childhood sensation — boredom. We have forgotten that boredom is the mother of creativity. We fill gaps with screens.

Why do we regard child boredom with such horror? Why do we think we have to create structure, meaning, and magical moments for every second of our children’s lives? To document everything? To constantly entertain, interact, enrich, educate, evaluate, examine and upload? 

Whatever happened to benign neglect, to letting them play unsupervised, go a bit feral? Why are kids’ playgrounds always full of hovering adults these days? It’s not stranger danger, it’s perfectionist over-parenting.

Attempting to be a perfect mother is not only terrible for kids, but terrible for women too. The job is hard enough without layering unrealistic filters of expectation on top. No wonder births in Ireland have dropped 20% in the past decade — it’s not all about the cost of housing and childcare.

Mothers need two things — structural economic support that extends beyond the home, and the ability to resist the false culture of perfectionism. Your kids will be grand. Stop hovering.