In an effort to make motherhood great again, conservatives are setting very high hurdles for those who want to take up motherhood. Enter all-or-nothing mother.
She has to breastfeed her baby, but if for some reason the milk doesn't come, she's just not trying hard enough. To avoid giving the baby lifelong attachment-related trauma, moms must be with the baby all the time, so they don't put the baby in the crib, sleep train the baby, or leave the baby alone with the father or other relatives. You cannot leave it there.
Rather than skyrocketing virginity and causing birth rates to fall even further, conservatives can't just tell women the truth: “There are a thousand ways to be a good mother, so you can relax.'' I wonder.
She has to feed her baby only organic food, but can't find a job to pay for it. This may require the ultimate dereliction of the maternal duty of childcare.
It's not that preschool, full-day kindergarten, or half-day kindergarten is much better. If you think about it, homeschooling is really the only option for mothers who care about their children. And so on.
female boss at home
In theory, this all-or-nothing motherhood applies the hardened, hectic, hectic culture of high-status white-collar professions to the domestic sphere, where one's child's life is at stake. And the soul has become a much bigger stake. Corporate presentations and spreadsheets are more possible than ever.
But in reality, such a vision of motherhood seems unbearable, not to mention impossible, for the only audience that matters: impressionable young women and girls. . Far from being convinced of the value of motherhood, young women are questioning the insistence that motherhood is an all-or-nothing ordeal. If feminists were really right, if being a mother is incompatible with being a complete human being..
I say this as a member of that demographic. I'm 23 years old and single. I'm very conservative and have always wanted children, but I'm surrounded by women my age who are mostly moderate to liberal and pro class. I don't know what they want.
An old woman who hates children?
Most of my co-workers are not the child-hating, travel-obsessed old ladies that conservative media often portrays. They actually like children, sometimes without even realizing it.
Some of their anxiety about motherhood is driven entirely by a culture that breeds adult narcissism and prolongation of adolescence, but much of it is driven by extreme feelings of the opposite. However, once they have children, they have to become completely dependent on their husbands financially and socially, and they no longer feel like they are anything other than “mothers” and spend every moment solely focused on their children. It will be.
At a time when young women feel that motherhood is all or nothing, a choice between staying “childless” or losing yourself by becoming a mother, more women Is it any wonder we choose to keep ourselves?
have more free time
This failure to establish norms of acceptable motherhood is bipartisan, but for example, conservative motherhood and hippie motherhood have become essentially the same thing. This is telling, but conservatives have a special responsibility here.
After all, unlike liberals, conservatives are interested in getting more women to have more children. Instead of leaning on the windmills of middle-class maternal neglect, conservatives should recognize the reality that today's working mothers find themselves in: spendmoretimeThey have more access to their children than the stay-at-home moms of a generation ago, yet today's children are more anxious and less self-sufficient than ever before.
Conservatives would do well to remember that women in traditional cultures have a proverbial “village” to help raise their children. This is something that American women usually lack, even those with traditional values.
As a result, many of the demands that conservatives make of mothers superficially resemble traditional culture, but depart from it in important ways. That is, overly intensive conservative maternal norms often distance mothers from society rather than involve them in social structures. Everyone else too.
legacy of love
What is essentially a neurotic and individualistic ideology that drives mothers crazy, deters them from having children who try to mother them, and does not seem to improve child outcomes, but rather Could it make it worse?
Rather than skyrocketing virginity and causing birth rates to fall even further, conservatives can't just tell women the truth: “There are a thousand ways to be a good mother, so you can relax.'' I wonder? And when we think of our mothers as adults, we don't remember them. Not the lifestyle choices they made, like day care or not, organic or not, home birth or not, but the love they gave us: the deep, unconditional love that only mothers can give. is.
