Breaking down postpartum *Good Mother myths* with Alex Bollen

Wow, that was fun!

If you didn’t get a chance to join Alex and I for our Substack Live last week, you can watch the whole recording here 👆🏼👆🏼👆🏼

Or, if you’re the readin’ type, below is the (lightly edited) transcript.

Also, QUICK PLUG! We’re going to be running a workshop — a dive deeper into how all of this shows in our lives and where/how we can change as individuals and culture — towards the end of the summer. The plan is to keep it to small group for this first go around so, if you’re interested, follow this link and let us know!

---

MOLLY:

Okay, so quick preface for everyone who is joining… Maybe you caught the written interview that I did with Alex. Maybe you didn’t. [Either way], I’m going to give a little bit of a preface…

Hopefully some of you who are watching this are familiar with the insanity of my stressor map. There’s a wide stressor node on there that I’ve titled social narrative and cultural expectations. And when I read Alex’s book, Motherdom, I was like, “oh, Good Mother myths! That’s what falls into this bucket.” Then reading it and talking to Alex and doing our interview, I’ve been rethinking how this shows up as a stressor and starting to think of it more as an overlay over the whole stressor map. Meaning that it’s not a specific stressor. It’s more like a stress amplifier, I guess. Because it has this amplification role, it makes everything worse, but also it’s unnecessary. Right?

ALEX:

It’s unnecessary.

MOLLY:

You could just take it off. Just take it off the map altogether!

So that’s why I really appreciate the way Alex writes about Good Mother myths in her book, and the approach she takes, because it’s really about identifying not only what the Good Mother myths are, but where they came from, in a way that really breaks down their power: how they show up and the solutions to clear them out, on a personal level and on a cultural and societal community level. So well aligned with everything in the Maternal Stress Project – this isn’t solely a you problem, this is an us problem. And we have a lot of work to do at a very broad structural and systemic and cultural and societal way when it comes to decreasing the stress for every woman and every birthing person and every parent in general.

This conversation isn’t too much of an overlap with the written interview that we did. It’s like a companion piece.

Alex and I were talking about this right before we went live, we could do this once a month and tackle a very specific area of the parenting journey every time, and still have a new topic for every conversation.

Today, we want to focus on the postpartum period. This is a physiologically vulnerable time. It’s also a psychologically vulnerable time, especially if this is your first baby. You’re new to motherhood. You’re prone to hearing Good Mother myths and thinking they’re true and then and they’re also incredibly unnecessary. So how do we really see where they are, see how they show up, and see the damage they’re doing? So we can just get rid of them.

Okay, Alex, now it’s your turn. First, I’d love for you to intro Good Mother myths in general, and then transition that into one of the biggies – one that really affects everyone across parenting but really shows up in that postpartum period – the myth of the self-sacrificing mother.

ALEX:

Good Mother myths are basically an assortment of narratives, ideologies, stereotypes, directives which say to mothers what you should or shouldn’t do, and also, crucially, how you should feel or how you shouldn’t feel. The specter of the good mother casts this shadow over all of us, but the Good Mother myths tell us what the good mother should or shouldn’t be doing. A really important thing to know about them is they’re contradictory. We can go on to talk about that in the context of sleep in the postpartum period, because you can hear really different things about sleep. They are fashioned by experts. And I think one of the things which is really interesting about our current era is that those experts aren’t necessarily doctors or scientists.

MOLLY:

Should we say “experts”?

ALEX:

Yes, “experts” (holding up air quotations)

How these Good Mother myths have their power, how they’re enforced, why they’re so potent, has two pillars to it: 1) “if you do this thing or you don’t do this thing, you’re going to harm your baby” and in that hypervigilant postpartum period, people are really vulnerable to the idea that if they do something or don’t do something that’s going to harm their baby; and 2) is what I call unmothering, a concept from black feminist scholarship, which is the fear of having your child or your children taken away. You don’t have to dig very deep below the surface to fine where people have this real fear of like “I’m a bad mother and if people think I’m bad mother, I’m going to have my child taken away.”

MOLLY:

It’s interesting to tee it up that way, because with “good mother” the opposite of that is “bad mother”. There’s little appreciation for grey space or even that either end of the spectrum is not based in truth.

ALEX:

And I think that’s one of the reasons why the “good enough mother” concept, which is Winnicott, has real popularity. I’s a way of resisting that binary of good or bad.

MOLLY:

You mentioned sleep. Sleep is interesting to consider especially when you think about it in the context of stress. It has this bi directional relationship where sleep is recommended as a stress-reducing strategy and lack of sleep can cause stress. Of course, what are you missing most in the postpartum period? You’re losing sleep. And you’re stressed!

I’ve written about this and you have great things in your book about this too – sleep has a prioritization issue when it comes to the self-sacrificing mother. On one level, loss of sleep is somewhat inevitable with a newborn. Especially with the lactating parent, the person who’s nursing is the one who’s going to say to their partner, “well, you don’t have to get up. I’m the one who’s feeding” But it has this cycle where you don’t challenge who has sleep priority, even in more extreme cases for those at risk for health issues related to lack of sleep, like mental health disorders. For example, if you’re at risk for postpartum depression, you need to prioritize your sleep, whatever that looks like. When you are influenced by the myth of the self-sacrificing mother, reconsidering the prioritization of sleep is not even a point of discussion.

ALEX:

No. Exactly. If people have feeding issues, you might get the “okay, well, you just need to wake yourself every two hours”, and there’s no kind of consideration of the impact that that might have on the person who’s having to wake up every two hours.

I think the other thing around sleep is the whole issue of bed sharing. There’s two different camps which have wildly opposing views. In my experience of working with new parents, bed sharing can work really well for some families, and they actually get more sleep that way. For other families, it’s like”no, I just lie there paranoid that I’m going to sort of roll over my baby.” There’s no one right way to do it, but because it’s so loaded – how your baby sleeps, how much they sleep – making those decisions is really hard and whatever you’re doing is going to be “wrong.”

It’s really so polarizing. It’s hard for people to try and navigate that. And it’s really just about what works for one family doesn’t work for another, but you don’t have that sort of discourse.

The content that you see on social media about baby sleep, it’s “try this”, “do that”, and wake windows. It’s not about “what can you do to get more sleep, to get more rest?” I think that absolutely should be the focus. There is a strong link between tiredness and postpartum depression and one of the simplest things you can do to protect maternal mental health is sleep and rest.

MOLLY:

The way that the self-sacrificing mother, the concept of it, gets lodged in your brain starts so early. It’s not just a postpartum thing. It starts when you’re trying to get pregnant. It’s there when you’re pregnant. And then it kind of congeals during the birth experience because of how decentered the mother is in her own birth.

The thing that comes to mind is how, once the baby’s out, even when you are still getting that baby out of your body, there isn’t recognition for the physicality of the event. What that body has just been through. You are very much a patient, because your body has just done this incredible thing, but it is also dangerous and monumental and there is a physicality of recovery – internal and external – in addition to the psychological shift of entering motherhood.

ALEX:

It’s huge.

MOLLY:

And that’s not even considering all the hormones trying to get themselves back to baseline. Again, there is this de-prioritization.

And the language used leading up to birth after birth, helps create this message of the self-sacrificing mother is a “good mother”.

ALEX:

It’s really interesting how the woman, the birthing person, is de-centered. When all that matters is that the baby is okay. People get called selfish if they want a physiological birth. People get called selfish if they want a cesarean section. This idea that if your autonomy just doesn’t matter. Your agency doesn’t matter. It’s: “Don’t be selfish. It’s not about you.”

There’s all this judgment around birth. But people have all sorts of valid reasons for wanting a particular type of birth, and let’s understand that, let’s respect that, let’s support that person in whatever birth they would like to have. We know that things don’t always work out. It can be unpredictable. But this idea that it’s all about a healthy baby, nothing else matters…. Who do you think you are?

MOLLY:

Yeah, the message of “all that matters is a healthy baby… “when you’re like “I’m here too! And I’m going through something huge!” It’s also in the way we ignore the importance of the birth experience for long term health. How powerful it is to feel emotionally supported in that moment. If you feel de-centered, if you feel unsupported, it’s not a healthy approach to birth! Also it feeds into that myth of “that’s how birth is. A ‘good mother’ puts her baby first” and can lead to those interventions under the auspice of “we will do what we need to do to make sure this baby is ok.” That risk:risk analysis, where there is absolutely zero risk to the baby, without any consideration of the risk related to decentering the mother, especially in the long-term sense. It tracks through, right?

ALEX:

That’s such a such an important point about looking at the risks. How the tiniest risks for the baby is completely unacceptable but a huge risk to the mothers, for the birthing person is okay.

Well, it’s not okay. And actually if you look historically, when childbirth was much more dangerous and mortality rates were much higher, when people had a choice, the mother would be prioritized over the baby. Because the mother is the more valuable person in that community then a baby that might not survive. So it’s interesting how that risk calculus has gone from one extreme to the other.

The way in which risk is used, as well: “you wouldn’t want to run that risk, would you?” And it’s like: everything is risky. Life is full of risk. I cross the road and there’s a risk. You’re never going to eliminate risk. But a lot of the dialogue around birth, mothering, early parenthood is: “we can’t tolerate any risk to the baby… even if it has a huge impact on the parent.”

A good example of that is around sleep, safe sleeping advice, the message that you need to be with your baby when they’re asleep. That leaves people saying: “my baby’s asleep in the Moses basket so I’m just going to sit in this darkened room, even though I really want to have a shower, even though I really want to have something to eat…” That’s a good example and if you look at the evidence around that advice, I’m not sure how strong it is. But what about the person sitting in a dark room and what they need?

MOLLY:

One thing that came to mind as you were talking, especially about the risk:risk, that I’m starting to wonder about is how much the concern around lawsuits and malpractice feeds into the current state of Good Mother myths? If anything happens to the baby, that’s a problem for the practitioner, so is this a way to transfer responsibility by making this a good mother thing? Instead of saying “we’re scared of what could happen and you might sue us so you should be self-sacrificing here and then its your fault.”

ALEX:

It is an interesting question. I’ve written about birth in the US and the UK, and they’re very different healthcare systems. And litigation hugely shapes the US medical system. It’s one reasons why birth is so medicalized in the US, like the constant monitoring of babies, for instance. In the UK, we don’t have that same litigation culture, although our National Health Service does pay out millions and millions and millions of pounds a year because of birth injuries and things going wrong in birth. But you still have this culture, in both countries, of coercion, of the weaponization of Good Mother myths, of the self-sacrificing mother. It just plays out in different ways in the different healthcare systems. The litigation issue definitely shapes things massively.

MOLLY:

We got a little off topic so I’m gonna pull us back…

Breastfeeding.

ALEX:

Oh, my goodness.

MOLLY:

This feels like a big one that shows in the context of the self-sacrificing mother and other drivers of Good Mother myths. In addition to being an author, you work with mothers in the postpartum period, so you see this come up a lot especially in terms of how the messaging around Good Mother myths, feeds into the stress of breastfeeding.

ALEX:

In my experience of working with new mothers, breastfeeding can cause the most enormous amount of stress and agony. People can get really distressed. There’s this narrative that, “oh, you can breastfeed, you just need to try really, really hard” and one thing, which I find deeply frustrating is that we know for some people, physiologically, their breast milk isn’t going to be enough for their baby. We don’t know the prevalence of that. But even if we say it’s 1% that’s one out of every 100. That’s still an awful lot of people being told “you can breastfeed if you just try hard enough.” They will try everything they can and it’s just a recipe for postpartum mental health issues.

So that’s one issue around it. Another issue is when say to people, “oh, you must breastfeed, and you must try really hard” but we don’t give them any support. The thing about breastfeeding is, if you get the right support at the right time, it can make all the difference. Even just the reassurance – “yep, they’re feeding a lot. That’s what babies do.” Culturally, we don’t really understand breastfeeding because it gets hidden away in people’s homes. It’s really normal for little babies to feed all the time but you’re thinking “Oh, I’m doing something wrong.”

One of the things which I’ve asked many times over the years in my postpartum groups is: “what surprised you most about motherhood?” Very often, people will say: “how long feeding takes.” And instead of having a culture where people understand that it takes loads of time, they just think, “oh, I’m doing it wrong.”

The other thing about breastfeeding is that some people just really hate it. For all sorts of reasons. For instance, if you’ve had horrific things happen to you, if you’ve been sexually abused. If you have sensory issues, the sensory overload from breastfeeding can be really overwhelming. We don’t talk about that. It’s just: Suck it up. If you’re finding this difficult, if you’re finding it hard, if you’re finding it challenging, then that’s on you. Just get on with it.

MOLLY:

One of the the traps that you talk about, in terms of what sets up Good Mother myths, is when something is described as “natural”. I just want to emphasize that we’re not saying don’t breastfeed. We’re saying we need to consider the nuance and the language we use and the way we include breastfeeding in our in our culture, the visibility, the way we talk about it, and the way we talk to our friends about it.

You need the full platter in front of you for when we talk about it: What are the options? Where do I fit into this? Where does my life fit into this? Where do my needs fit into this? Where does who I am fit into this? It’s such a nuanced conversation and when you say “breastfeeding is natural”, you put it in this box, right? And then you close the conversation.

ALEX:

You do. And if you’re calling something “natural”, the flip side of that is that people who don’t breastfeed are being “unnatural”. And the judgment around that. The judgment around breastfeeding is just grim. And I think breastfeeding people also get judged, for breastfeeding in public.

MOLLY:

The irony!

ALEX:

In terms of what’s “acceptable”, it’s so narrow. It’s really, really challenging. There’s not that nuanced conversation. There’s not the: “let’s people make the decisions that are right for them” the “let’s support them in their decisions.” You know, give practical and emotional support. We don’t do that. We set people up to fail. I think by saying “breastfeeding is natural, so we’re not going to give you any support” you are setting people up to fail.

MOLLY:

Breastfeeding is also a good example of another driver of Good Mother myths: the concept of magical thinking. Again, it’s a trap. The way we get stuck on these ideas that, if I do this one thing, my kid will be a genius, or everything will go well from now on, or I won’t regret this when they’re 25… whatever moment in time that you project out to.

I definitely see this as a way of managing stress. Anticipatory stress is real. You worry about what happens if you stop breastfeeding and then, if that kid fails a math test when they’re a junior and they don’t get into the college of their choice, you have the “I should have been breastfeeding for that full year.” That’s anticipatory stress, and it’s unnecessary.

Can you talk a bit about magical thinking, and how it shows up in breastfeeding and anywhere else with Good Mother myths.

ALEX:

Magical thinking – you find it in all human societies – it’s our tendency to try and find ways to control things we can’t control. A really good example would be, I’m going to wear my lucky socks when I go and see my favorite team playing or I’m going to do a rain dance because I’m worried about drought. It’s about trying to influence the future by doing things which aren’t really connected to the future. Wearing your lucky socks is obviously not going to make any difference to you how your team plays, but you feel that sort of sense of control.

We all want our children to grow up to be healthy, to be happy, to have fulfilling lives. That’s an understandable thing that we want because we love them. And so we’re really susceptible to any sort of messaging, which is like: “if you want your kid to be okay, you need to do this…” Breastfeeding is such a good and powerful example of that. The claims that are made in relation to breastfeeding, it’s just massive overclaim, it is magical thinking. This idea that, if you breastfeed, your kid is going to grow up to be really smart, they’re going to get into the right college, they’re going to be sporty, they’re going to be this, and they’re going to be that.

We even see people making claims about breastfeeding in broader terms, like breastfeeding can solve poverty. But, no, it can’t. How on earth can breastfeeding do that? It is magical thinking.

There is, evidence around illnesses and things like that…

MOLLY:

In the short term, there are clear benefits…

ALEX:

But in terms of the long-term…

MOLLY:

A lot can happen between breastfeeding in college.

ALEX:

So much happens. How can you trace it back to breastfeeding?

Breastfeeding is expensive. There’s this myth that breastfeeding is free. It’s not free. It’s only free if you think that women’s time doesn’t cost anything. And people often spend hundreds of dollars, hundreds of pounds on, lactation consultants and pillows…breastfeeding has a cost. There’s a reason why it’s higher income families which are more likely to breastfeed.

MOLLY:

We could talk about that for a while.. . Just go get her book!

Breastfeeding is a big one. The self-sacrificing mother feels like a big one. But all of this shows up even in the smaller things and that highlights how unnecessary some of these Good Mother myths really are.

One that you’ve written about recently is tummy time. I really related to this because, oh my god, doing tummy time with my first baby was awful. She hated it. It was the worst. I felt so bad and I watched all these other babies, sitting so cutely on their tummies. She would never do it. She was never happy. And we would do all the different tricks for getting “adequate” tummy time. You talk about language like this how, if you say “more than…” you are establishing a base that suggests doing anything less is worse, you should always do more.

There is a quote in your post that really resonated with me, and I wrote it down: “it’s either you’re a bad mother for not optimizing your child’s development, or you’re a bad mother because your baby is unhappy about the face plant.” I had a face planter, so she was always unhappy when we did tummy time.

Let’s talk about the language used and where it even comes from.

ALEX:

So I think there’s a general thing of “the more the better” – the more you talk to your baby, the cleverer they’re going to be. It’s logically nonsense, right? Because there’s a ceiling to everything. Your baby is not going to have an IQ of 250 because you talk to them every second of day. There’s a ceiling. It’s logically nonsense but we accept it, because we expect mothers to be devoting all their time to cultivating their babies.

Tummy time was a particularly interesting one. It causes so much stress to people. I’ve had new mothers saying to me that their partner was giving them stress because, at three days old, they weren’t giving a baby tummy time. If your baby’s on your shoulder or lying on your lap, they’re getting tummy time. It’s the normal, everyday kind of mothering practices that qualify as tummy time, that we completely ignore and we don’t acknowledge. It’s like there must be this very conscious thing that you do, and you must do at least 10 minutes a day. This target, that’s the baseline. And if you do manage to do 10 minutes a day, wow, you’re still a loser, because you know you should be doing more. And babies vary so much. You had a face planter, right? Poor little baby! They just want to be held. They do not want to put on the floor. But now it’s another thing you’re failing.

MOLLY:

I’m wondering how, at this point in time, we get so much information about what we should be doing as mothers in these quick bite-sized social media posts. So instead of having an hour dedicated to learning all of these different ways of doing tummy time, we depend on platforms that don’t have the space for nuance. Instead, it’s the message tummy time is important for development alongside a picture of a baby, on their tummy, looking so happy, right?

I feel like social media is a little to blame for this too. There is no room for the nuance. And the one liner is what gets stuck in our head.

Also, I’m happy to report my face planter is now 12, and she’s doing fine. She crawled, she walked, she’s on the swim team… she’s fine.

ALEX:

Yeah, exactly. You don’t know that at the time, you just think, “oh my goodness, they’re never gonna walk.”

I think, what’s really interesting about babies, as with adults, is they’re all different. They have their different personalities. Some babies are really into vocalizing. Other babies are really into sort of moving around. They’re all different. In terms of baby’s physical development (unless you’re locking them in a room and they’re not getting anything) they are going to reach all these milestones.

Ordinary loving parenting is what babies need to develop. This idea that we must consciously optimize development…

MOLLY:

That’s really the crux of it.

And that’s a good transition to talking more about how we shake these Good Mother myths off? Especially in terms of how it amplifies the stress in this time of life, how it’s an overlay on the stressor map, and how it’s unnecessary. There are a lot of stressors that you’re going to encounter during this phase that are absolutely inevitable, but they don’t need to be as strong, as heavy as they are when you layer on the Good Mother myths. How do we shake them off? What do we need to do? At a personal level. And, if we want to go there, at a broader societal level.

ALEX:

So much of this is at a societal level, in the sense of support systems for mothers. The US is particularly bad in terms of parental leave and childcare in general. So there is a huge societal part to all of this. And then you have things like decent housing, secure jobs, if you have all of those things in place, it’s going to be better for children. It’s gonna be better for families. That’s a really, really important part of it.

In terms of at a personal level, around the stress, one of the things I will say to new parents is what I call the misery test. If something is making you miserable, that’s a sign to just back away. If you’re following a social media influencer or if your friend says “oh just do this…” but its making you miserable, back away. Tummy time is a really good example. It was making you miserable. It was making your daughter miserable so…

MOLLY:

Walk away! I like that.

ALEX:

That is so much easier said than done, I think, particularly for a new parent. But it’s having that kind of faith that you know your baby better than anyone else. You and the other caregivers in that baby’s life. It’s not someone on Tiktok. It’s not your pediatrician. It’s you – you know that baby.

So it’s about really having that faith in terms of what is right for you and your family. One of the things I’ve written about is the importance of diversity and variety. Linked to that is just rejecting this idea of optimization. Can I swear?

MOLLY:

Absolutely!

ALEX:

It’s bollocks!

MOLLY:

That’s barely a swear! I love the politeness of that word.

But yes, it is utter crap.

ALEX:

It is utter crap. And I think we really need to reject that. There is no one right way.

In terms of something like physical development and the idea that every single baby needs to have 10 minutes of tummy time a day to kind of develop, it’s just nonsense. It’s real nonsense. It’s about accepting, on a personal level, but also on a sort of societal level, that there is no one right way. There is no such thing as optimization. We’re all trying to do the best, and we will all make mistakes. I think also being able to live with mistakes and just go, “okay, I didn’t get that right.”

I think back to my mothering. I think many things I’ve done wrong (and my kids are now old enough to tell me all the things which is always highly amusing), and being okay with that. We are going to make mistakes, and that’s life, right?

Do our children really need to grow up in a perfect kind of Eden where nothing ever goes wrong? How well are we equipping them for the world if they grow up like that?

MOLLY:

I wonder if there is also something about our generation, that we’re more attached to feeling like our mistakes are really fucking everything up. We talked about this in our last interview too, I feel like I’m in this funny zone right now (my kids are 10 and 12) where I know that tummy time doesn’t matter. I’m over that one. I know that breastfeeding one for longer than the other probably doesn’t matter. I’m over that. But I’m also here, in this in between stage, thinking: “Oh dear lord, everything I do now will set them up to be the humans that they will be forever!” So I have this new feeling of responsibility for what my role is right now. It has a bit of magical thinking, because I know I don’t have that much influence and all they really need is a loving home or even just that one person who is loving and there for them.

There’s a lot of research that shows how just the basics are the key. Meeting those basic needs. It’s not about micromanagement. And yet, we have this message that “THIS is the most important thing EVER!”

ALEX:

Absolutely. It is that ordinary loving care. And then the other really important question is, what gets in the way of that?

I know that when I am really stressed about things, then I am less patient, I’m less fully present, all of those things. It’s kind of understanding what is getting in the way for us that we can do something about. And I think it’s also accepting that our children are who they are.

MOLLY:

You have a quote in your book that I just really appreciate: which is “accepting how little power we really have to shape our children’s lives.”

I think that as a mantra – if we are present, if we are here, if we’re doing the basics, if we are providing a loving home, if we’re providing the basics. If we are able to provide because, again, not everyone can even access the basics. That’s a societal level issue.

Relieve that weight from yourself, that everything you do is hugely consequential. It’s not. It’s a myth that we’ve been fed.

ALEX:

And I think it gets in the way of the here and the now. Of enjoying our time with our children. Enjoying the here and now. I don’t want to be one of those people who’s like, “enjoy it. It goes so fast” because that’s really annoying, but because I’m kind of at the other end now.

I just think back to when they were babies and I wish I had been less stressed; just enjoyed it more. Absorbed it.

MOLLY:

Quick plug! Alex and I are planning out a workshop towards the end of the summer. The idea is to open this conversation up and think through experiences and strategies when it comes to dealing with Good Mother myths. What does it look like to mother in an authentic way that’s for you, how do we have these conversations, and how do we map the path forward?

Is there anything you can add about the workshop?

ALEX:

From my own work mothers and parents, just how powerful it is to share experiences with each other. It can be very affirming.

MOLLY:

So if you’re interested, fill out the form.

Thank you to everybody who is able to join Live. Thank you to everybody who is watching and made it all the way to the end.

Chime in and comment !

Thank you, Alex. This was so fun. Bye everyone!

---

Can I bug you for a tiny gesture of support? A simple tap on that ❤️, a share, a recommendation, or (if you’re feeling extra generous) a ridiculously low monetary upgrade of $6 for the ENTIRE YEAR (keep me caffeinated 😉):