The Fallacy of Maternal Self-Sacrifice

Unpacking the false belief that choices that make our lives easier are bad for our kids.

Last week, I was texting with a friend, a stay-at-home mom of three, who was struggling to choose between two preschools for her middle daughter. One preschool had a longer school day than the other, which meant that my friend would have more of a break each day. The longer preschool was part of the same school her eldest daughter attended, which also meant two of her kids would be going to the same school, streamlining pick-ups and drop-offs.

My friend admitted that putting her middle child in the all-day preschool would make her life easier, not least because her daughter was going through a clingy phase. “I end up just not sitting down, all day, because as soon as I do, she’s on top of me,” she said.

She admitted, however, that she also felt a lot of guilt over wanting that space. “I feel like it’s a huge failure to stick her in school all day so I don’t have to deal with her,” she texted. “What I obviously SHOULD do is figure out how to enjoy these precious little kid’s weeks and months while I can still have them with her.”

In her texts I recognized something that I’ve felt myself and that I often see in other moms: The belief that a parenting choice that makes your own life easier is, by default, bad for your kids. I am calling it the fallacy of maternal self-sacrifice — the pernicious but pervasive idea 1) that we are only good mothers if we are constantly focused on our kids, and 2) that the moment we prioritize ourselves, we are directly harming our children.

It’s a fallacy because this isn’t actually how it works. What’s good for us isn’t, by default, bad for our kids. It’s far more common for the opposite to be true: What’s best for us is often best for our kids. But we have come to believe this lie because our misogynistic culture tells us, over and over again and in so many ways, that motherhood is primarily defined by self-sacrifice.

Before writing about this here, I wanted to be sure that psychologists with expertise in child development and parenting agreed with me, so last week I reached out to two wonderful and extremely knowledgable psychologists: clinical psychologist and parenting coach Rebecca Schrag Hershberg and clinical psychologist Yael Schonbrun, whose names you may recognize from past newsletters.

And wow, yes, did they ever agree.

The idea that we should always be sacrificing our needs and desires is, to some degree, rooted in American culture. It’s based in “the puritanical ethics of our Western society where we have this idea that, if it's easy, it must be frivolous or indulgent,” Dr. Schonbrun said — yet most of the time, she said, that conclusion is incorrect.

Misogynistic expectations surrounding motherhood — what it is to be a “good” mother in our society — add another deep guilt-inducing layer. We’re told in so many ways that motherhood should be all-encompassing. That we need to be constantly enriching our children’s lives or we are failing them. That motherhood has “to involve sacrifice and pain and exhaustion, and that if you're not sacrificing and exhausted and miserable, somehow you're not doing it right,” Dr. Hershberg said.

We often further berate ourselves by assuming, wrongly, that choices that could ease our burdens will be directly harmful to our children.

Let me dig a bit into the childcare example in particular. A lot of moms — especially, I think, stay-at-home moms — believe that they should always be tending to their children, and that childcare that’s not absolutely necessary is indulgent. But as Dr. Schonbrun pointed out, this isn’t how raising kids has worked for most of history, and it isn’t how it should work today.

“I actually think more childcare is often better for all parties involved, including the kids,” she explained. “We are wired to alloparent. We're not wired to do it alone.”

Having other caregivers means that we get recharging breaks — and that means we can be more patient and present when we do spend time with our kids.

“It's so much about quality and less about quantity,” Dr. Hershberg said. “You can be with your child for five hours, but if you're exhausted and snapping and on your phone, that's not going to be nearly as helpful for creating positive outcomes in your child as spending ten minutes that are really connected and child-led and warm and fuzzy…. but I think there's a resistance sometimes to seeing that because those ten beautiful minutes don't involve our suffering and our sacrifice.”

Dr. Schonbrun agreed. “There is a severe misunderstanding of the science of maternal availability,” she told me. It’s true that kids suffer when they are severely neglected — as evidenced by research that followed children who were raised in state-run institutions in China and Romania. But this research has been unfairly extrapolated and used to support intensive parenting approaches such as attachment parenting.

“Having caring, stable parental figures is critical, but the data roundly shows that caregivers don't need to be mothers — particularly when you look past the first six months — and, in fact, having additional caregivers as a part of a child's life is good for physical and socioemotional outcomes,” Dr. Schonbrun said.

Romanian orphanages are nothing like high-quality daycare or preschool. Childcare typically enriches children’s lives rather than depriving them. Kids get to make friends and develop social skills. They experience new perspectives and ways of doing things. They foster independence and resilience. And, again, they benefit when they arrive back home to parents whose buckets have been replenished and who can be more patient, present caregivers.

I know that my friend’s dilemma was specific, but this flawed thinking — that we are bad parents when we do things that make our own lives easier — rears its ugly head in so many situations. I know because I’ve thought it, too. I’ve written about some of these moments in my newsletter. So the next time you feel guilt over a decision that you worry may not be ideal for your kids, I encourage you to re-read this newsletter — I’ll do it, too — and examine whether the decision truly is bad for your kids, or whether you’re perhaps falling prey to the fallacy of maternal self-sacrifice.

Related posts:

• Why Parenting Mistakes Are Actually Gifts

• Alcohol, Guilt and The Patriarchy

• The Deep Misogyny of the “Maternal Instinct”

And now for this week’s ….

Today I’m commenting on this Instagram post from raisedgood, which has nearly 9,000 likes:

Here are my thoughts.

This is a perfect example of a social media post that promotes the motherhood fallacy of self-sacrifice. It’s a post focused on what moms should be doing based on what’s deemed best for their children, with no acknowledgement of the effort involved or the fact that doing more for kids isn’t always best.

Also, whenever I see the phrase “science proves,” I cringe. Science rarely if ever “proves” things — it suggests, but we always need to keep in mind that studies aren’t definitive. Many studies together can suggest a consensus, but even a consensus isn’t proof.

And science definitely doesn’t “prove” that mothers are meant to hold their babies close. Let’s just start with the phrase “mothers are meant to.” That’s a loaded one, no? Meaning what — that there are certain motherly things we’re supposed to do (like, apparently, hold our babies close) that are rooted in divine providence? Built into our DNA? If we don’t do them, does that mean we’re not really mothers? Or we’re just really bad ones?

In the post, she discusses five reasons why moms are meant to hold their babies close, but I’m just going to unpack this one: “A newborn’s smell is scientifically proven to be addictive to new mothers,” she writes. I went a-hunting and found the small study that this claim is based on. Did this study prove that a newborn’s smell is addictive to new mothers? Uh, no. In fact, the new moms in this study found a newborn’s smells no more pleasant than non-moms did. But the researchers did find slight differences in how the mothers’ brains processed the smells. According to the researchers, the findings “tentatively suggest a potential reward mechanism by which bonding serves to elicit maternal motivational and emotional responses.”

Tentatively. Suggest. And they say nothing at all about addiction.

I could go on and on and on about this Instagram post, but I’ll spare you. The point I’ll emphasize is that social media is chock full of messages designed to make mothers feel like they are the only people in the world who can properly nurture their kids. These messages are largely built on sexist lies.