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Key points
- Parents are struggling with the demands of parenting and a lack of social support.
- The rewards of parenting do not justify leaving parents (and especially moms) to shoulder the entire burden of raising kids.
- Better policies are necessary to make it easier for parents to provide for and raise a family.
This Mother’s Day, there are a few Mother’s Day sentiments that I can really do without. I don’t really need to hear about “the joy of parenting,” how I should “cherish every moment,” or how moms are “selfless superheroes.”
While these might sound like nice ways to honor moms on Mother’s Day, there’s actually a darker side to them: These same “positive” sentiments about moms can also be used to justify leaving them to fend for themselves in the messy maze known as parenting.
In business, this is known as passion exploitation. As researchers Jae Yun Kim and colleagues found, people are more likely to say that it’s OK to exploit someone at work if they’re passionate about their job, in part because people expected the work to be “its own reward” for passionate workers.
Sound familiar, moms?
It’s not just the view that parenting should be its own reward that can be used against moms—it’s also their competence. As assistant professor of management at Michigan State University Christy Zhou Koval and colleagues explain in their article, “The Burden of Responsibility,” when people see someone who has high self-control, they expect more from them, ask more of them, and think it takes less effort for them to do stuff.
And, as behavioral scientist Troy Campbell notes, there is one group this burden of responsibility clearly applies to: moms.
Women still do the bulk of the household labor and caregiving in heterosexual relationships. They’re also more likely to do the invisible labor of “household management.” According to research by Allison Daminger, a doctoral student in sociology and social policy at Harvard, women are more likely to do the mental work of anticipating needs, identifying options, deciding among options, and monitoring the results.
We think that moms can handle anything and that they don’t mind it. But keeping track of all the things is exhausting, even if you love your kids. Parenting is hard, even under good circumstances. And while there are many ways in which parenting is rewarding, those benefits don’t simply cancel out the physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion, motherhood wage penalty, stress, and burnout.
And it’s not just a matter of getting the men to contribute more. For one thing, almost a quarter of U.S. children live with a single parent. For another, our society has made it difficult to raise and support a family even for two-parent households.
Things like a crisis in education and a lack of affordable housing, affordable child care, affordable health care, and paid family leave (to name a few) all make it hard to be a parent in the U.S. And these are not problems that can be solved by coming up with a better division of household chores.
The fact that there are natural rewards to parenting does not justify leaving parents to shoulder any and all of the burdens of raising kids. We need to stop telling parents—especially moms—that they should endure the entire weight of raising the next generation simply because they “chose” to be parents or because “it’s all worth it in the end.”
These same reasons don’t justify employers exploiting their passionate workers, and they don’t justify society taking advantage of the unending labor of parents.
For let’s not forget that society benefits immensely from the unpaid labor of parents. And given how much society stands to gain, it’s reasonable to think that there’s a lot more it can do to help share the burden of raising up the next generation into productive members of society.
Leaving parents to fend for themselves does not make us feel like “we’re all in this together.” In the end, parents suffer and so does society.
So, what if this Mother’s Day, we stopped referring to moms as “selfless superheroes” and acknowledged that they’re just human? What if we stopped underestimating the cost that parents (and especially moms) bear for all this physical, mental, and emotional labor? What if we recognized that just because they can do it, that doesn’t mean it’s easy?
Moms need more than a card or flowers or a day at the spa. They need a change in the cultural norms that put so much of the responsibility on them. They need a society that makes it easier to provide for and raise a family. They need better policies that allow them and their families to flourish.
Moms need more than a one-day acknowledgment and appreciation of their sacrifices. They need actual help the other 364 days of the year, so their kids’ futures are not dependent on moms sacrificing their careers, their mental health, and their selves.
© Jennifer Zamzow, 2022
