The Good Mother Myth

In an era of mommy blogs, Pinterest, and Facebook, The Good Mother Myth dismantles the social media–fed notion of what it means to be a “good mother.” This collection of essays takes a realistic look at motherhood and provides a platform for real voices and raw stories, each adding to the narrative of motherhood we don’t tend to see in the headlines or on the news. From tales of mind-bending, panic-inducing overwhelm to a reflection on using weed instead of wine to deal with the terrible twos, the honesty of the essays creates a community of mothers who refuse to feel like they’re in competition with others, or with the notion of the ideal mom—they’re just trying to find a way to make it work. With a foreword by Christy Turlington Burns and a contributor list that includes Jessica Valenti, Sharon Lerner, Soraya Chemaly, Amber Dusick, and many more, this remarkable collection seeks to debunk the myth and offer honest perspectives on what it means to be a mother.

As a psychotherapist, parent educator and parent coach, Alyson Schäfer has worked with a great many mothers who, in the quest to be a "good mother" have ended up on the door step of despair. Alyson is a forty-something, suburbanite, working-mother of two and can speak to these issues both personally and professionally. This book explains the psycho-social phenomena of how each person creates their own unique "good mother myth" and then examines why these myths are not only faulty, but could in fact lead to poor parenting, marital disaster and individual crisis. Her years of educating parents around these concepts afford Alyson the skill to take complex ideas and explain them to a lay audience in a compelling and easy to understand way. Capitalizing on the need to present parents with information in an easy to digest format, the book is presented as a series of personal stories, each highlighting a common parenting myth. This format will appeal to tired parents who have little time and energy for "academia". Instead, readers learn by taking a voyeuristic peek into the private family lives of the book's characters. Readers can identify with the fictitious parents and coaching clients in the stories and see first hand how the characters ’ life experiences shaped their unique "good mother myths" and how these myths create conflict in their lives. The author offers up ideas for how the character can reject her current thinking and adopt a more useful outlook to improve her situation. The story arc allows readers to identify and then project how their parenting may be unknowingly going off the rails. The goal of this book is to provide parents with some basic education and a means of self-discovery. Readers uncover their own good mother myths and are given an eye-opening glimpse into potential issues to challenge their thinking. A great sense of empowerment is restored as mothers become better able to resist the pulls of their personal and cultural myths, and instead begin parenting with greater intention and in ways that are more suitable to proper child guidance.

This groundbreaking and irreverent history of motherhood is worth a hundred advice books for any mother who’s ever been made to feel guilty or frazzled by society’s impossible expectations. Analyzing data from the psychoanalyst’s couch to the hidden history of wet nursing, psychologist Shari L. Thurer wends her way from the Stone Age to the age of Hillary Rodham Clinton, painting a vivid, often frightening picture of life for mothers and children in a time when their roles were constructed by men. Along the way, she debunks myth after myth—exposing the not-so-golden ages of Classical Greece and the Italian Renaissance, and revealing the pervasive ideal of Dr. Spock’s selfless, stay-at-home mother as the historical aberration it actually was. A work of impassioned scholarship and astonishing range, The Myths of Motherhood does nothing less than recast our conception of good mothering.

"Given a voice, what would the Great Goddess, the Virgin Mary, Snow White's evil stepmother, or Portnoy's mom have said about child care, contraception, bonding, or breast-feeding? Would their feelings have mattered? After all, maternity has been constructed by men over the millennia. Aristotle thought mother's womb merely cooked father's seed. The Church preferred virgins to mothers, and Freud was father-fixated. Even a brief survey of history reveals a diversity of maternal practices and ideals that are at odds with each other as well as with the views of contemporary child-care experts and psychologists." ""I cannot recall ever treating a mother who did not harbor shameful secrets about how her behavior or feelings damaged her children," writes Thurer. Today our sentimentalized conception of the good mother casts a long, guilt-inducing shadow over real mothers' lives. Never has there been so much advice and so little agreement. Never have the ideals of motherhood been as ambiguous, psychologically demanding, and unforgiving. One conclusion is certain: the "good mother" is a cultural invention." "In this brilliant synthesis of history, psychology, the arts, and religion, Thurer shows how our current concept of the ideal mother, like all ideology, is culture-bound, historically specific, and hopelessly tied to fashion. Thurer exposes our current myths of motherhood as a backlash against recent gains in women's rights and control over their bodies." ""For thousands of years, because of her awesome ability to spew forth a child, mother has been feared and revered. She has been the subject of taboos, witch hunts, mandatory pregnancy, and confinement in a separate sphere. She has endured appalling insults and perpetual marginalization. She has also been the subject of glorious painting, chivalry, and idealization. Through it all she has rarely been consulted." The Myths of Motherhood, finally, is her story."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Now in paperback, the provocative book that has ignited fiery debate and created a dialogue among women about the state of motherhood today. In THE MOMMY MYTH, Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels turn their 'sharp, funny, and fed-up prose' (San Diego Union Tribune) toward the cult of the new momism, a trend in Western culture that suggests that women can only achieve contentment through the perfection of mothering. Even so, the standards of this ideal remain out of reach, no matter how hard women try to 'have it all'. THE MOMMY MYTH skilfully maps the distance travelled from the days when THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE demanded more for women than keeping house and raising children, to today's not-so-subtle pressure to reverse this trend. A must-read for every woman.

A distinguished scholar presents a landmark historical perspective on parenthood in America. This trailblazing book suggests that behind the rhetoric of maternal responsibility are issues of power, resources, and control. "Berry's book could be a significant impetus for corporate executives and political leaders, conservatives and liberals, and mothers and fathers to support parental involvement that is gender-free."--The Washington Post Book World.

When a mother kills her child, we call her a bad mother, but, as this book shows, even mothers who intend to do their children harm are not easily categorized as ÒmadÓ or Òbad.Ó Maternal love is a complex emotion rich with contradictory impulses and desires, and motherhood is a conflicted state in which women constantly renegotiate the needs mother and child, the self and the other. Applying care ethics philosophy and the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir to real-world experiences of motherhood, Sarah LaChance Adams throws the inherent tensions of motherhood into sharp relief, drawing a more nuanced portrait of the mother and child relationship than previously conceived. The maternal example is particularly instructive for ethical theory, highlighting the dynamics of human interdependence while also affirming separate interests. LaChance Adams particularly focuses on maternal ambivalence and its morally productive role in reinforcing the divergence between oneself and others, helping to recognize the particularities of situation, and negotiating the difference between oneÕs own needs and the desires of others. She ultimately argues maternal filicide is a social problem requiring a collective solution that ethical philosophy and philosophies of care can inform.

Barnhill asserts that much of what people understand to be God's ideal is actually based on secular culture. Barnhill addresses several issues mothers struggle with and offers a positive view of motherhood based on biblical principles.