Please Stop Encouraging Mothers to Have Martyr Complexes

I’m not going to dissect the whole article like I’ve recently been doing with pro-homeschooling content, but I do want to address some things I found concerning, especially this paragraph:

“There were some moms who were able to push back against or reject intensive parenting norms — but those moms tended to be less socially connected before the pandemic. With fewer social connections, they didn’t feel as beholden to other people’s expectations for what ‘good parenting’ should look like. They didn’t stress as much if their kids were watching At the same time, having fewer social connections often meant these mothers had to do more on their own with less support (e.g., less support from extended family members or friends who might serve as a sounding board or step in to offer resources or assistance when needed, etc.).” on loop, because they didn’t have other mom friends to compare themselves to. And they didn’t stress as much if their kids weren’t doing much academically during the pandemic, because they weren’t comparing themselves to other families they knew at their kids’ schools (in some cases because they were already homeschooling pre-pandemic).

I have never been a mother. My own mother was mildly abusive. She would do painful things to me and I would sit passively and let her do this, and then she would spend hours whining about how hard it was being a mom. In that context, my sympathy for mothers in general is limited.

I grew up in an isolated homeschooling family. My mother had few friends. She wasn’t “beholden to other people’s expectations for what ‘good parenting’ should look like.” She didn’t have other mom friends to compare herself to. She didn’t stress if my sister and I weren’t learning as much as other kids, academically or otherwise.

And do you know what? It sucked for us kids.

Most of the time we had nothing to do and just wandered around the house bored and lonely, and there was no one to suggest that Mom sign us up for sports or anything. There was a certain amount of neglect and abuse going on in this household, and there was no one to report it or hold my mother accountable.

My mother developed strange beliefs and habits: she started using the Pearl method, she followed a macrobiotic diet, and she homeschooled using Catholic books from the 1800s even though we lived in the 1990s and our family was never Catholic. When people are disconnected from the outside world as my mother was, they have no barometer for determining if their behavior is normal or rational.

I’ve seen variations of this play out in other homeschooling families, too. Educational neglect is very common in homeschooling families because the parents face no pressure-but maybe we should call it accountability- to ensure that their children are actually learning anything.

I begged my mother to let me go to school, and she finally enrolled me when I was ten, but I had a hard time fitting in with the other kids. My mother haddn’t bought me normal clothes or given me access to normal music and other entertainment, because she lived in her own world where sharing common cultural experiences with other people wasn’t important, and this had a very negative impact on me.

Jessica Calarco never discusses the dangers that a socially isolated parent poses to their own child, especially if the parent insists that the child live in isolation, too. Calarco talks about the dangers of isolation only in terms of how it could negatively affect the mother (less support from other people), and really doesn’t seem to care how the children are affected. She doesn’t even seem to be aware that children could have feelings about stuff like this.

I realize the purpose of her research was to study mothers, not children, but I fear that she’s basically just encouraging narcissistic mothers to continue in their martyr complexes and bad parenting, on the grounds that their martyr complexes are justified because being a mom is just so hard, and that anyone who would dare to give advice or call them out on their bad parenting is just being mean and putting too much pressure on them. She’s also encouraging narcissistic mothers to continue viewing their children as mere objects who exist to be acted upon (or neglected) to meet the mother’s needs, and who do not have feelings or needs of their own.

One last thing: the title of the article implies that the problems of motherhood are unique to the United States. I find that hard to believe.

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