In the book, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, author Judith Warner describes what she calls “the mess” of the modern motherhood religion. Gone are the days when Dr. Spock encouraged parents to enjoy their children. Enter the era of hyperparenting – the mad dash to equip children to be “winners” through strategic participation in a proliferation of educational programs and learning activities that will guarantee one’s child remains ahead of the pack. Nothing but complete devotion to the task will ensure success. Thus, a good mother must utterly devote herself to her children’s future – even at the expense of her own self-esteem, sanity, and well-being.

Feeling powerless to change society at large, today’s mother pours herself into controlling the one thing she feels she can control: her children. With so much pressure to parent a “winner,” today’s mother is plagued by what Warner calls “the mess” and the “too-muchness” of modern parenting. The high stakes result in the “caught-by-the-throat feeling so many mothers have today of always doing something wrong” (3). She writes her book from “a conviction I have that this feeling – this widespread, chocking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret – is poisoning motherhood for American women today” (4).

An unwavering acceptance of “attachment theory” is at the heart of the motherhood religion. According to attachment theory, “the kinds of bonds infants forge with their mothers determine the kinds of relationships they will have with other people for the rest of their lives” (92). This places all the pressure on a mother’s ability to bond with and remain attached to her child. A child’s one chance for a healthy, productive, and successful life completely rests upon its mother’s efforts. A good mother, therefore, will devote her entire being to this task. Enter the religion of motherhood: “The icon of ideal motherhood at the dawn of the twenty-first century was a woman so bound up in her child, so tightly bonded and fused, that she herself – soul, mind, and body – all but disappeared.” (68)

As noble as it sounds, the modern motherhood religion is not elevating but poisoning motherhood. There is no proof that obsession with attachment-parenting produces what its faithful adherents promise. On the other hand, there is evidence that attachment-parenting hinders a child’s development.

Psychiatrist Walter Kempler, in Today's Health, warned that constant attention and excessive chatter from Mother and too much direction from her in play (“look at this, look at that”) would result in “an irreparable loss, in which a child’s natural curiosity for the world becomes obscured by a dependence upon his parents for suggestions and direction.” He argued against smothering and in favor of “attentive neglect,” saying “be with your child and do things with him while, in a sense, ignoring him.”

The sociologist Alice Rossi in 1964 denounced the “fire-department ideology of child rearing,” which she characterized as the view that “a mother should be available to her children ten hours a day, on the chance that the child may need or want her help for one of the ten hours.” She wrote, “The result is not good mothering, but a kind of smothering that can develop excessive dependency between mother and child. . . . If we consider self-assertion, independence, and responsibility to be desirable traits in adults, then children should be reared to facilitate the development of these qualities. One of the best ways of doing this is for the mother to be a living model of these qualities herself. . . . As ‘fire-department mothering’ is curtailed, the child’s opportunities for privacy and experience in doing, thinking, and worrying through things for himself will increase.” (78)

Obsession with attachment-parenting not only hinders a child’s development; it also has a negative impact on the mother. The unbearable weight of controlling a child’s destiny produces unbearable anxiety. “No – what’s really unique about maternal anxiety today is our belief that if something goes wrong with or for our children, it’s a reflection on us as mothers. Because we believe we should be able to control life so perfectly that we can keep bad things from happening” (191). Add to this the daily frustrations of mothering that make the task seem anything but magical: “The cult of total-reality motherhood tells them that they are saints – which would be flattering except that they don’t generally feel like saints (they often feel bored and impatient and frustrated and tired) – which leaves them wondering what is wrong with them for feeling that way” (144-145).

Warner calls mothers to a reality check. In spite of the magical allure of “attachment theory” it does not appear that the results are overwhelmingly positive. Furthermore, the long-term negative impact of “separation” – the evil that attachment theory seeks to destroy – may be drastically overstated.

Our pop culture and education have taught us to attribute [our negative] feelings to “separation” or “abandonment.” So we separate as little as possible. We insist on being physically present or, if this isn’t possible, mentally engaged with our children twenty-four hours a day. But what we overlook entirely in doing this is the fact that, for the vast majority of us, separation from our mothers wasn’t the cause of whatever problems we had in childhood (or have now). It certainly wasn’t the kind of separation we dread our children will undergo in day care. After all, in the late 1960s, when many of us were preschoolers, only 2 percent of American children were in group care such as day-care centers, after-school care, or even nursery school. (104)

It is not lack of adequate activities, the use of playpens, or working mothers that is at the heart of women’s problems.

No – having had a working (hence, absent) mother is not the thing most mothers today cite as the cause of their mom-related psychological woes. It’s having had an unhappy mother. A divorced mother, perhaps, who was crippled with worry over money. Or a mother who was stoically sticking it out in a bad marriage. Or as was very often the case for the women I spoke to, a mother who’d been sucked into her era’s version of total-reality motherhood, and who’d been bored and frustrated and overinvested and angry as a result. Who was too much in her children’s faces, as a result. Who’d mothered too much.

Much as we mother today. (104-105)

What children need is a happy mother – a mother who is not totally absorbed in her children, a mother who possesses a life and an identity that is not completely wrapped up in parenting, a mother who has not made her children the be-all-and-end-all of her existence, a mother who maintains proper boundaries between her and her children.

Studies have never shown that total immersion in motherhood makes mothers happy or does their children any good. On the contrary, studies have shown that mothers who are able to make a life for themselves tend to be happy and to make their children happy. The self-fulfillment they get from a well-rounded life actually makes them more emotionally available for their children – in part because they’re less needy. (133)

In contrast to the madness of the motherhood religion and the hyperparenting it promotes, Warner recalls the advice she received from her pediatrician after the birth of her first child: “You don’t just have this child for a couple of months. You’ll have her for the rest of your life. You have to have a life of your own. Because if you’re happy, she’ll be happy. If you’re fine, she’ll be fine” (11).

© Richard J. Vincent, 2005