How Mom Guilt is Used to Oppress and Control Mothers

“You’re a bad mother.”

It’s hard to imagine a crueler insult that’s also a moral judgment, an assessment of a person’s worth as a human being, and potentially a legal threat all rolled together. Bad mothers are so deviant they need to be policed, sent to jail, ridiculed, and forever shamed. In the collective consciousness, they represent the worst kind of person—an embarrassment to themselves and to us all. How dare they fail at this most natural of pursuits, at the very definition of womanhood?

And yet, this insult is in the back of every mother’s mind for a significant portion of every day. One 2021 study found that feeling guilty is considered a core feature of being a good mother. So even if you somehow don’t feel mom guilt, you need to feel guilty about that.

In the popular literature on mom guilt, mom guilt is depicted as something that originates from moms. Those silly women and their unrealistic desires to please everyone and do the right thing! It’s probably because of their crazy woman hormones!

But for mothers, the message is clear: no matter what you do, it will always be wrong.

Practice gentle parenting? Your kids are monsters and you need to set better boundaries. Punish and reward your kids? Abusive and manipulative. Your natural birth was weird and foolish, and by the way, stop talking about it. Your medicalized birth means you didn’t try hard enough, take care of your body, or care about your kids. Enjoy breastfeeding? Gross. Breastfeed in public? No one wants to see that. Can’t breastfeed? Didn’t try hard enough. Formula feed by choice? Perish the thought. Did you exercise and diet after having a baby? You need to focus more on your kids and less on your stupid body. Also, you’re gross anyway. Did you accept your body and decide not to lose the weight? Struggle to lose the weight and give up? Still struggling? Disgusting. Don’t you care enough about your kids to conform to an impossible beauty ideal?

You better be involved with your kids’ school and ensure their needs are met, but don’t try too hard because then you’re a helicopter parent who’s abusing the teachers. Be sure to research child health so you can ask your pediatrician good questions. Not too many questions, though. Wouldn’t want to inconvenience them. Be sure to help your kids learn through play and master real-life skills, but also they must be doing worksheets fresh out of the womb so they don’t fall behind. Don’t forget to teach social skills! Don’t intervene in your kids’ disputes but also make sure they never bully another kid. The moms on the playground will judge you no matter what. Did you remember to clean your house? When the mom at the playground calls CPS because your kid shoved hers and you intervened incorrectly, remember it will be your fault when CPS shows up and the house is dirty. Everyone knows men are responsible for nothing and can’t clean. Trying to get your husband to participate more? You’re a nag. He’ll probably leave you. Silently resentful that he won’t do more? Why don’t you ask him?! What’s wrong with you? Men can’t read minds.

This guilt doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the water we swim in. Everyone judges mothers. Meanwhile dads are heroes if they manage to spend time with their kids one afternoon a week without killing them.

This didn’t just happen randomly. There’s a very specific purpose.

Mom guilt is a way to control mothers. It distracts us from seeing the challenges of motherhood as political rather than personal.

Guilt is an individual experience, the product of the belief that I did something bad—not that society set an unreasonable expectation or someone unfairly judged me. If I feel guilty, it’s because something is my fault.

And if moms feel guilty all the time, well, it’s very difficult for them to look around and observe the objective circumstances that force them into the feelings of guilt. When you think the problem is that you’re not spending enough time with your kids, the last thing you’re going to do is assert that quality childcare should be a right. If you think you’re doing a shitty job keeping up the house, why would you admit that you need and deserve help so you can do less?

Demanding better from society begins with asserting that moms cannot and should not do it all. That comes with an admission of imperfection, and being imperfect is not acceptable in the patriarchal construction of motherhood.

As long as we feel guilty, we look within to find blame, even as the real culprits—lazy male partners, workplace discrimination, no paid leave, garbage childcare, an entire society built around the free labor of mothers—are all around.

Worse still, because we continue to pretend that mothers’ work is easy, or is innate and natural, or isn’t work at all, women don’t see how hard they’re working. Or they think the fact that their work is hard is a sign that they’re doing a bad job. This invisibility of work intensifies the guilt. It encourages us to keep running on a treadmill we can’t escape, faster and faster, never going anywhere.

As long as we feel guilty, we won’t rally together and demand the radical change that could uplift us all.

Mothers are already doing everything they can. It’s time for us to look outside of ourselves and point the finger at the society failing us.