Intensive mothering is the bogeyman scaring Gen Z away from parenthood

A lower view of human potential might encourage potential mothers to take the leap

Intensive mothering is the bogeyman scaring Gen Z away from parenthood

The rumors seem to be true. More and more young women don’t want children. My theory is that most of us grew up with all-star mothers, who gave up just about everything to raise us. The feeling among most of us is that we’re not up for the challenge. 

Alternatively, others had mothers who were absent, selfish, or cruel. Most of the all-star mothers I’ve met have a near-paralyzing fear that if they fail to be “the perfect mom” they will destroy their children’s lives – building resentment and sentencing them to decades of therapy.

In an effort to avoid failure, mothers shift practice what Sharon Hays calls “intensive mothering” where “one’s ‘natural’ love for the ‘inherently’ sacred child necessarily leads one to engage in child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive child-rearing."

Most of my friends and I experienced intensive mothering as children. We were shuffled from private school to piano lessons, from soccer practice to church by our twice-sainted mothers. To the shock of older generations, many of us are disinterested in having children of our own. 

 These women dedicated themselves to their children's wellbeing and what did they get? A generation that is burnt-out, mentally ill, and chronically online. Hardly a fair trade in my opinion. We of all people should know that if our mothers couldn’t produce perfect children, we sure as hell can’t. 

So we’ve given up any aspirations toward reproduction, unwilling to play a game that our mothers, the Olympic athletes of parenting, couldn’t win. Now what? 

I believe we’ll need to shift from the high view of human ability represented by intensive mothering to a lower one to make motherhood appear possible and even joyful. 

David Zahl makes the case for a lower view of human ability in his book Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others (and Yourself). For Zahl’s purposes, anthropology means a particular view of humankind. “A high anthropology,” Zahl says, “views people as defined by their best days and greatest achievements.” 

Although Zahl admits, it’s tempting to focus on our best days, a high anthropology quickly devolves into perfectionism and later burnout. He writes, “Burnout derives from the inflated assumptions we carry about what we and other people are capable of.” 

Intensive mothering is all about inflated assumptions of human capacity. The core  belief is that if a mother tries hard enough and makes all the right choices her children will be ideal humans. Hopefully, we’ve all met enough people to realize that ideal is not really our thing. 

The problem with my generation is not that we have too low of a view of ourselves but that we have too high of a view of others. We believe like our mothers before us that children can be perfected. The only difference is that we don’t believe we’re capable enough to do it.

For my generation to embrace motherhood, we’ll need a different set of expectations. As long as the success of motherhood is measured by a woman’s ability to produce the “perfect child,” it will remain an unappealing option. The value of motherhood has to be beyond our ability to hurry our child along from the perfect preschool to an elite university. 

Zahl promises that low anthropology allows growth “because it shifts a person’s hope from their own internal resources (willpower, discipline, natural energy level) to external possibilities. It opens a person to the outside world, to the possibility of love and the surprise of grace.”

Childbirth, child-raising, and all the rest are definitively opening oneself up to “external possibilities” and mothers claim to enjoy it. Despite the diapers, sleeplessness, and infuriating teenage sass, Pew Research Center reports, “83% of moms say that being a parent is enjoyable for them most (56%) or all of the time (27%).” 

Motherhood has obvious drawbacks (I’m looking at you 48-hour labor stories), but as Bethany Mandel observed, “I didn’t sign up for parenthood because I’m a glutton for punishment or because I’m somehow a noble martyr; I did so because our kids are fun and enrich our lives, our home, and our community.“ 

To be a mother, you don’t need to crave exhaustion or possess the patience of Mother Theresa like the practice of intensive mothering advertises. Instead, motherhood can be a chance to welcome in the unknown, release control, and maybe even enjoy yourself in the process. If more of my generation thought we could ethically reproduce without committing to becoming a perfect mother, I bet more of us would give this whole motherhood thing a chance. 

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