B.Ritain’s mothers are whacked because they are trying to be perfect. So says a survey published last week, one that has prompted me to start a new club. It will be called something along the lines of the Supermums’ Survivors Club. Members will, like me, have tried to be exemplary mothers – combining work and home, our careers and our children – but crashed and lived to tell the tale.
We seemed to be thriving: one minute suited and blow-dried, at our desks; the next holding a clean-bottomed baby, surrounded by blond moppets in a perfectly tidy house. A perfect vision of juggling and having it all.
Except none of it was true. We were worn out and worn down. Bone-weary and tearful. And in the end, it was all too much. In my case, the pressure of trying to keep all the balls in the air led to two severe depressive episodes when I was in my 30s.
I was worried about trying to work (at that time I was a newspaper reporter), trying to be a good mother and trying to be a good wife – in fact, trying to be a supermum. I became more and more overwhelmed with worries.
I was bursting with an active dread that disaster was about to strike. Something terrible was going to happen and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. It felt like I was on a plane that was going to crash. In three days, I went from being mildly anxious to being unable to move, in an agonizing fetal curl on the floor, suicidal with fear. It proved to be the start of my first major depressive episode, born of feeling overwhelmed. Another one followed a few years later.
Given my experience, I wasn’t surprised by Bupa UK’s survey that found that 63% of women are exhausted by trying to be perfect mothers. We aspire to perfect-parent status: parents who cook, entertain, oversee extracurricular activities and whose children get top grades. We obsess about having everything all figured out. We are always optimizing to control, improve and streamline our lives, our children and our bodies. To make every second, calorie and career opportunity count.
And one-fifth of mothers say the pressure to be a supermum has affected their mental health. Almost one-third of them have sought help from a medical professional for mental health concerns but kept it a secret from their loved ones. Stigma, it seems, is alive and well.
If anything, being a mother is even more pressurized now than when I was raising my own children, the youngest of whom is now 18. Half of the mothers in the survey said influencers on social media, celebrity posts and posts from other mothers made them they feel they had to live up to unrealistic standards.
The mythical perfect mother is flourishing on Instagram. Social media chips away at the feeling that we are fine, in insidious ways. We see other people who seem to be having more fun at family meals than our own dismal affairs, people who are better, richer, thinner and more glamorous parents than we are.
Whereas once we might have compared ourselves to our neighbors or friends, now we can compare our family life to the world’s most successful and powerful people. Naturally, few of us feel we or our families match up.
Clearly, this pressure to be a perfect mother is bad for us women: female perfectionism is one factor leading to higher rates of depression. Women are more likely to suffer from depression than men, according to the Mental Health Foundation. In 2014, one in six adults had a common mental health problem: about one in five women and one in eight men. From 2000 to 2014, rates of common mental health problems in England steadily increased in women and remained largely stable for men.
My view is that trying to be perfect is also bad for our children. We are modeling to them the idea that they need to be superchildren. The more perfect we are, the more pressure we put on our children to be likewise.
The reality is that there are many advantages of less than ideal childhood and imperfect parenting for our children. Witnessing failure and messiness and muddle in imperfection in our parents can all be forces for good for our children, especially for our teenagers. Adolescents need challenges to grow and having perfect parents may not necessarily be part of that.
Brief periods of normal stress are not harmful for children; they are essential, says Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and the co-author (with Greg Lukianoff) of The Coddling of the American Mind.
Children need a wide range of experiences to become strong. If they are over-protected, we perfect parents may systematically be stunting their growth, Haidt argues, all with good intentions.
A more relaxed answer, and one that may be better for both us and our children, is to aim for being good enough, an idea originally suggested by psychologists such as Donald Winnicott. I have argued that no child needs an ideal parent. They just need an OK, decent, usually well-intentioned, sometimes grumpy but basically reasonable father or mother.
It is a view shared by the clinical psychologist Dr Carla Croft, from Barts Health. She says: “Calmer parenting comes from accepting and being gentle about our imperfections. When we are not perfect, we are teaching our children about real relationships – you could say authentic love.”
It is a message I hope a new generation of mothers will hear. That being good enough is the aim and that they don’t need to be supermums. One day, I hope, there will be no takers for survivors’ clubs like mine.
www.theguardian.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism