Today, Explained - Why millennials dread motherhood

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

American policy failures and bad PR have made millennials dread motherhood. Vox’s Rachel Cohen and Momfluenced author Sara Petersen explain. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Rob Byers, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Since the dawn of mankind, there have been generations. And no generation has been more disruptive than the Millennials. Millennials killed cable TV. Millennials killed the 9 to 5. Millennials killed ironing. Millennials killed paper napkins? Really? Millennials killed golf.

Millennials killed the mall. Millennials killed marriage. And now, millennials are killing motherhood. As a millennial, I am terrified of both pregnancy as a female and bringing a child into the world that we live in. Why millennials dread motherhood. Coming up on Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas.

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Today explained. Now you say, now Francis. Today explained. Now you say, now Grant says. Today, he says. Good job. Rachel Cohen writes about policy at Vox. She's also a millennial who's been thinking about whether or not she wants to be a mom. So, I'm 31. When I was 30, I had been seeing someone for about a year and things were going really well

but we never talked about our feelings on having kids and everything that I was really seeing about motherhood looked really bad but I didn't want to say something that might mess up the relationship because I'm not someone who's always wanted to be a mom and I'm not someone who's always loved being around little kids or babysitting. And so it kind of set me on this journey of just trying to learn more about motherhood and reading more stories and doing research. And there were aspects about it

that seemed kind of nice in this way that surprised me, but then my fuzzy feelings would fade and I would remember all the ways in which what we are told about motherhood in America sounds like hell. Just to give you like an example of what I mean, here are some of the major titles of nonfiction that have come out over the last couple years on motherhood. Mom Reach, The Everyday Crisis of Modern motherhood. Screaming on the inside, the unsustainability of American motherhood. Ordinary insanity, fear and the silent crisis of motherhood in America. All the rage, mothers, fathers, and the myth of equal partnership. So, you know, you can kind of see where the dread

feeling comes from. It's going to hurt romantic relationship, it's gonna destroy your sex life. How about six years? That's when I think I'll want to do that again. You're gonna lose touch with all your friends. Isn't it weird though when you have a kid and all your dreams and hopes just go right out the window? Your career is gonna suffer. You really are gonna be missed around here. Well, I won't be gone too long. I'll be back as soon as my maternity leave finishes. Well, unless won't be gone too long. I'll be back as soon as my maternity leave finishes. Well, unless you give my job to someone else during that time. Your physical and mental health is going to degrade.

You're going to get no support from your partner, your employer, the state. You're going to be all on your own. You're probably going to go bankrupt. Like, have fun. Rachel took all those feelings she was having about motherhood and put them into a piece for Vox titled How Millennials Learn to Dread Motherhood. And the essay got a ton of responses from all sorts of millennials who were like, I'm a millennial who's dreading motherhood and parenting. I am a mother, but I was dreading it.

Don't want to put my body through that if I have the option. And I think for the first time in my life, I'm asking what would the quality of my life look like? I think a big part of that is social media and being able to see the reality, the day-to-day of being a mother. I just don't know how much I can give to a child. I pay a lot of attention to the news and to climate change and things seem pretty grim. There's not really much hope for the future, so I don't want to add to it. Also don't want to bring a kid into a world that's so broken and hateful and violent. I also had a lot of pressure from everyone as to how to mother. I see divorce.

I just don't want to do it. Kids are a lot. Also, who is financially stable enough at our age to have a child? Show me them. My goal going into the piece was to explore this concept of dread that women are feeling and to understand sort of how the discourse had changed. So it wasn't really like trying to prove a thesis so much as understand something that I was observing. And there's always been ambivalence and even a little fear with the idea of becoming a parent. It's a life-changing decision. But the kind of dread that I wanted to look at is really unlike the kind of anxiety that baby boomers and Gen X and even some elder

millennials have dealt with when they were making this decision because never before have the risks and the stakes and the cost been so loud, so clear, and really coming at women from all angles, all over social media, pop culture, and with vanishingly few positive stories or satisfied characters. And I think just a really important thing to understand is that it's not like this is just spin or PR. There really are millions of happy parents out there. And there is a lot more positive research on parenting that we tend to hear less frequently. So it was just trying to understand why that is and how we got here. I wonder, you know, is there like a left right divide in how motherhood is depicted on social media? Is this political in some way?

So I do think that's another thing that has been happening over the last few years that has added to this sense of confusion because the whole prospect of becoming a parent has started to seem more politically fraught. And I think that's really cannot be separated from the attacks we're seeing on abortion rights in this country. I think there's this real sense over the last few years, especially on the left, that this is a time to amplify and to clarify the risks of pregnancy and the toll of parenting that nobody should be forced to do against their will. And because of this, I think there is more ambivalence. There is more of a feeling that it would be almost inappropriate to talk more vocally about upsides of having children because there are people out there right now who really want to force you to have kids when you're on the fence or leaning against it. Republican politicians are doubling down on

explicit endorsements of childbearing. People who go home at night and see the face of a smiling kid, whatever their profession, I think they're happier, I think they're healthier, and they're going to be better prepared to actually lead this country. While saying the kinds of things that Democrats increasingly do see as at odds with reproductive freedom and kind of valuing families of all kinds, we also want to destigmatize people who choose to live child-free. So I think, you know, there's just this dynamic happening right now where progressives don't want to embrace this pro-natalism ideology.

But it's also not great that they've backed away from more positive messaging on families and kids. Like most Democrats' messaging tends to center on how hard it is to raise a family in America and how, you know, crisis and precarity. And it could be better, but it's not good right now. Parents who need help buying groceries and baby formulas will see their out-of-pocket costs go up. It is so cruel and heartless that parents who get $6 a person a day to feed their families would see it disappear. Can you imagine?

And that is, I think, fueling feelings of dread that people who haven't yet become parents feel. Okay, so depending on your politics, depending on your algorithms, depending on what's around you, and what kind of culture you can consume, you're seeing this dreadful depiction of motherhood in America, or perhaps you're seeing this sort of unrealistic, everything is perfect, idealistic version of motherhood, where is the truth for most American moms or potential moms? Yeah. And I read this great piece in the cut about two weeks ago about a mom. She has two kids. She's pregnant with her third. And she was writing about how had she seen the videos on TikTok about parenting before she had any kids,

she's not sure she would have gone through with it. In case anyone was wondering what the hardest part about being a mother is, it's when you're sick and motherhood does not stop. And don't get me started with the hell I went through during my first trimester. I was stuck to the couch my first trimester. I was stuck in my bed. I was crying. And she, you know, writes great things about the real realities and the challenges of parenting. But the images and representatives that we're seeing today are really getting extreme and I think distorted and leaving people with a confused representation. Even though the thing about TikTok videos is they're sort of presented as if you're getting like the real truth. Like, you know, anyone can make a video.

So it's not filtered by the mainstream media or gatekeepers. So, you know, having a more nuanced take on parenting might get less clicks. It might be less sexy, but I think it gets us closer to the truth. And I think that people who are trying to decide what's best for them in terms of reproductive decisions, like we should be helping them get closer to the truth so they can make the decisions that are best for them. I've heard from so many women over the last week saying, like, thank you. They had never had these anxieties really articulated before. Some of them cited the Barbie movie monologue as the closest getting to that.

You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people. But, you know, they had never even really, they said, talk to their friends or even their partners about it. And I know for me, doing this project, you know, pushed me to ask even some of my closest friends questions we had never talked about together, even though it turns out we were all kind of grappling with similar fears and messages. And I can say, like, my own feelings of dread have gone down since doing this research and since talking with more people in my position, with people who are already parents. And so I feel like the balance is just trying to be sensitive to how the information is conveyed and what people should realistically do with it,

and not to be afraid to share the good stuff because that's part of the story, too, even if, you know, it might generate fewer clicks. In a minute, a mom. But not only a mom, a mom who's daring to generate fewer clicks. It's Today Explained. picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday, and she's very fortunate.

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This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. Support for this show comes from the ACLU. The ACLU knows exactly what threats a second Donald Trump term presents. And they are ready with a battle-tested playbook. The ACLU took legal action against the first Trump administration 434 times. And they will do

it again to protect immigrants' rights, defend reproductive freedom, fight discrimination, and fight for all of our fundamental rights and freedoms. This Giving Tuesday, you can support the ACLU. With your help, they can stop the extreme Project 2025 agenda. Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. You're listening to Today Explained. I am Sarah Peterson, and I'm the author of Momfluenced, Inside the Maddening Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture. And I also write the newsletter In Pursuit of Clean Countertops, which is about the myth of the ideal American mother. And since I don't follow you on social media, Sarah, I have to ask,

are you now or have you ever been a momfluencer? I mean, I am a mother on social media. So per my own definition, I am. My like, I don't know, quick and dirty definition of a mom influencer is someone who has utilized their maternal identity as a way to build a social media following, a lucrative social media following. So really their identity as a mother is central to how they are building their brand. And then for the purposes of my book, I sort of looked at anyone performing motherhood online, regardless of whether or not they're doing it for money. What got you into this business of motherhood?

So I had my first kid in 2012, which was a really different landscape than it is now. I was the first in my peer group to have children. I certainly wasn't consuming much motherhood content. Mommy bloggers existed at that point, but I wasn't following any of them. So I really went in, you know, completely cold. I remember I emailed like my cousin's wife asking her what to get, like what to buy. Whereas now you will find millions upon millions of, you know, things you need for new baby, things to pack, you know, for the hospital. So it's really

striking for me to think back on that time as just so, so drastically different from what it is now. Yeah. How have things changed in the intervening decade or so? Yeah, I mean, I can't really imagine somebody embarking upon parenthood now and having to email a cousin's wife for a list of baby products. They will be bombarded with ads from the second they first get a positive pregnancy test and start Googling, you know, what does a blurry line mean? Is it accurate? And they will be targeted by momfluencers trying to sell them everything under the sun, curtains, you know, skincare products, washable rugs. I mean, you can pretty much hinge any product onto motherhood if you want.

So what other kinds of momfluencers are out there? It sounds like ones that are posting lots of pictures of their babies. I mean, the image of a stereotypical momfluencer that comes to mind is someone who's white, who's thin, who has long blonde beachy waves, who has access to generational wealth, who is married to a man who has more than two children. And her house is decorated in lots of shades of beige and white. There's lots of linen. There's macrame wall hangings.

And there's a lot of joy. This is one of my favorite projects. I make all of the boy setting. But this would also make a really good gift if you're looking for something thoughtful to give a new friend with a new baby. Oh, okay. So this kind of differs from what we were hearing in the first half of our show, which is that if you're looking at mom content, mom tent online, you're seeing a lot of dread. You're seeing a lot of look how hard my life is and how impossible these expectations are. But you're saying there's a lot of content, mom-tent, out there that's depicting perfection.

Yes. But I also completely, you know, I see Rachel's point in that there is a ton of essays, articles, books, movies, focusing on sort of the darker sides of motherhood. And I think the stereotypical momfluencer content, it's not giving you a nuanced picture of the private internal satisfaction one can derive from motherhood. It's very much checking super gender normative boxes of motherhood. So I think, you know, I can totally see how somebody that doesn't have kids is consuming both the motherhood dread stuff and the picture perfect squeaky clean imagery on Instagram and coming away with no clue what to expect. So somebody I've spent a lot of time writing about and studying is Hannah Nielman. She's Ballerina Farm.

This is the dinner-making crew while the boys are at rodeo practice. She lives on a ranch called Ballerina Farm because she's a Juilliard-trained ballerina. So it's this really fascinating blend of pick-yourself your bootstraps, homestead aesthetics, and hyper-feminine, beauty queen, blonde-white femininity. When I first started looking into her, she had a little over 100,000 followers. She now has upwards of 8 million last time I checked. Okay, so people want this kind of stuff. I mean, 8 million followers, that's no joke. And does this make people feel aspirational? Depressed? What? I mean, if we're looking at Ballerina Farm, I mean, you could write a doctoral thesis on her comments alone. So many of them are just,

you know, wow, you just had your seventh baby and you're already wearing an evening gown. Wow. You make sourdough bread from scratch every day. You're the best mom. Wow. You homeschool your kids. You're the best mom. There's all these assumptions of what makes a good mother as reflected on her page, despite the fact that, you know, the vast majority of the 8 million people following do not know whether or not she's a quote-unquote good mom. I mean, some of those things you said don't sound all that bad,

but what's problematic here, I guess the deeper issue, is that it may not all be realistic for gen pop. A hundred percent. I mean, you know, if we're thinking about nostalgia in general, particularly as it pertains to gender roles within the home, there were no quote unquote good old days for any mothers, particularly marginalized mothers. You know, white angels of the house could only exist through the labor of other mothers being paid. You had me at white angels of the house. So, okay, I'm referencing the 19th century cult of domesticity, which was a real thing.

And yeah, they were called angels of the house and they were primarily white, wealthy women whose status really served to further marginalize and harm, you know, working class women, women of color, certainly queer women and queer mothers. fetishize this modern day rendition of sort of the angel of the house we are digging in our heels at the ideal that there can only be one kind of good mother do you think they have a real effect on people's decision to become moms yeah um when i was reporting out my book i spoke to lots of people who were on the fence about having kids. And many of them felt sort of exhausted by the performance of motherhood as they saw it online. Like all the picnics, all the pumpkin patch photos, all the holiday cards. It just felt like a lot of outward facing work. And that makes complete sense to me. Um, but, you know, other people said it looked fun and they wanted to go to the pumpkin patch and dress their kid in a cute, you know, pinafore and hand knit sweater or whatever. Um, so I really think it depends on the consumer and what they're consuming. What would you say to the people who Rachel spoke to for her article on millennial mom dread?

And I think that that that piece that she wrote performed really well because a lot of people could identify with it. Yeah, I mean, I can't fathom what it must be like to be considering motherhood in 2023. Why do you say that? Why can't you fathom it? Because I became a mother when there was so much less widespread motherhood content available. I mean, I could have done some digging and found some mommy bloggers talking about postpartum depression and sort of the gritty sides of motherhood, but it wasn't everywhere the way it is now. But on the flip side, you know, I was shocked by how difficult motherhood was, experienced

postpartum depression and felt really isolated in that experience. So, yeah, I feel for people considering motherhood now, you know, feeling anxious and bogged down by the onslaught of information. But I also don't think that it was great 10 years ago when we knew so much less. And I don't know, one thing as I read her piece that struck me was just that if we are determining how motherhood might be for us only through social media and motherhood media, we will have sort of a lopsided view. I really feel like if you talk to any person who is currently a parent, it's really easy to hold both truths at once. Talk to any parent you know,

and they have a whole thread where they are interchangeably bitching about toddler tantrums and also boring their friends with cute things their kids said that day. A hopeful note, I think, is that if you talk to any person who's actually a parent, I think you're going to feel less bogged down by, you know, the grim motherhood narrative that you're absorbing via the media. And just really, yeah, any binary is missing something. If something is all good,

you know, it's missing the bad. If something's all bad, it's missing the good. Sarah Peterson is a mom, maybe a bit of a momfluencer, and the author of a book called Momfluenced, Inside the Maddening Picture Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture. Thanks to all of our listeners, so many listeners who called in to tell us about their millennial dread of motherhood. Our program today was produced by Victoria Chamberlain, working mother of two. We were edited by Amin Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, mixed by Rob Byers, and hosted by me, Sean Ramosurm. We four collectively have zero children.

It's us. Hi. We're the problem. It's us. The rest of the team of Today Explained includes executive producer Miranda Kennedy, host Noelle King, managing editor Matthew Collette, Halima Shah, Isabel Angel, Hadi Mawagdi, Miles Bryan, Patrick Boyd, and Abishai Artsy, who became a dad for the second time a week ago today, but not a millennial dad.

Apparently he's a geriatric millennial, though. I hope they have pills for that. Welcome to the world, Andromeda. Breakmaster Cylinder makes music. Sometimes we use it. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of Vox, which is totally free, thanks in part to contributions from our listeners. makes music, sometimes we use it. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of Vox, which is totally free.

Thanks in part to contributions from our listeners. Join us at vox.com slash give, and thank you. you