“The Books Make You Feel Bad”: Expert Advice and Maternal Anxiety in the Early 21^st Century*

Abstract

With ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews of parenting classes serving middle-and uppermiddle-class mothers, this paper explores how mothers engage and experience expert advice. Contemporary models of motherhood expect more than nurture and sacrifice; modern mothers must also be highly skilled and well informed. A wealth of information is available to help mothers navigate a high-pressure environment in which their actions are believed to have deep, long-lasting impact on children's future health, happiness, and success. How do mothers engage with expert advice, what demands does it place on them, and what rewards might that generate? Our data include approximately 50 hours of observation, 10 formal, in-depth interviews, and multiple informal interviews with mostly white, highly educated, relatively affluent mothers. Interview narratives and fieldnotes were coded and analyzed with Dedoose. We show that mothers in our study experience a paradox of expertise, in which more knowledge often fails to produce more certainty. Parenting advice is complex, contingent, and sometimes contradictory, and the stakes in which mothers work to synthesize this information feel astoundingly high. The labor of gathering, synthesizing, and activating expertise is a unique and underexamined form of emotional and intellectual labor.

Decentering intensive mothering: More fully accounting for race and class in motherhood norms

“…This socially constructed and historically specific set of norms calls upon mothers to engage in an expert‐informed style of mothering that is time‐intensive and expensive. As a culturally dominant set of norms it has fueled divisiveness and anxiety about mothering in which mothers encounter social judgment for their mothering techniques and second guess their mothering strategies (Cucchiara & Steinbugler, 2021; Henderson et al., 2016). In its intensification of mothering standards, this ideology has also contributed to the “mommy wars” in which working moms are pitted against stay‐at‐home mothers in a contest to see which group can achieve the highest mothering standards (Abetz & Moore, 2018; Crowley, 2015; Pedersen, 2016).…”

“…Many mothers wish to enact motherhood in a perfect manner, with social media raising the stakes of this pursuit in ways that have important implications for mental health (Henderson et al., 2016; Schoppe‐Sullivan et al., 2017). Attempting to always make the right decisions, mothers consult expert advice, but find it often fuels rather than quiets the anxiety surrounding motherhood (Cucchiara & Steinbugler, 2021). In light of these pressures, this line of research has shown how intensive mothering norms contribute to guilt, anxiety, post‐natal depression, poor mental health, and exhaustion among mothers and conflict among couples (e.g., Chesley, 2011; Gunderson & Barrett, 2017; Henderson et al., 2016; Loyal at el., 2021; Sonnenberg & Miller, 2021).…”