Being a mother in the United States is very hard. But many of us would still like to pretend that it isn’t. This was apparent following the backlash to Chappell Roan’s recent comments about parenting on Call Her Daddy.
On the podcast, Roan told host Alex Cooper that most of her friends from her home state of Missouri had already gotten married and had kids, and that she wasn’t sure she was interested in ever becoming a mother. “All of my friends who have kids are in hell,” Roan told Cooper. “I actually don’t know anyone who’s happy and has children at this age … I’ve literally not met anyone who’s happy, anyone who has light in their eyes, who has slept.”
This is, in theory, not a controversial statement. Roan is 27 years old, which means that most of her friends are likely around the same age and thus have very young children. Multiple studies have indicated that this is the most stressful period of young mothers’ lives, with women’s satisfaction levels declining precipitously from the moment they give birth to their first children to the age when they become more self-sufficient, around 8 or 9 years old. (Happiness levels are even lower for women who have multiple young children.) It makes total sense that Roan doesn’t know any young mothers who are happy, because statistically speaking, most of the young mothers she knows probably aren’t.
And while I’m sure there are mothers who would take issue with the definitiveness of Roan’s statement, as a mom of two myself, I don’t know a single mother who would disagree with the crux of it. I can’t remember the last time I had a conversation with the mom of a child under 10 where we didn’t talk about how little sleep we were getting and how utterly stressed out we were. Sure, there’s a spectrum, and some mothers seem better-equipped to deal with that stress than others. But the stress is still present, because that’s just the day-to-day reality of raising young children.
But mothers on the internet were outraged by Roan’s comments. The conservative publication Evie Magazine posted an Instagram Reel with the caption, “Having children is a blessing, not a burden 🫶,” stitching Roan’s CHD appearance with images of beautiful young parents frolicking with their babies in tropical locales. Moms on TikTok also crashed out. “Is hell your child locking eyes with you across the room and immediately relaxing because you know they’re safe in your presence?” one creator rhetorically asked, before placing a kiss on her infant’s downy head. Another said of Roan, “It’s funny because what she needs is a child to bring that happiness and bring that love into her heart.”
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On one level, this is just the latest installment in the age-old debate between women with children and women without them, in which both sides feel the need to prove who has made the better life choice. You see this all the time on the internet: when someone posts a viral TikTok bragging about how they refused to give up their airplane seat to a crying toddler, or when someone tweets about how irritated they are when small children try to pet their dog. The conversation invariably devolves into a blood war between two sides trying to make an argument that no one really asked them to make at all.
But there’s something else happening here. Recently, there’s been a cultural shift from acknowledging the realities of motherhood to papering over them. During the early 2000s and 2010s, there was nothing particularly subversive about going online and proclaiming that being a mom is really hard. In fact, it was pretty much par for the course among both liberals and conservatives alike. The rise of the mommy blogosphere in the mid-2000s, in which stay-at-home moms shared their unvarnished thoughts about postpartum depression, spit up, and breastfeeding struggles, reflected women’s need for a space to share their complex feelings about motherhood. Even the most aspirational, picture-perfect Instagram influencers — women who were often both politically and religiously conservative — posted makeup-free selfies, photos of messy nurseries, and captions about their struggles with postpartum depression or infertility.
During the pandemic, which left women assuming the bulk of child-care duties, the conversation about the difficulties of parenting in the United States grew even louder. Calls for government-mandated paid leave and state-funded child care abounded, and there was a widespread belief that something desperately had to change. Over the past few years, however, that consensus disintegrated.
Now, if you spend a lot of time on the internet, where our feeds have filled up with images of willowy blonde housewives nuzzling their infants’ heads, it’s hard not to feel like there’s a concerted effort to downplay the difficulties of motherhood in favor of promoting its rewards. TikTokers like Kylie Perkins have built a massive following off shaming young mothers for experiencing stress or burnout, essentially yelling at them to do the laundry or clean the house, and books like What Are Children For? try to persuade ambivalent liberals they have a moral obligation to reproduce. Right-wing influencers like Candace Owens and Brett Cooper have also played a tremendous role in extolling the virtues of young motherhood to women who previously sat on the fence. “They believe motherhood is important,” Cooper said last year of Gen-Z women, who she claims have started fantasizing about becoming young moms due to their “biological instincts” to procreate.
It no longer feels acceptable for a mom on the internet to come clean about the realities of parenthood. In the rare event that one does — like the TikToker Nurse Hannah, who posted a video of herself leaving 17 dirty diapers strewn about the house during a weekend of solo parenting — they are met with widespread opprobrium. Commenters accused her of being a slovenly pig and a bad mother, rather than asking what dire circumstances led to her household’s condition in the first place. On snarky sub-Reddits, there’s seemingly a new Nurse Hannah every day, with redditors criticizing every single aspect of a momfluencer’s parenting, from the food they give their kids to the cleanliness of their playrooms. Women who dare to acknowledge the less desirable aspects of mothering are particularly vulnerable to this treatment. Like Roan, they are castigated as miserable, embittered feminists who don’t even deserve to be blessed with children in the first place. We used to view the difficulties of motherhood as a universally accepted truth. Now, when someone is honest about how tough it is, we perceive their honesty as nothing less than an admission of guilt.
It’s hard to overstate how disorienting this all is. Because despite the preponderance of pro-mom imagery in the culture right now, being a mother in the United States hasn’t gotten any easier — in fact, thanks to conservatives’ war on women’s reproductive freedoms, it’s arguably gotten much more difficult. Not only do women now have less say in how or when they choose to have children in the first place, they also have to pretend to enjoy every second of it, or risk being labeled deficient. It’s not just that Chappell Roan is right — every mother of young kids knows she is. What’s changed is that now, they’re under immense pressure to pretend she is wrong.
