We Rarely Acknowledge What's Most Exhausting About Modern Motherhood
Peopleimages.com | Canva Mothers are exhausted these days, and no one wants to hear it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s tiring to raise children, we get it, enough already.
But actually, people don’t really get it. I know this because it only clicked for me very recently, and I’ve parented three children, starting with my stepson over 20 years ago. I know this because what’s most exhausting about modern motherhood is something we don’t really acknowledge.
It’s high time we did. There’s no question that the early years of parenting are tiring, to say the least. It’s an acute, intensive exhaustion, like a leg cramp that hurts but we know will eventually pass.
Some parents wax nostalgic about these early years, and I am not one of them. Whenever I see young parents schlepping diaper bags and chasing after toddlers, I feel hugely relieved that I can venture into the world without three dozen carefully packed necessities and without fear that a child may escape my clutches and dart into an oncoming car.
But I do understand the nostalgia. In those early years, we, the parents, are our child’s entire world. Maybe there’s a daycare provider or a nanny or another family member who spends time with our child, and we meticulously prep these interlopers with a long list of said child’s bowel rhythms, naptime preferences, and dietary requirements. As young parents, it is inconceivable to us that our child will one day consume things that we didn’t select or approve. It’s not just food they will consume without our consent. They will also become their own consumers of media, messages, and things.
And most of it will be very, very bad for them. Toxic, really.
If we care about our children’s physical, mental, and emotional health — which I would venture to guess most of us do — parenting becomes one long protracted fight against our cultural defaults. When we talk about the need for parents to be more supported by society at large, we often focus on issues like paid leave and accessible childcare.
These are vital in their own right, but we rarely talk about the vigilance it requires to raise children in a country in which the air we breathe and the water we swim in are objectively detrimental to their well-being. Heck, it takes enough vigilance to protect our own physical, mental, and emotional health.
And since mothers typically spend double the amount of time on caregiving as fathers do, including making the majority of decisions around household purchasing, family nutrition, screen time, and media exposure, this is a burden we tend to feel most acutely. Here are just some of the messages I battle against daily.
We rarely acknowledge what's most exhausting about modern motherhood:
1. We are surrounded by bad food and a culture built around sitting still
I occasionally attend birthday parties for one-year-olds, for which the parents have invested considerable energy into baking some kind of well-intentioned sweet potato cake because their baby’s body is a temple into which only breast milk and whole foods have flowed. I wonder if I should warn them about the tidal wave of sugar and processed foods that are poised to engulf their precious bundle of joy.
Though I buy relatively healthy food at the grocery store, sugar still finds a way to seep into our house, or if not our house, my children’s mouths multiple times a day. It’s friggin’ everywhere. It’s in the chocolate milk that our public school district inexplicably gives its students. It’s in the bags of gummy bears that a church uses to try to lure my kids to Jesus while they’re walking home from school. It sails from floats at parades and explodes from birthday piñatas and lurks in Gatorade at weekend sports games and bursts through the seams of paper bags on Valentine’s Day.
Any one of these scenarios on its own, of course, is not that big a deal. But add them together, plus all the other ultraprocessed garbage that is so readily available to our children, and the compound effect is significant. Nearly 20 percent of children aged two to 19 are obese, and diabetes in youth under 20 is expected to surge by 700 percent over the next few decades.
As my children gain more independence, it matters less and less that I stock our pantry with nuts and the fridge with fruits and vegetables. I am no match for the ultraprocessed food industry, which markets its wares aggressively to our youth. It’s not a coincidence that supermarkets put sugary cereals at children’s eye level, nor is it a coincidence that fast food chains set up shop near high schools with open campuses. (And it’s not a surprise that when they do, students are measurably less healthy.)
Ubiquitous fast food restaurants and convenience stores are just one component of built environments that prioritize profit and efficiency over our communal health. Even though the 1990s found many of us disenchanted with the car-dependent, consumer-fueled suburbs that had been continually sprawling over the prior decades, they still kept sprawling.
My house’s Walk Score of 82 is far above the national average of 49 — and would also be far out of my price range today. Though most Americans want walkability, that’s not what most Americans get. This is too bad for us and even worse for our kids. They grow up with the notion that getting from point A to point B automatically involves a car. And, of course, they spend a lot of time sitting in said car.
We live in a culture that not only fails to protect our children’s physical health but also actively works against it. That means it’s not just up to parents to fill in the sizable gaps, but also to fight against multi-billion-dollar food and real estate development industries, which both have one primary aim: to make money. Lots of it.
2. We're taught that life is about making money and buying things
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The importance of making money is not lost on my children. It’s our default cultural message, embedded in songs, movies, shows, ads, and the glamorized lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Unlike a “normal mom,” according to my daughter, I don’t buy much — partially because I hate spending money, partially because I’m trying to be somewhat environmentally responsible, and partially because we have a small house that can only hold so much.
Still, I distinctly remember thumbing through friends’ copies of Seventeen back in middle school, then setting aside the magazine and feeling overcome by an acute desire to go out and buy stuff. This was particularly unusual for me because I was a particularly unusual kid in that I didn’t care much for stuff. While writing my list for Santa, I used to sit and stare at the blank piece of paper, wracking my brain to think of a single thing I really wanted.
But marketing can be powerful, particularly for a 13-year-old who is suddenly feeling insecure and questioning everything she thought she knew. It didn’t take more than 10 minutes for those glossy pages to convince me that all my problems would be solved with just the right exfoliating face wash or hydrating shampoo.
My own adolescent daughter never struggled to make a list for Santa; in fact, at age seven she asked him for $90,000 and 100 pieces of jewelry. (Incidentally, seven was also the age at which she stopped believing in Santa.)
Even though she rarely watches commercials, gets most of her clothes second-hand, and sleeps in the same bed I slept in growing up, our culture’s rampant consumerism has managed to seep through the cracks. My daughter’s dresser is somehow lined end to end with all the latest and greatest products that the Internet has convinced her will lead to lifelong fulfillment. She is intent on buying her way to self-worth, obsessed with the so-called problems that money + Target can supposedly solve.
And no matter how many “life-changing” things she manages to collect, she will always be hungry for more. Not only that, she will be measuring what she has and how she looks by what social media shows her other people have and how they look.
3. Social media is treated like a requirement, not a risk
There’s a lot I envy about my parents’ generation — for instance, their access to affordable housing, their lack of student debt, and their general ability to be more financially solvent — but if there’s one thing I’m most jealous of, it’s that as parents, they only had one or two screens to monitor. My parents bought a computer when I was in middle school, but there was no such thing as the Internet, and thus they didn’t have to worry about me, say, stumbling into hardcore adult videos or instant messaging with a predator. I mostly used the computer to write stories.
The only other screen in our house was a television, which had four channels and which my parents limited by storing it in the hall closet, which meant we had to roll it down the hallway and plug it in any time we wanted to watch it. (I understand this wasn’t a widespread parenting tactic, but it was a brilliant way to limit screen time when there was one primary screen to limit.)
Enter the Internet, smartphones, and social media. My stepson, now 26, and his peers were the true user testers of this dangerous trifecta, the generation of children who proved how easily young minds could get hooked— and how much money there was to be made.
At this point, there is no denying that unchecked social media is bad for us and even worse for our children. One study found that the 33 percent increase in depression amongst 8th through 12th graders between 2010 and 2015 “correlates with smartphone adoption during that period, even when matched year by year. In the same period, the suicide rate for girls in that age group increased by 65 percent.”
But now we’re so deep in, it’s hard to know how to claw our way out. Parents find themselves faced with impossible choices—either isolate our children socially or expose them to the dangers of smartphones. We’re told it’s up to us to limit their consumption, while Big Tech does everything it can to encourage compulsive overconsumption. This excellent Substack post by Gaia Bernstein outlines Big Tech’s “strategy of corporate blame-shifting — diverting full responsibility onto users, including children and overwhelmed parents.”
So, to recap, my job as a mother who wants to raise healthy children is to convince my kids that the multi-billion-dollar food, real estate development, retail, and tech industries are wrong, and I am right. But that’s not all. I also need to convince them that the messages they get about their gender, orientation, and race are also highly damaging and completely untrue.
4. Kids absorb rigid, harmful messages about gender and identity
When my kids were young, I often wondered: What will society do to my fierce and prickly daughter? What will society do to my sweet and sensitive son?
Now that my kids are older, I’m seeing the answers unfold. As I’ve watched my children assert their growing independence — first my stepson, then my daughter, now my son — I’ve also watched their sense of self become defined by a broader culture that is rife with racism and misogyny.
For my stepson, adolescence was a time of slow hardening. Once upon a time, he rested his head in the crook of my shoulder when I read to him before bed. He sat quietly in the backseat during road trips, lost in thought, occasionally piping up with insightful questions we could rarely answer. He never asked, “When are we going to get there?” but instead, “Why do rocks sink and boats float?”
He cried when his grandfather burned down his house in a game of dominoes because he hadn’t done his math right. His grandfather told him to suck it up, stop crying.
Suck it up. Stop crying. These were the same messages he got from the rest of society, too. Over the years, the anger seeped in and hardened him at the edges.
He lost his bright-eyed inquisitiveness, started fights, built walls, clenched his vulnerabilities like fists. I’m now watching my 10-year-old son adopt his own tough exterior, mostly around his friends, and sometimes it’s hard to reconcile this emerging version of him with my soft-spoken, deep-feeling baby boy.
For my daughter, adolescence has manifested in a slow taming, a shedding of confidence that began right on schedule at age nine and continues its grim march forward. It’s been difficult for me to watch, particularly as a 45-year-old woman who is finally reclaiming my own sense of self-worth after decades of never quite feeling good enough.
I see my daughter starting to internalize all the things I’ve spent the last few years trying to unlearn — all the messages about what a female should be interested in, how a female should behave, and how a female should present herself. As I’m gleefully shedding high heels, skirts, and all the frivolous cares I once gave about what other people think, my daughter has begun her own frantic and unrelenting quest to fix all the flaws she now perceives in herself.
Meanwhile, both of my kids have become slightly obsessed with taming their gorgeous, biracial curls. My daughter used to wear her tightly coiled ringlets in a beautiful halo around her head. Now she slathers them in hair wax and coerces them into a ponytail. (Boys don’t like her, she says, because she doesn’t have hair she can flip over her shoulder.) My son, meanwhile, spends up to 30 minutes each morning “doing his hair,” which involves a lot of gel. I understand the need for some degree of frizz-taming, but I also miss my kids’ assertive, natural curls and the lack of self-consciousness they embodied.
I try, though often fail, to walk the delicate line between respecting their choices and critiquing the messages the world is sending them. And amidst all the terrible isms, there is an equally insidious message implicit in our policies and social structures, even if we rarely articulate it explicitly.
5. Children are treated like an inconvenience by society
I recently grumbled to my kids about how the deployment of the National Guard to our hometown of Portland could cost as much as $10 million. My daughter rolled her eyes and said, “And we can’t find a way to pay for air conditioning at school.”
Everywhere, my kids see money being spent, often lavishly, and yet they are asked to concentrate on schoolwork in temperatures exceeding 95 degrees. My son’s classroom is on the second floor, and for a time, it didn’t even have a working fan.
We live in a country that spends 10 times as much on our military as we do on education, fails to offer adequate childcare, and passes state laws that guarantee dogs the right to spend more time with their young than human parents. While most kids may not be aware of our specific laws and policies, none of this is lost on them.
Additionally, in more recent years, adults seem to have decided that “fun” cannot be had when there are children present. Nothing captures this shift more dramatically than the childfree wedding trend. In 2023, The New York Times reported that of “4,000 couples with 2024 wedding dates, 79.5 percent are in favor of kid-free weddings.”
Opportunities for multigenerational interaction used to simply be built into the fabric of American life — in neighborhoods, churches, and social gatherings. Social gatherings like… weddings. But our defaults have shifted. The default is now isolation over connection, all of us simply following the well-worn grooves of our own social lanes. Siphoned off by age, parental status, politics, religion, and income.
Fewer and fewer kids come of age within a multigenerational community that has their backs. Instead, they grow up amongst perennially stressed-out, isolated parents who spend more time on their paid jobs than they do on them, and a lot of other adults who generally don’t seem to care that much about them or really want them around.
We love to tell mothers, “It takes a village,” but we can’t build a village alone. I often wonder: What would parenting look and feel like if I lived in a culture that shared my core values and prioritized the well-being of my kids?
To some extent, I have to accept that much of the social conditioning my children are subject to — and will be subjected to moving forward —is beyond my control. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but I’m currently on a journey to change what I can, which starts with reimagining my relationship with time, reprioritizing my core needs, and reinventing my definition of family. This journey also involves unpacking all the toxic messages and behaviors I myself have absorbed over the years, starting in childhood.
Ultimately, this article isn’t really about solutions, though I offer some in the stories linked above. This article is first and foremost about naming what’s at the core of so much parental stress. This stress, especially when articulated by women, is rarely taken seriously and grossly misunderstood. But when we get to the heart of it, we see that we’re essentially pitting parents, and particularly mothers, against powerful industries, political indifference, stubbornly persistent legacies of toxic isms, and equally harmful emerging cultural norms.
We have no lobby, no union, no multinational conglomerate to represent our interests. It’s just mom versus society. If you’re a mother who feels as emotionally exhausted as I do, let’s at least be clear about why.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication Mom, Interrupted.
