When parents compete, everyone loses

Dear Friends,

The moment people know you’re thinking about having a baby, they start asking you to take sides.   Are you team unmedicated birth or epidural?  Vaginal or cesarean? Bottle or breast? Purees or baby-led weaning? Working or staying at home? Only child or siblings? And don’t even get started on all the philosophies of how to correctly teach your child to sleep through the night, use the toilet, or be a good human. 
 
We live in an age of combative mothering.  It’s a culture that normalizes and even feeds off constant competition between parents in terms of the best parenting styles, decisions, and practices.  If you’ve ever attended an event at school or made small talk with parents at the park, you’ve probably encountered this cultural phenomenon.
 
Combative parenting shows up as a mom who can’t stop mentioning that her baby slept through the night since birth because of this Instagram account she follows and the person who can’t help but bring up how they still sleep next to their kid every night, so they aren’t emotionally traumatized. It’s the shame felt by a mom when she takes out a bottle to feed her baby and gets some side-eye from strangers, and the judgment felt by a mom whose family and friends don’t understand why she insists on breastfeeding.  It’s the friend who can’t stop themselves from one-upping you every time you share a parenting win, and it’s the anxiety that keeps you googling all night to find the right way to handle a tantrum.  
 
It isn’t hard to understand why these competitive urges creep in.  Modern parenting has grown to encompass so much more than keeping your kid clean and healthy.  Now, we worry about children’s emotional, intellectual, developmental, spiritual, social, academic, athletic, and physical well-being.  There are so many different facets to try to balance, and in the age of the internet, there’s nearly an endless amount of information and opinions on how (not) to do so.  Of course, every parent wants to get it “right.”  And if we are doing it right, then someone doing it differently must be wrong.  
 
Instead of presenting parenting as richly diverse and reflective of the needs of each unique parent and child, combative parenting frames decisions as win-lose and imagines that good parenting involves navigating a precarious series of tests. But the reality is that the road to good enough parenting is wide and well-traveled. Children don’t need perfect parents.
 
A pass/fail view of parenting introduces fear, shame, and insecurity. When we imagine that every aspect of our parenting has the potential to ruin our child, our insecurity can manifest as defensiveness and mom-shaming.  In turn, the fear of judgment drives us further away from our peers and even deeper into our own need to justify our actions.
 
Perhaps it goes without saying, but let’s just state it anyway—it’s a trap.  The so-called “mommy wars” pit mothers against each other and distract from the social and societal issues that impact us. 
 
The issues are often falsely laid out as choices to sow further discord.  Some moms have limited control over how they give birth, what they can feed their babies, or whether they work or stay home.  This worldview diverts to debating the merits of the choices instead of focusing on ensuring parents have the resources needed to exercise all their options. 
 
For example, combative parenting wants us to focus on whether staying at home or working parenting is right (to say nothing of part-time work, shiftwork, work at home parenting, etc.). The debate is a distraction from the real issue--ensuring parents have the ability to choose what’s right for their family.
 
Even the manufactured categories are falsely limiting to create a sense of black and white.  By constraining the possibilities for maternal identity, we restrain mothers’ agency. Combative parenting breaks up mothers into increasingly smaller factions and then tries to turn us on each other.  It reduces motherhood from infinite options to a series of cutesy labels and binary identifiers.
 
If you believe in attachment parenting, can you still sleep train?  Of course. But encouraging parents to identify with a single philosophy discourages us from picking and choosing what works for us in favor of getting the entire thing right.  Parenting should be a buffet and not prix fixe. 
 
We believe that few parents truly want to participate in combative parenting, but it can be so pervasive that we often find ourselves unconsciously complicit—perseverating over the minor details of parenting or judging someone else’s choices.  But we can be part of making a change. 
 
There is a way out, and it’s community.  There’s a reason for the saying “it takes a village to raise a child.” Competition discourages vulnerability and support, but the reverse is also true.  When we open ourselves up authentically to the other mothers in our community (flaws and all), it deflates the combative energy.   
 
Instead of leaning into our personal definitions of best practice, we can choose to support the choices of other mothers and work with them to achieve their goals.  We can unite to advocate for the types of policy change that would support all families.   Interdependence and sisterhood are the alternative to competition.  
 
Warmly, 

Kellie Wicklund, LPC, PMH-C
CEO + Clinical Director

Christina Moran
Executive Director