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WORK TITLE: The Good Mother Myth
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WEBSITE: http://www.nancyreddy.com/
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LAST VOLUME: CA 392
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PERSONAL
Born October 18, 1982; children: two sons.
EDUCATION:University of Wisconsin, M.F.A., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Stockton University, Galloway Township, NJ, assistant professor of writing and first-year studies. Previously taught in a public school in New Orleans, LA, and in Houston, TX.
AWARDS:National Poetry Series, 2014, for Double Jinx; Promise Award, Sustainable Arts Foundation, 2015; recipient of grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
WRITINGS
Contributor of poems to literary journals, including Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Fail Better, Tupelo Quarterly, 32 Poems, and Smartish Pace; contributor of essays to periodicals, including Slate, Poets & Writers, Romper, and The Millions; author of the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful.
SIDELIGHTS
Nancy Reddy is a writer and an assistant professor of writing and first- year studies at Stockton University. Previously, Reddy taught at a public high school in New Orleans, Louisiana. Reddy holds an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.
In 2015, Reddy released her first poetry collection, Double Jinx: Poems. In an interview with Eva Langston for her Web site In the Garden of Eva, Reddy explained how her experience in her M.F.A. program contributed to her writing the book. She stated: “When I started my M.F.A., I really just wanted to write. I knew a book was the ultimate goal, but I didn’t start the M.F.A. with a clear sense of what that would be. I’d been teaching high school English for five years, which … is amazing and rewarding, but doesn’t allow much brain space for things beyond who’s chewing gum or texting under the table.” Reddy continued: “I was just so grateful to have time to write. … I felt like my eyes were growing back, like I could see again in a way that would allow me to write.” The first and last poems in the collection allude to Nancy Drew mysteries, which Reddy read as a child. Reddy told Langston: “When I wrote that first poem—‘The Case of the Double Jinx’—a lot of the themes and obsessions of this book started to come together for me: rivalry and competition, word play and nonce forms, dark humor. After I wrote that poem, I felt like I could see a lot of the other poems the book needed.” Other fictional characters that appear in the poems include Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood. Religion, family, and broken relations are among the poems’ themes.
Dakota Garilli, a contributor to the Coal Hill Review Web site, stated: “Reddy’s reinventions of famous female characters always force her readers to see these stories in a new way. … But for all their strength of craft, these poems seem to exist uncomfortably within their predecessors’ old parameters. … Those that seem to come from Reddy’s personal history, are the strongest of the collection. In these, she is able to take to task the damaging aspects of femininity, and, for that matter, masculinity, with greater specificity.” “Although a few poems lean toward the maudlin, the best show intelligence, spirit, and a good ear,” asserted Ellen Kaufman in Library Journal. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented: “Reddy channels the vibe and energy of Plath and Sexton, but it’s her arresting language that’s the real draw here.”
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In 2022, Reddy published another collection of poetry, Pocket Universe, and coedited an anthology of poetry and essays around the topic of motherhood, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. Then three years later, Reddy published a book of her own on the topic: The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas about How to Be a Good Mom. A work of narrative nonfiction, the book was inspired by Reddy’s own experience of becoming a mother. She had assumed before her first child was born that she would either be a good mother or learn how to become one, but she found that much more difficult than she anticipated. That led her to research what social scientists and psychologists of the mid-twentieth century wrote about parenthood and how so much of their research was misguided. Reddy debunks flawed studies and poor research, and she writes about how misogyny was behind much of it. She also writes about her own experiences of being a mother and what she has learned.
A writer in Publishers Weekly praised Reddy for her “sharp analysis” and “candid account of struggling with feelings of inadequacy.” They wrote that the book provides a “perceptive argument that flimsy science has been used to guilt-trip mothers for decades.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews agreed, calling the book a “refreshingly honest book that challenges the problematic ideals of motherhood.” They predicted that readers, especially new mothers, will find the book “useful and liberating.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Globe & Mail, January 20, 2025, Amberly McAteer, “I’ve Decided I Want to Be a More Self-Centered Mom,” author interview, p. A13.
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2024, review of The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas about How to Be a Good Mom.
Library Journal, October 15, 2015, Ellen Kaufman, review of Double Jinx: Poems, p. 91.
Publishers Weekly, July 20, 2015, review of Double Jinx, p. 166; November 18, 2024, review of The Good Mother Myth, p. 50.
ONLINE
Christina Consolino, https://christinaconsolino.com/ (February 10, 2025), Christina Consolino, author interview.
Coal Hill Review, http://www.coalhillreview.com/ (February 22, 2016), Dakota Garilli, review of Double Jinx.
In the Garden of Eva, https://inthegardenofeva.com/ (September 14, 2015), Eva Langston, author interview.
Nancy Reddy website, http://www.nancyreddy.com (May 15, 2025).
Writer’s Digest, https://www.writersdigest.com/ (January 21, 2025), Robert Lee Brewer, author interview.
I hold an MFA in poetry and a PhD in rhetoric and composition, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In another life, I wrote scholarly work on writing studies and materiality, creative writing pedagogy, and community literacy, and I've published that work in Community Literacy Journal, Literacy in Composition Studies, and The Journal of Creative Writing Studies.
I teach at Stockton University in New Jersey, and I also lead community writing workshops and lifelong learning courses, most recently at the Cooper Street Writing Workshops at Rutgers-Camden, the Stockton Institute for Lifelong Learning, Blue Stoop, and Murphy Writing.
You can find me on instagram and join us over at Write More, Be Less Careful, my newsletter about why writing is hard and how to do it anyway.
I’m a writer and a writing teacher. My first book of narrative nonfiction, The Good Mother Myth, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s in January 2025.
I’m the author of three books of poetry, most recently Pocket Universe, and the co-editor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood.
I’ve recently written pieces on the damaging mythology of the “golden hour” after birth for Slate and making mom friends for Romper, as well as review-essays on the whiteness of the motherhood memoir and the political nature of motherhood at Electric Literature.
Nancy Reddy: On the Myth of Perfect Parenting
In this interview, author Nancy Reddy discusses how allowing herself to draft imperfectly reflects the argument in her new book, The Good Mother Myth.
Robert Lee Brewer
Published Jan 21, 2025 1:00 PM EST
Nancy Reddy’s previous books include the poetry collections Pocket Universe and Double Jinx, a winner of the National Poetry Series. With Emily Pérez, she’s co-editor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. Her essays have appeared in Slate, Poets & Writers, Romper, The Millions, and elsewhere. The recipient of grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, she teaches writing at Stockton University and writes the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful. Follow her on X (Twitter) and Instagram.
Nancy Reddy
In this interview, Nancy discusses how allowing herself to draft imperfectly reflects the argument in her new book, The Good Mother Myth, her hope for readers, and more.
Name: Nancy Reddy
Literary agent: Maggie Cooper, Aevitas Creative Management
Book title: The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to be a Good Mom
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Release date: January 21, 2025
Genre/category: Nonfiction
Previous titles: Pocket Universe (poetry collection, LSU 2022), Double Jinx (poetry collection, Milkweed 2015), The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (anthology, UGA 2022)
Elevator pitch: The Good Mother Myth is half memoir, half research, and it investigates the midcentury science and psychology and animal studies beneath our bad ideas about how to be a good mom. If you love your actual kids but suspect that being a mom is kind of a scam, it’s the book for you.
Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]
What prompted you to write this book?
When I started working on this book, my kids were 3 and 5, and I kind of came up out of the haze of early motherhood and looked around and thought, What just happened to me? My whole life I’d been good at things, and I’d really believed that I could do just about anything with hard work and the right research—and becoming a mother turned that belief on its head. There was no amount of work or studying that made me feel like I was doing it right. So, this book became a long investigation, first of why motherhood was so hard, and eventually, of that underlying belief that motherhood was something you could master.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I started working on this book in the summer of 2018. My older son, who’d just finished kindergarten as I began, will be well into his first year of middle school by publication. So, the research and writing and thinking in this book really spanned my kids’ entire elementary school years. (Plus, a pandemic and the publication of two other books, my poetry collection Pocket Universe and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, which I think of as cousins to this new book.)
The book evolved a ton in that time, as you’d guess. I started out, I can see now, trying to write a sort of theory of everything for motherhood. I wanted to figure out why this thing that I’d assumed would be natural and easy and beautiful had in fact been incredibly hard and ugly at times, even as it was joyous and transformative. I read every motherhood memoir I could get my hands on, and then my research brain kicked into gear, and I started reading about animal parenting and anthropology of childhood and the neurohormonal roots of postpartum mood and anxiety disorders. It was fascinating, but as a concept for a book, it was way too big. I honed the project on my own for quite a while, and when I signed with my agent, we worked for another nine months to clarify the concept and the structure. In the end, the book focuses on our bad ideas about motherhood and unpacks the midcentury origins of those ideas as a way into having a more humane and loving experience of mothering.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
The biggest thing for me was having an editor who was really excited about this book and eager to help me shape it. Once we sold the book, the actual turnaround for finishing it was tight (less than eight months I think?), so I had to quickly get comfortable sending my editor work that wasn’t as polished as I would have wanted. It felt really vulnerable to send those early messy drafts, but writing that way also helped me be freer and less precious. It’s a looser and funnier and warmer book than it would be if I’d had the time to really try to make it perfect. (Which feels, I can see now, like the writing echo of what the book argues about motherhood: that perfect or good shouldn’t be our desired endpoint anyway!)
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
When the book sold, I felt really confident about the structure and the research and the arc of it, but as I was rereading some of my central sources, I found that there was still one last twist. I’d been writing mostly about the work of male scientists who’d devoted their careers to telling women how to mother, but at one point, I realized—most of them had kids. Who was raising them while they were in their labs and traveling the world lecturing women? (You can guess the answer.) Once I turned my attention to the wives of those scientists, I discovered that they were fascinating characters, too. Harry Harlow, the psychologist whose research on infant monkeys was foundational for attachment theory, had been married twice, and each time, his wife was forced, because of university nepotism policies, to leave her career. And the point isn’t just that for these two brilliant, ambitious women, their career was the cost of marriage—it’s also that the science is worse for having edged women out of the lab. I came to feel a real kinship with the wives, who were complex characters of their own, and whose stories, because they hadn’t left such a visible paper trail, were much harder to track down.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
When we talk about being a “good mom,” it’s almost never about what moms and kids and families actually need. Being a “good mom” always seems to be more about performing whatever shifting, impossible ideal for someone else—the other moms at daycare drop-off, your own mom, the specter of the online mamasphere. Your kids don’t need an adorable bento box lunch or an Instagrammable bedroom or a million extracurriculars to hone their skills. They just need love and attention from responsive adults who care about them. (And those adults don’t always have to be the mom! More loving adults is always more.) I hope that readers will be able to stop worrying about being “good” and instead be able to enjoy loving and getting to know the particular little people they’re raising.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
If you’re a writer who’s in a busy season of life—maybe you’re caring for young children or aging parents or both; maybe you have a demanding job that doesn’t leave a lot of time for writing—know that whatever little scraps of writing you can do will still be worth it. So much of my most recent book of poetry, Pocket Universe, started as scrawls in a notebook leaned on the steering wheel of my car in a driveway somewhere—in a few moments stolen before I had to go teach, in the parking lot at daycare pickup. And I often felt bad in those years that I wasn’t “really” writing in the way I had before I had kids. But when I eventually had the time to go back and open up that notebook, to pull up my notes on my phone and my voice memos and other little scraps, I realized that I had been writing that whole time. Even if you can only catch a moment here and there, those little bits of writing can still add up to a lot.
Fewer Experts, More Support: An Interview with Nancy Reddy
By Christina Consolino | February 10, 2025 | 0
If I were the type to be intimidated by other people, my guest today would be the one to do it! Nancy Reddy is a writer and teacher who “holds an MFA in poetry and a PhD in rhetoric and composition.” She’s written “scholarly work on writing studies and materiality, creative writing pedagogy, and community literacy, and [she’s] published that work in Community Literacy Journal, Literacy in Composition Studies, and The Journal of Creative Writing Studies.” Add to that a list of books, including the now available The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom. And that’s not all! Her newsletter, Write More, Be Less Careful, addresses “why writing is hard and how to do it anyway.” It’s one of my favorite newsletters to read, partly because of the material, but mostly because of how much of Nancy shines through in each letter. That’s something that can be said of all Nancy’s work, in my opinion. Heartfelt, thoughtful, and always authentic, I’m awed (not intimidated!) by Nancy’s talent and generosity. Excellent writer, excellent human, and goodness knows we need more of those in today’s world.
Welcome, Nancy!
Christina: I’m thrilled with your newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful, which stems from a column you used to write for Pank. You say that the newsletter “continues [your] obsession with creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.” Why the newsletter format? What differences do you find between a column and a newsletter? How’s it all going?
Nancy: For me, the biggest difference is the sense of immediacy with a newsletter: when I hit send, it goes directly into people’s inboxes, which makes writing it feel really personal and immediate. It also means that I get direct feedback—readers email me back, comment, share it, and that’s been so valuable to me. Writing can be so lonely, and my newsletter reminds me that we’re never really doing it alone. I think it does that for my readers, too.
One of the things I love most about writing my newsletter, especially as our readership has grown, is being able to share that space with other writers. I run a regular interview series, good creatures, about the intersection of caregiving and creativity. I’ve learned so much from the writers and artists we’ve featured, and I think my readers are really eager to learn about how other caregivers are making space for their creative work. (And that’s how we met!)
Christina: How and when did your obsession with “creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck” come about?
Nancy: It came from my own feeling of deep stuckness! I’d started writing essays, or trying to, but I kept getting bogged down. I had a folder of half-finished drafts, and the more I wrote and didn’t finish, the worse I felt.
At the same time, I felt like, I do actually know something about writing and writing process! At that point, I’d already published two books of poetry and I’d written a dissertation and I’d studied writing process and pedagogy as part of that PhD. So I thought, how can I use what I know to help me get unstuck? In the original column, I was doing a lot of interviews with people who had expertise of different kinds in the creative process: Jessica Abel, an illustrator and creativity coach, who talked about the magic of one thing for achieving your creative ambitions; writing studies scholar Hannah Rule, whose work challenges some conventional wisdom about freewriting and thinks about the materiality of the writing process.
The rhythm of a regular deadline did so much to help me get unstuck. Every time you finish one thing, it makes it easier to get back to work and finish the next thing. That really practical focus—like, literally what am I working on next?, how do I finish a writing project?—is a throughline in Write More as well.
Christina: Much of your work centers on motherhood, which is so rich with experiences to write about. Are there any mothering experiences you think you wouldn’t write about?
Nancy: I’m less interested in writing about my kids now that they’re older. The writing I’ve done about motherhood is really about me and about the institution; my kids are actually kind of incidental to it. The Good Mother Myth encompasses my first two years of motherhood, and Pocket Universe goes a little farther, ending with my first son’s fifth birthday party. My sons are now 9 and 11, and I find them incredibly interesting, but I also want to give them space to grow up and live their own lives without my writing about it layered over them.
Christina: In getting ready for this interview, I read a lot of your poetry, which resonated with me deeply. One line in particular ends your poem “Postpartum,” and it reads, “I’d thought/ that when the baby came I’d be myself but better. I’m not.” I can’t imagine a mother who reads that poem and doesn’t stop there and linger on that perfect ending. Can you comment?
Nancy: That ending! I revised it and tinkered with it so many times, and I just looked at it as it appears in Pocket Universe, and I can see I took out the final sentence—the “I’m not.” A mentor had suggested that the sentiment was implied and I didn’t need to be so explicit, but now that I rethink it, I’m not sure.
In Pocket Universe, that poem is at the beginning of the second section; the first section concludes with a poem titled “Golden Hour” that ends “in the hospital I’m a good mother,” another feeling that I suspect many mothers will be able to relate to. (So many loving nurses helping out! People just bringing food right to your room! Then they just send you home with a tiny stranger and you’re supposed to do it all yourself.)
So those two poems get at, I think, the contrast between the dream of transforming from an ordinary woman into a “good mother” and the reality of the postpartum period.
I should say that, as much darkness and postpartum weeping as there is in the book, it also really arcs toward joy. The second half of the book has poems about my older son’s glee in learning baby sign language, about reading books together at bedtime, about the boys hugging at daycare. The book ends with a poem, “Dark Matter,” about a child’s birthday party and my feeling, gathered with all those kids and their parents, of our “collective unbearable luck.”
Christina: In an essay for Electric Lit, you talk about approaching early motherhood as if it were a research project, reading, studying, etc. But then, your healthy baby had “strong lungs and a penchant for nighttime wailing. And I was convinced I was a bad mother.” Many mothers would see themselves in those words. Where do you think that feeling of being a bad mother comes from? How does our society help ingrain that into us? What do we need to do to help more mothers not feel that way?
Nancy: That’s really what my new book, The Good Mother Myth, is all about—the really bad and dangerous idea that being a good mother means doing it all yourself, that mothers just instinctively “know” how to care for their babies, that they’ll love their babies so much that they won’t mind the missed sleep and constant labor of caring for a really tiny new person.
The short version is that we all need fewer experts and more support. All that research was of pretty limited use in the actual work of caring for a child. What made a difference was the support from family, friends, and community: a breastfeeding clinic where I sat with other mothers who were struggling to nurse, friends who’d come over and hang out even when I hadn’t showered and the house was a mess. I think being really honest about what’s hard and what helps is the first step toward helping future new mothers have an easier time. That, and actual structural support: paid parental leave, prenatal care and maternal mental health care, accessible and affordable childcare.
Christina: Speaking of The Good Mother Myth, I love that you consider “what animals can teach us about what’s really ‘natural’ about mothering.” How did this particular interest come about?
Nancy: The book evolved so much over time, and there was a (long!) period where I was really obsessed with animal parenting and how it can help us to understand ourselves. One version of that proposal was super animal-heavy; I think I had kangaroos and whales and orangutans in it. Oh, and the Australian social spider, which turns itself to goo and lets its babies consume its melting body! (Can you tell that was in the depths of the pandemic?)
When I started that book, I was pursuing this question: if motherhood is—as I’d always been led to believe—the “most natural thing in the world,” why was it so hard? That idea of mothering as “natural” led me into the animal world and especially to the work of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. I also spent a lot of time reading about the psychologist Harry Harlow, who used baby monkeys to study maternal attachment. (You’ve probably seen the images from those studies—a tiny monkey clinging to a kind of terrycloth surrogate “mother.”) Harlow spent most of his career at the University of Wisconsin, where I was in graduate school when my sons were born, and I thought a lot about those ostensibly “perfect” cloth mothers when I became a new mother and struggled so much to become the kind of endlessly patient, selfless mother I thought I should be. Harlow’s work, particularly as it was taken up by the founders of attachment theory, became the kernel of the research strand of The Good Mother Myth.
Christina: Let’s go back to that Electric Lit essay, which also talks about the whiteness of motherhood memoirs, and I can’t agree more. You wrote, “If we’re building a ‘new canon’ of books on motherhood, let’s consciously build a bigger canon,” which, of course, would include memoirs by a diverse set of mothers. I wonder if the old adage applies here: You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink. What do you think?
Nancy: What I’ve found is that there are lots of mothers and parents doing really excellent writing (and art-making more broadly) about their experiences, but the paths to publishing remain more challenging for some writers than others. I really respect the work of organizations like Literary Liberation and its sister publication Raising Mothers, which are working to make space for mothers of color in particular to share their stories. I co-edited an anthology, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, that included a really wide range of mothering stories, and I’m proud of the diversity and breadth in that book, too.
Christina: Ah, poetry. I love how something so small can have such an impact on a reader. Have you always been a poet? What about poetry is so compelling? Which poets influenced you early on? And now?
Nancy: Poetry has given me a space to say things, and to figure them out for myself, that I couldn’t actually speak aloud. I love the small space of a poem, where you can really perfect every word and every line and stanza break. I also love the sense that a poet is leaning forward and speaking just to you.
Christina: Motherhood, with its small bursts of time and activity, lends itself to the shorter form. How did motherhood change your writing practice?
Nancy: It’s made me less precious about my working conditions. Before my sons were born, I’d spend hours sitting somewhere quiet tinkering with an image or a line break. During my first years of motherhood, when those long hours alone vanished, I so often felt frustrated that I wasn’t writing enough, or wasn’t writing well or seriously. But what I did do was always keep a notebook somewhere nearby. I kept up the habit of recording little snippets of things that spoke to me: a line, a sentence from a story on the radio. I’d scribble in a couple stolen moments before daycare pickup, or in the parking lot at work before I went in to teach. When I finally found myself with some longer stretches of time, I was able to put those pieces together.
I’ve also always traveled for work and for writing retreats. When our kids were just 1 and 3, I applied, at my husband’s insistence, to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference—and when I was awarded a fellowship, he had to figure out how to care for them all on his own for nearly two weeks! (He might have regretted encouraging me, but he never complained. He’s a competent caregiver and a loving dad, and I think the time we’ve each had caring for our kids on our own has been good for us.) I felt so anxious about going away for so long when they were so small, but a good friend told me something that I’ve said to countless new mothers since: it’s good for your kids to see you pursuing something that matters to them. I want my kids to know me as a writer, and sometimes that means we’re at home and I ask them to wait a minute while I finish writing something, and sometimes that means I’m away from them.
Motherhood has shown me that I can do a lot of writing in scraps, but to really put something together, whether it’s an essay or a manuscript, I need sustained time by myself. I don’t feel any guilt about claiming that time.
Christina: You’ve been the recipient of several fellowships, and your work has won multiple awards. Is it enough? Do you feel like you’re a literary success?
Nancy: Does anyone? I feel really proud of my work. I try not to think too much about the idea of “success” big picture because it’s always a losing game—no matter how many books you’ve published or how well they sold, someone else has bigger numbers; no matter which prizes you’ve won, there are fancier ones there still rejecting you.
Christina: What is your writing kryptonite?
Nancy: All the things I tell myself I’ll do quickly before I get started—read my email, check Instagram. It’s so easy to fritter away a whole morning just “checking” little things or doing tasks that are writing-adjacent but aren’t really the writing. The best way for me to preserve my writing time is always to do it first.
Nancy can be found in multiple places!
Website: https://www.nancyreddy.com/
X: @nancy_reddy
Instagram: @nancy.o.reddy
Goodreads: Nancy_Reddy
Thanks to Nancy for agreeing to this interview! Feel to leave a comment!
Parenting
The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom
Nancy Reddy. St. Martin's, $28 (256p) ISBN 978-1-250-33664-4
Flawed mid-20th-century child development research helped create unrealistic expectations for mothers, according to this incisive treatise. Poet Reddy (The Long Devotion) excoriates British psychiatrist John Bowlby's 1950s studies on juvenile delinquents and children orphaned by WWII, suggesting his conclusion that the "most important factor in a child's mental health was the constant care and devotion of their mother" was undermined by the fact that he didn't collect data on how poverty or other social factors affected the kids. Much of the research implicitly encouraged pushing women out of the workforce after WWII, Reddy argues, describing how generations of researchers have used variations on Mary Ainsworth's "strange situation" lab setup, in which the psychologist observed how children reacted to their caregivers' absence, to suggest that sending kids to day care might cause long-term emotional harm. The sharp analysis sheds light on how child development research's individualistic focus unfairly blamed mothers for children's outcomes while letting economic inequality and other political factors off the hook, and Reddy's candid account of struggling with feelings of inadequacy after having kids demonstrates the deleterious effects of the impossible expectations set by such studies ("I cried and raged and cried. I felt terrible, and I felt alone"). It's a perceptive argument that flimsy science has been used to guilt-trip mothers for decades. Agent: Maggie Cooper, Aevitas Creative Management. (Jan.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Cooper, Maggie. "Parenting: The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 44, 18 Nov. 2024, p. 50. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A817760164/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=771a50da. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.
Reddy, Nancy THE GOOD MOTHER MYTH St. Martin's (NonFiction None) $28.00 1, 21 ISBN: 9781250336644
Probing the history of "the good mother."
As a feminist and daughter of a devoted single mother, Stockton University writing professor Reddy was shocked to find herself feeling more like a frazzled "leaking mammal" in the weeks after giving birth to her first child than a fulfilled, "blissed-out" new mom. The unconditional love she had been taught she would automatically feel did not materialize, and for a time, Reddy believed that being a good mother was beyond her reach. In a book that draws on her experiences as a new mother and on research into the mid-20th-century social scientists and doctors whose well-intentioned work ultimately created "bad ideas" about good mothering, she begins by looking at Harry Harlow, whose studies of baby monkeys and their cloth surrogate mothers laid the groundwork for the myth that the best mothers were as "constantly available" as they were "endlessly adoring." Building on Harlow's work, John Bowlby developed his theory of mother-child attachment, which claimed that mothers were naturally designed to exist in a private, caregiving dyad with their children. Pediatrician Benjamin Spock later echoed the ideas of both in his bestselling child-rearing manual. But as the author suggests, his advice that women follow their instincts and their (male) doctors' instructions served only to undercut women's confidence in their own mothering abilities. Reddy's own experiences--like learning to accept help from others outside her family--taught her two important lessons: that children--and mothers--thrive the most "when cared for by a whole community" and that love is as much felt as it is built over time. Intelligent and well researched, Reddy's study offers insights that new mothers will undoubtedly find both useful and liberating.
A refreshingly honest book that challenges the problematic ideals of motherhood.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Reddy, Nancy: THE GOOD MOTHER MYTH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A817945712/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=edfe28c2. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.
Byline: AMBERLY McATEER; Special to The Globe and Mail
Sitting around the dining table on New Year's Day at an adults' only dinner party - my first in what seems like eons - I decided to say the horrible thing out loud. We had been asked to share a word or idea that we're bringing into 2025. Common answers included balance, joy, spontaneity, the year of yes.
Selfish, I said. I want to be a more selfish mother.
I explained that, days earlier, I had been gifted an expensive hair-drying apparatus. The simple act of sitting alone in my bathroom for 20 entire minutes, trying to figure this tornadolike device out, felt foreign. Working on something so silly, so vain, as my appearance, for only my benefit, seemed futile and wrong.
Down the hall, I could hear my two young girls asking my husband where Mommy went, then asking for snacks, then asking what time precisely Mommy would be coming back.
After I emerged - with bouncy, shiny hair for our grand outing to the playground - I did some serious reflecting. I haven't taken a vitamin in four years, but I always make sure my kids are fully fortified. I can't remember the last new thing I learned, but I've enrolled my kids in multiple stimulating activities. And my hair has most definitely been in a bun since 2020. Why did I stop doing things purely for my own advantage?
Asking these questions feels like an act of defiance. Society has hardwired me to believe that my overwhelming love for my children negates any desire to be a well-rounded person outside of motherhood. In some ways, the "mom who lost her identity" trope snuck up on me.
I am so overjoyed by my girls (and also, it must be said, exhausted every single day) that until recently, I haven't thought about who I was before they came along. They were just here, and my world revolved around their incredible universe, and I had no choice but to be all-in.
In other ways, the messaging is loud and clear. When moms set boundaries, the response is not kind. Just ask Isabelle Lux on TikTok, whose video about her postpartum rules went viral. Her list included not changing a diaper for three weeks after the birth of her child in order to focus on her own self-care; staying in bed for 15 days to recover; and returning to her complex beauty routine as soon as possible.
Reaction to the video ranged from dismissive laughter and scoffing disbelief to accusations of insanity.
There are practical reasons moms struggle to find time for themselves, too. A 2023 study by the Pew Research Centre in the United States found that in heterosexual marriages, women spend more time on caregiving than men - even when they are the primary breadwinner.
And new research led by the University of Alberta shows the gender gap of household chores only widens with parenthood, with women performing more housework than average while raising children. How can we think of ourselves until the never-ending laundry is folded and the dishwasher unloaded and the groceries put away?
There is a resounding acknowledgment among moms that moms do so much. Who among us millennial moms hasn't shared the ubiquitous Snoop Dogg acceptance speech, delivered when he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame? The one where he says, "I want to thank me for doing all this hard work, I want to thank me for having no days off,
I want to thank me for never quitting, I want to thank me for always being a giver ..." Perhaps instead of sharing this meme, we should be asking why it is that we need to thank ourselves so extensively and what would happen if we started rewarding ourselves with some self-centred attention?
That women sacrifice and lose themselves in motherhood is not a flaw in the system - it is the system. Society demands that moms become more flexible in all aspects of their lives, while dads can return to their regularly scheduled programming.
Parenting handbooks and manuals are filled with advice about how to raise babies, toddlers and children but there is one part of the equation the authors leave out. Where are the mothers in the books about parenting?
Nancy Reddy, author of the new book The Good Mother Myth, says that's no surprise. Her book tackles the long-believed myths of what makes a good mother - including the selfless martyr narrative.
"You know all of these authors, who are mostly men, they're ostensibly studying motherhood and what mothers need to do to produce a healthy baby and a good kid - but they're not actually very interested in mothers at all," she told me. "Mothers are not really seen as full people."
When I told Reddy about my word for 2025 and the ensuing "mom guilt" that has followed any attempt to be selfish, she interrupted me.
"I just really hate that phrase," she said. "'Mom guilt' has become this weapon against women and by having a name for it we've made it worse. No one talks about 'dad guilt' because that isn't a thing."
Then she said something that stopped me dead in my tracks: "These ideas all come from men - largely, that it's possible, and optimal, for one good mom to do it all and just love her kids so much that she doesn't mind." She put into words precisely the flawed contention that may as well have been tattooed on my forehead since the birth of my first child four years ago.
After my call with Reddy, I was determined to be more selfish.
But almost three weeks in - and after a nasty virus that has wiped out my husband's ability to parent - I'm not feeling very selfish. I have purchased but not taken vitamins, and my hair has resumed the mom-bun position until further notice.
Insult to injury, my youngest recently learned I have a name other than mom (or more, accurately, snack lady) and it's the funniest thing she's ever heard.
"Amberly?!... Amberly? That's not your name!" she laughed hysterically in her high chair.
I'm determined to prove her wrong, but it might take all year.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Globe and Mail Inc.
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McAteer, Amberly. "I've decided I want to be a more self-centred mom." Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 20 Jan. 2025, p. A13. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A824175989/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=255305a2. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.