Rebel Mothers

Hello! Welcome to today’s episode, where we will continue our conversation from last week about invisible labor and dive deep into the concept of emotional labor in motherhood.

We’re going to acknowledge that while emotional labor is not gender specific, current societal norms often place the bulk of emotional labor on mothers, and in this episode, I want to define and validate this labor while discussing ways to ease the load for mothers. We'll uncover all the ways emotional labor shows in motherhood, plus, we'll touch on how race, class, and the patriarchal system play into this intricate web of responsibilities, and ways we can ease the weight of emotional labor by getting men more involved.

So yeah, like I just mentioned, emotional labor is not gender specific. I’m not going to fall into some essentialist trap that claims that women and mothers are more biologically nurturing, so they take on more emotional labor because they’re just naturally better at it. No. Women and mothers have been socially conditioned to be the caretakers and providers of emotional support for their families because that’s the way they were raised. This episode is meant to acknowledge that right now, that’s the way things are, and while our role as rebel mothers is to work to change that in society, we also want to support and help the individual mothers of today. Absolutely I want to encourage fathers to provide emotional labor, and hopefully you can share this episode with your partner so you’re both on the same page for what it means to provide emotional support for the family. I profoundly hope that I am raising my two boys to be emotionally available fathers. But the truth is that emotional labor is often performed by the mother right now, and it is real and exhausting work, and so today I want to name it and validate the experience, and talk about ways to make it easier on mothers, because that’s what this podcast is all about.

So what is emotional labor, specific to motherhood? Emotional labor in motherhood refers to the invisible, often unrecognized, and emotionally taxing work that mothers undertake to nurture and support their children. It’s the ongoing effort required to ensure a child’s well-being, including providing love, empathy, and patience. This might look like soothing a crying baby at 3 a.m., helping a toddler navigate their fourth tantrum of the day, or offering guidance to a teenager who was just rejected by their date.

Mothers also carry the weight of worrying about their children's safety, education, and overall happiness, which can be emotionally draining. We’re reading books about brain development in children, or containing our fury in an email to the teacher because our child came home crying about an incident in PE, or lying in bed worrying that our kids don’t have any friends. This is all emotional labor and it all takes energy.

And here’s something else to note. Moms today perform more emotional labor than previous generations. We are WAY more concerned about our kids’ emotional well-being than ever before in society. Everything from attachment parenting, gentle communication, breaking generational trauma, teaching about consent, raising our OWN inner child, grounding and regulating our nervous systems; all of these are examples of emotional labor that I do that my mother rarely had to think about or even have vocabulary for. It was only a few generations ago where children were seen but not heard. And now, we understand the attachment theory that says that a child’s early experiences with their parents have a profound impact on their relationship skills as adults. And while this is critically important, it also puts a hell of a lot more pressure on parents to get it right from the very beginning.

Attachment parenting, or you could call it mindful, respectful, conscious parenting, there’s no real definition but they all emphasize building strong emotional bonds between parents and children, which requires a continuous and emotionally invested effort. It’s practices like co-sleeping, babywearing, and responsive feeding, all of which demand a high degree of emotional presence to understand and respond to your child’s cues.

Gentle communication, which is part of attachment parenting, is the practice of maintaining a compassionate and respectful dialogue with children, and yes, this can be emotionally draining. It requires parents to regulate their own emotions effectively, even in challenging moments, in order to validate children’s emotions with empathy and patience. You have to practice active listening and say things in a way that are sensitive to your child’s developmental stage and emotional well-being. Instead of issuing commands like “we have to go, please put on your shoes,” gentle communication sounds more like, “hey, it looks like you’re having big feelings about not wanting to put your shoes on. I get it. It’s hard to have to stop playing with toys” And if you slip up and lose your patience and yell, “for crying out loud, just get your shoes on, we’re going to be late!” then you have to repair the broken trust by later on saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m sure that felt scary. I’m working on staying calm with my own big feelings. I love you.” That last sentence was taken verbatim from Dr. Becky’s instagram page, which her page is a beautiful example of all things gentle communication.

And I’m not saying these practices are bad, or not worth the emotional investment. They absolutely are. Attachment parenting and gentle communication can be fulfilling, but it’s important to acknowledge that they require a continuous investment of emotional labor. We’re constantly checking our own emotional state when we’re around kids, and we’re constantly attuned to their emotional state as well. And this is behavior that many of us were not raised with ourselves, so sometimes it feels like we’re making it up as we go along.

Indeed, on that note, another form of emotional labor that’s related to all this is navigating advice about raising children, especially early on. So much of it is conflicting, like “get them on a sleep schedule, no you should co-sleep, no you should make sure they can sleep independently. Make sure your child knows they can count on you to always be there but also develop appropriate boundaries so that they learn how to navigate life on their own.” Sometimes we can look to our own parents for advice, but sometimes that’s more harmful than helpful.

Another form of emotional labor that everyone can benefit from is examining our own personal ancestry for patterns of behavior that have been passed down through generations, then decide if these behaviors are things we want to continue or stop doing with our own children. This is often referred to as breaking generational trauma, and it’s absolutely a profound and often overlooked form of emotional labor. People who are striving to break free from generational trauma must confront sometimes painful memories and actively work to reshape their behaviors. It can look like going to see a therapist to talk about your family’s history of addiction, or setting clear boundaries with older family members about behavior that you do not tolerate in your own home, or addressing cultural or racial trauma. Identifying and then stopping generational trauma is extremely emotionally labor-intensive and should be recognized as such.

And this brings me to my next point, which I didn’t get a chance to address in last week’s episode but it’s super important, which is a class and race based analysis of invisible and emotional labor. Different identities of people experience invisible, mental and emotional labor differently.

Racism significantly compounds the mental load and emotional labor of motherhood, particularly for mothers of color. These mothers often need to navigate racially biased healthcare systems, educational inequalities, and the fear of racial profiling, which adds an additional layer of stress and anxiety. Mothers of color may also bear the emotional labor of explaining racial injustice to their children and preparing them for the realities of racism in society. This emotional toll, coupled with the constant concern for their children's safety and well-being in a racially unequal world, contributes significantly to the mental load. And while I’ve given a lot of examples of how invisible and emotional labor show up in the home, bell hooks notes in her book “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center” that, quote, “historically, black women have identified work in the context of family as humanizing labor, work that affirms their identity as women, as human beings showing love and care, the very gestures of humanity white supremacist ideology claimed black people were incapable of expressing.” So again, just because this labor is invisible and often limited to the domestic sphere, that doesn’t mean it is always oppressive or unrewarding. White-bodied mothers bear a responsibility for educating their children about racism and actively working to address their own unconscious biases.

When it comes to invisible or reproductive labor, underpaid domestic and caregiving work very much needs to be addressed as a class issue. 90% of domestic workers are women, just over half of them are Black, Hispanic, or Asian American and Pacific Islander women; and they tend to be older than other workers. The typical domestic laborer is paid under $14 an hour and are 3x as likely to be living in poverty as other workers. All of this points to a societal disregard for the importance of care work.

I read a comment once in a feminist mothering space about the mental labor of researching, interviewing and hiring a house cleaner, and while yes, ok, I can see that, this comment was made with very little acknowledgement of the class privileges inherent in that statement. One of the major critiques of the white feminist movement in the 1960s was the complete lack of awareness of the class and racial inequities regarding domestic labor. Liberal feminists encouraged middle class women to go get college degrees and careers, which they were able to do by hiring household help. They were able to offload some of their invisible and mental labor onto paid domestic workers…which raises the question, to whom do the paid workers offload their invisible and mental labor?

I’m going to tell you right now, I don’t have the answers to this problem. Sorry, spoiler alert! I can’t fix all the world’s problems in this episode. But we can start organizing to “socialize” women’s private labors and bring them into the public domain by creating, for example, free 24-hour publicly funded, community-controlled child-care, laundering, and cleaning services staffed collectively by well-compensated workers. And then individual mothers can also ensure that if they are hiring domestic help to offset invisible labor, that they are paying a livable and equitable wage, including enough to fund a retirement plan and health insurance coverage.

Ok, so let’s get back to emotional labor, I don’t want to get too far off track. Hopefully some of the earlier examples helped you identify where emotional labor is showing up in your life. But how did we get here?

Hey, it’s our good old friend, the patriarchy! The fact that mothers are expected to be attuned to their children's emotional needs, anticipate potential issues, and create a safe and loving environment is deeply rooted in traditional gender roles. As a result, mothers often bear the responsibility for emotional labor because it’s believed that they should be nurturing, empathetic, and emotionally available to their children. We talked about this a lot last week, when we talked about invisible labor and the mental load as a whole.

And this gendered division of emotional labor is further made worse by a lack of support for fathers in many patriarchal societies. When I talk about dismantling patriarchy, I do so because I understand how it harms men too. Society's rigid gender norms often mean men are discouraged from openly expressing their emotions, pushing them to conform to traditional ideals of masculinity that includes stoicism and the ideal of the rugged, independent man. This pressure can lead to men hiding their emotions, which not only affects men’s mental health but also continues this generational cycle of emotional isolation for men and boys who don’t see their fathers cry.

Men also suffer from a lack of sensitive and empathetic male role models who are comfortable handling the emotions of children. Most dads on TV and in movies are depicted as incompetent fools who need Mom to straighten out their messes. This isn’t just annoying, it’s shaping and impacting the way we think about fathers. Liz Plank, who wrote an excellent book about patriarchy and masculinity called “For the Love of Men,” says it like this: quote “while women have been taken seriously as workers, men have yet to really be taken seriously as caregivers…All this time we were so focused on getting people comfortable with the idea that women work, but that revolution was never followed by a movement saying it’s okay for men not to.”end quote. Millennial fathers are more involved than any other generation, but even now we’re struggling against these deeply held stereotypes against men and caregiving.

As a Rebel Mother, I want you to ask yourself, would you rather a teenage boy to be the babysitter for your children? Sit with your reaction to that question for a minute, and then ask yourself why you feel that way. If we are not teaching our boys to be nurturing caregivers to small children, how do we expect them to do it when they’re fathers?

So besides encouraging men to take on more caregiving, here are some more ideas on how we can ease the weight of emotional labor in motherhood.

Maybe seek professional help, for yourself or any member of your family that seems to have a lot of emotional challenges. Find a therapist or counselors to address emotional and mental health needs, both for mothers and the entire family.

Go back to the basics, make sure you’re well fed, drinking enough water, getting sunshine and fresh air, taking your multivitamins, taking time for relaxation and pursuing creative interests. A well-rested and emotionally balanced mother is better equipped to handle emotional labor.

Education. Invest in parenting education that teaches emotional intelligence, empathy, and effective communication skills. This can be books or podcasts or online courses. Dr. Becky is a great place to start, I highly recommend the books and resources around Highly Sensitive People, there are so many resources out there.

Boundaries: Teach children age-appropriate independence and responsibility, reducing the emotional labor mothers invest in micromanaging every aspect of their lives. There’s a lot of weight and pressure on mothers to be heavily involved in their children’s lives, but, speaking from experience, my children have over and over proven themselves to be far more capable and responsible than I give them credit for. Which of course brings up a fear that one day they’ll leave me and I’ll die sad and alone, but we don’t need to spiral right now.

So to wrap this all up, emotional labor in motherhood is a complex and demanding facet of parenting that transcends gender roles and deserves recognition and support. As mothers today navigate the ever-changing demands of attachment parenting, gentle communication, and breaking generational trauma, they grapple with an increased emotional workload compared to previous generations. It's also essential to acknowledge the intersectionality of this labor, particularly the additional challenges faced by mothers of color and the impact of class disparities. Furthermore, dismantling the patriarchal norms that perpetuate these imbalances is crucial, along with encouraging fathers to actively participate in emotional labor. By addressing these issues and working collectively, we can strive for a more equitable and emotionally supportive world for all parents and their children.