Motherdom, with Alex Bollen

Alex Bollen is a researcher with over twenty years of experience, including as a former director of the research agency Ipsos MORI. She is a Postnatal Practitioner with the NCT, the UK’s largest parenting charity, and has been running postnatal groups for new mothers in South West London for over a decade. She is the mother of two children.

Alex’s first book, Motherdom, is out now. 

What do you mean by 'Motherdom'?

The title for my book, Motherdom, was suggested by a brilliant woman called Cora from my literary agency. I think  Wifedom, which is a fantastic book, was what inspired her. 

I started exploring the etymology of the word and the more I did, the more I felt that Motherdom captures so much that we need to think about in relation to motherhood. The ‘dom’ suffix is attached to a lot of words. Freedom. Martyrdom. Wisdom. It means ‘condition, state, dignity, domain or realm.’ Thinking about the dignity, domain and realm of motherhood links to one of the key things I want to say with my work which is that we don’t appreciate what mothers do. We’re too busy saying what they’re not doing and criticising people.

Motherdom is about recognising the respect and appreciation we should give to mothers. 

It works on a second level too. Just like with the concept of freedom, it helps us think about where we’re at now, how much freedom we have, what state of motherdom we’re in, to where we could be in a future free of Good Mother myths. Good Mother myths oppress us as mothers. They make us feel guilty and ashamed. They are used to divert attention away from what mothers and children really need. Motherdom is about breaking free from all of that.

Lots of childcare advice claims to point us towards what is optimal. What do you think about the concept of ‘optimisation’ in the care of babies and children?

I think it’s a really bogus idea. There isn’t 'One Best Way’ of looking after all babies or all children. There are lots of different ways. It depends on you, your child, your circumstances, your family. 

The idea of optimisation and a ‘Best Way’ is really problematic- it piles on the pressure and makes people feel guilty. It makes it sound like we should be constantly looking to optimise or perfect our children which is a very unhealthy way to think about our relationship with them.

I think one of the most important elements of motherhood is understanding and accepting our children as they are and accepting how little we can really do to change that. For instance, just accepting that your individual child is quite shy rather than investing loads of time and energy trying to change them into a more socially acceptable extrovert. 

Fundamentally, the concept of optimisation doesn’t allow for diversity. It doesn't allow for different circumstances, different points of view, different personalities, different family situations.

As a researcher, I’ve done a lot of work on communications testing and so I do have some sympathy for the point that public health messages need to be kept simple to maximise understanding. But oversimplification removes any nuance or recognition of different circumstances. This is compounded by the fact that the support networks around mothers have been so stripped back. There used to be so many more children’s centres, ways of having informal chats with health professionals, ways of connecting with different parents and hearing different perspectives. 

Now most of those services are gone, and what mothers are left with is an uncompromising list of do’s and don’ts often based on fairly flimsy evidence: always talk to your child, turn every moment into a ‘brain building moment’, do as much skin-to-skin as possible. These instructions encourage us to make every moment a conscious activity specifically designed to maximise our child’s development. It’s exhausting. No one is ever going to meet the standard, and focusing on it makes us lose sight of the fact that anything g parents do to care for  their child will be helping them develop physically, mentally, emotionally, intellectually.  

Can you talk us through an example of a scientific study being oversimplified and made into motherhood instruction?

I think the ultimate one is the Baltimore study, which was done in the late 60s by Mary Ainsworth. It had a sample size of 23 babies and is the basis for the belief that mothers need to interact sensitively with their babies to build secure attachments   . The study is still cited as evidence today. I think it has become so foundational because it so neatly fits our cultural conceptions of motherhood: the mother who is constantly interacting with and stimulating their child and putting them before anything else. These days people talk more about ‘responsiveness’ rather than ‘sensitivity’ but it comes down to the same basic ideas and this study is fundamental to both. 

Why does bad science keep happening? Part of the reason is that researchers and universities understandably want to get media attention for their findings, and journalists want  catchy and easy to understand stories.

A good  example of this is a study published in 2023 which produced headlines that drinking even before you are pregnant can change your baby’s face! If you drill down into the research, you see that of 200 facial traits measured, only three were different in 9 year old children whose mothers had drunk alcohol before pregnancy compared to those that hadn’t. Only three traits out of 200! How anyone is supposed to spot such miniscule differences on a child’s face is beyond me. Despite this, the researchers warned that women who ‘want to become pregnant soon should quit alcohol consumption several months before conception and completely during pregnancy to avoid adverse health outcomes in the offspring’.

We seem to accept these messages because it plays into the most enduring Good Mother myth of all - no sacrifice is too great for the good mother. 

How optimistic are you that we might be able to make the cultural shifts necessary to break free from Good Mother myths?

I guess I’m optimistic enough to have written my book, which I don’t think I could have brought myself to do if I felt it was hopeless. It’s certainly not going to be easy though. These myths are deeply engrained.

We are so used to holding dads to a ‘credit model’ where they are praised and recognised for the good things they do, whereas we consistently judge mums on a ‘deficit model’ against ridiculously high standards.

This spills over into how all women are expected to behave, regardless of whether they are mothers. In the workplace, in social situations, with family, women are measured against a really high bar in terms of how much they sacrifice or sideline themselves for the group, for the team, for the children. 

We can break free from these myths and our starting point needs to be hearing different voices, different experiences, hearing that there’s no one ‘right way’. I’ve done a lot of work with new mums in postnatal groups and that has been a hugely valuable experience for me, helping me understand issues like breastfeeding and the whole range of reasons why people do and don’t do it, why it does and doesn’t work in their circumstances. Instead of judging each other against uncompromising mantras and rules we need to focus on understanding each other. We need to challenge good mother myths together. 

Of course there is a political element to it too, I’m not saying that individuals have the power or the responsibility to fully solve this. We must shift focus from what mothers are apparently doing wrong, to what children need. What relationships? What resources? The UK is the 6th biggest economy in the world yet we have children who go to bed hungry. Who really cares about ‘brain building moments’ in that context? The political problem is much harder to solve but I do think that shifting the focus onto what families actually need can  help trigger the political discussions and solutions we all need.