Five days after I became a mother of twins, I held my daughter beside her NICU bed and sobbed openly. When a nurse approached me and asked what was wrong, I let it all spill out: I told her how I felt disconnected from everything. My body, my emotions, myself. My children.
Everyone told me that the day I met my babies would be the best day of my life, but I didn’t feel that joy or an instant, all-consuming connection — it was buried too deep beneath fear, birth trauma, extreme sleep deprivation, and, I now suspect, an undiagnosed case of postpartum depression. I felt like I was inhabiting someone else’s body, holding someone else’s child.
“Oh, no. You can’t do this to yourself,” the nurse told me. “Mom guilt is something you’re always going to experience, but you’ve got to let it go. It’s all in your head.”
But now, I see it so clearly: She got it wrong. We’ve all been getting it wrong when it comes to mom guilt. It’s not all in our heads. It’s not something we can just “let go” or “ditch” or “not buy into.” And if we want to address mom guilt, we have to trace it back to the place from which it originates.
American mothers live in a country that offers virtually no support and a society that upholds incredibly unrealistic standards for them. There s the structural stuff: the lack of national paid parental leave, the inaccessibility of child care, the sad state of postpartum care. And then there’s the cultural stuff: The idea that moms should “have it all” and act accordingly, the mental load, the double standards, unrealistic media representations of parenthood, the glorification of mommy martyrdom and rampant online mom-shaming. In light of all that, mothers feeling as though they can t measure up is inevitable.
“For every mom I know, guilt is their baseline," says Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Moms First. “If you live in America, which has no structural support, every day is a new opportunity for you to feel like a failure. I think the way that we talk about mom guilt, it’s as if you should just snap your fingers and do it on your own. The reality is, it takes structural change and it takes cultural change.”
The structural issues—particularly lack of paid leave, inaccessibility of childcare, and unequal pay, according to Saujani—set mothers on a journey of guilt that begins as soon as they step into the role. There’s also the culture of toxic positivity surrounding motherhood, which leaves us wholly unprepared for the messy, exhausting realities. But instead of recognizing the role systemic and societal issues play, we blame mothers for imposing guilt on themselves—effectively guilting them for experiencing guilt.
We tell moms that if they don t figure out how to ditch the guilt, their “misery” will affect their children; we urge them to shift their focus from feeling bad about themselves to “filling their own cups,” without them that filling your own cup is impossible when you can’t find affordable childcare, or hand off the mental load of parenting, or even scroll social media without a parenting expert (or “expert”) making you wonder if every interaction you’ve ever had with your child will inflict lifelong trauma.
“Mom guilt is the byproduct of what society has illustrated for moms, this unattainable role. We now have more access to information than we ever have. We have curated feeds on social media, we have the input of people everywhere—whether it’s grandparents [or] people at the grocery store—telling us how to navigate this role perfectly,” says Ashurina Ream, PsyD, the licensed clinical psychologist behind Psyched Mommy. “Now, not only are they feeling like they’re not measuring up, but they’re feeling bad about feeling bad. It’s a really invalidating experience. Anytime we tell people to avoid their emotional experience, we are invalidating them. We are telling them that what they’re feeling is untrue. I get so many moms that come to me and say, ‘What’s wrong with me? Am I the only one who feels this way?’ And no, you are not. You are being gaslit by society.”
The solution to all this is, of course, too complex and ambitious to identify individually…but maybe it all starts with a narrative shift. “Guilt comes from feeling like [we’re] failing. And we’re not failing, we just live in a country that makes us fail. We’re set up to fail,” says Saujani. “That’s the narrative change. It’s an awakening that we all have to fight for structural change.”
It’s easy to prescribe self-care to overwhelmed moms, but instead of manicures and massages, limiting exposure to those harmful messages that tell us we aren’t enough may be the best way we can care for ourselves. That can look like blocking, unfollowing, or muting social media accounts; it may also take the form of stepping away from mom groups, or shifting social conversations away from topics that lead mothers into the comparison game. It could even involve recalibrating the type of parenting information or advice we seek out in order to minimize those feelings of inadequacy.
It’s time to reframe mom guilt. It’s not a rite of passage that’s baked into the motherhood experience, it’s a lens through which we can view all the ways we’re being let down. Fixing mom guilt takes more than a shift in the way we talk about the topic. It takes a full dismantling of the systems and standards that feed it—but as we wait, as we fight, a mental reframe may be the first step.
“I would say give yourself grace,” says Saujani to mothers struggling with guilt. “It’s okay to feel like that. It’s natural because we live in a society that’s made you feel that way. And it’s not your fault.”