These are great points and I always wonder about them when it comes to parents because they almost ALL universally complain about and seem to dislike the excessive parenting standards/safetyism...and yet for such a universal complaint, can't seem to change it. Are they all that terrified to go first? Maybe it just hits a really primal fear, to worry about everyone thinking you're a bad parent? It sure seems to, for women in particular. Though I notice that most of the lawyers I work with who are moms just don't worry about this at all, and don't care. Probably bc they're too busy to worry about what some other mom down the street who does not actually have any ability to impact their life thinks. And then with lots of things, as you've found out, it turns out way more people either don't care, or secretly agree with you anyway...and will laud you and thank you for being the brave one who decided to poke the standard and find out.
To your point about parenting standards and safetyism---I wonder whether there are generational explanations of this, like 30-yr-olds with kids are afraid they'll get the cops called by busybody 50-yr-olds whose kids are grown, or some variation of that. Or it could be current parents we're afraid of, but just 1% of parents being willing to call CPS on you is enough to scare the rest of the 99% away from doing anything about it. It could also be that we're overestimating the risk of getting the cops called on you because we've all heard like one story about it. This would be ironic, because it's this kind of fear that made people afraid of stranger kidnapping in the first place.
My take after um, running the experiments: in certain circles, the ones that are very concerned about appearances even if they complain about them endlessly … if you go first with not doing the things it’s not particularly welcome. It’s breaking code.
If “we all wear pink on Tuesdays” is a thing, however oppressive and annoying that is, the person who just turns up in black because they can and because it’s easier will not be viewed with warmth.
So for me it’s less safetyism and more that there’s not much good in letting your kids roam free if no other kids are out and about. It’s a collective action problem. If everyone let their kids hang out at the local park great, if it’s just your kid it’s boring and less safe. I’m pretty lax with my older son, but he still has to set up hang outs or otherwise he’s just riding around the neighborhood alone.
There's at least two things going on here. First, the mom who's quoted is mistaken. These are not societal expectations. They are class and status anxiety coming out sideways. The mom doesn't need to do these things because society expects them from every mom, but she does have to do them if she wants to retain middle or higher class status in the eyes of her peers. Secondly, and more obviously, society has been fragmented into insignificance. In the past, society would be neighbors on the block or in the building, plus church and other social groups, plus all the people you might meet while going downtown or to the mall and shopping in a series of stores. But with everyone on devices 24/7, not doing group social activities, and shopping less and in a smaller number of locations, it's almost weird to say you feel such social pressure. But if anyone does it is moms, who are most likely to manage things like kids soccer games and play dates, where the old social world of gossip and judgement has not gone away.
The status point is a really interesting one, I hadn't thought about that. As for whether it's *ever* useful to talk about "society" now (or even in the past)...I really don't know. Candidly I'd be interested to read some essays or theory about it or hear it debated. I haven't worked it through myself entirely!
I'm brewing up an essay on this very topic this weekend, which bc of you I have NOT dashed off into a Note, so hopefully I find the focus to actually draft it out. 😊 But IMO status anxiety and striving is often nowadays essentially a cognitive mistake. In the same way that historically humans were always on the brink of starvation and therefore learned to be obsessed with food and gorge whenever it's available, and it's now a problem that just leads to obesity in an age of abundant food, status consciousness and anxiety that may have been appropriate in a dangerous world where ostracization from your tribe meant death is just totally maladaptive in a modern world of billions of people and no one's going to die just bc someone else disapproves of them...mostly it's just unnecessary misery making and a total misallocation of energy to invest much worrying about status, in today's environment. I agree with your commenter that this unfortunate cognitive tic seems to arise in particular with mom groups, where it seems that something about the natural vigilance and worry about your own kid and their future prospects really pours fuel on these anxieties and triggers the old primal terror of losing status. Even though in today's world it really shouldn't be terrifying and probably won't even much effect your life.
By the way, today I took my own advice by posting a follow up essay and frontloading it with the question of whether this is gendered, something Im extremely interested in but would have been wayyyy too gutless to write about online. I just posted it and I still have butterflies about it, which I'm studiously ignoring. So we'll see if you're correct that I can survive the experience of "someone being mad at me on the internet" or whether I die alone in a cave
I don’t think this is quite accurate. I was homeschooled K-12 by religious parents. My family was socially isolated in some ways after my brother died of cancer because many of these same religious peers fervently believed in faith healing and the prosperity gospel and thought this was a sign that God had “cursed” us. Meanwhile, “mainstream” people were weirded out by our large family (and made nasty comments to that end), our habit of wearing skirts/dresses, and the fact that I had a high school job (I can’t count the number of adults who threatened to call CPS on me, a 16 year old working in a bakery at 6am before I started my schoolwork).
I struggled to make friends in college and to this day primarily remain friends with my childhood acquaintances. Women tend to police each other through social ostracization and because I did not dress right, wear the right makeup (or enough makeup), talked too enthusiastically about topics other than beauty, fashion, and celebrities, I was left on the margins. I got my period late and was bullied by the girls in my church youth group for it - they all developed at the age of 8 or 9, which is actually a sign of very poor health but what did I know? All I knew was that I was weird, lol.
It’s horrible being the “weird” kid and not having the ability to do anything about it. I married a “normie” and while we are doing a handful of counterculture things (Catholic school, attend church, no iPads) with kids, I let my husband decide what’s “normal and OK.” So far, so good.
I'm very sorry to hear about your experiences with ostracization and bullying, nobody deserves that. And I definitely don't deny that that exists.
I don't think that these facts necessarily invalidate my points here, though they nuance them. If you live way out on the margins of social norms, you're no doubt going to feel more social repercussions of that, because they do exist. But I think your experience is a pretty extreme example---much more extreme than something like "society expects me to be a perfect mother AND a career woman." I wonder whether it might be the exception that proves the rule that in most cases, people aren't that worried about your choices---at least not enough that you should really deeply take account of what they think as you structure your life.
Maybe another way to say this is that, in your very exceptional upbringing, you've poked the social expectation and found that there was something there in that case. In some cases, this will true; in many, it won't.
One last thought is that I think that children and young people often face much more acute social pressure than adults---children, in their immaturity, can be very cruel, and teen friend groups and social scenes are notoriously difficult to navigate. But I do wonder whether "what would Becky think??" is something that adults can and should mostly grow out of when they become their own people with their own lives.
I agree that “society expects” is an amalgamation of various judgements that everyone observes in their life. How much you care in general depends on your own personality, and probably varies depending on what's being discussed.
When it does bother you, it's difficult to stop caring what others think. Some people are very susceptible to social pressure and judgment, and such people probably bemoan what “society expects” on a regular basis. Telling them to stop caring is like telling them to stop liking their favourite ice cream flavour.
Yeah, a lot of this seems very dispositional. And I do think it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, in the sense that you tend to find what you're looking for. All of this makes me wonder if what you think you see in "society" is more a reflection of yourself than society in many cases.
I think generally we're well attuned to social pressures, because historically being oblivious to them meant death. That said, in the modern West you can get away with a lot if you're willing to put up with some stick. But it takes a certain sort to push that.
Thanks for the shoutout. It is always amazing to see Americans use this “manager in their head” as I like to call it to sort of externalize their situation. Neither my wife nor I “do both”. I think we’d probably just be worse versions of ourselves with a bit more money.
I do think there’s sort of a collective gravity around this stuff. Like almost everyone I know does the dual income thing. By % of parents it’s like 70% of parents in the us or something like that.
This is where reading weirdos like us can be a relief haha
Thanks to you for being a thought leader and example about this!
When you say "collective gravity," you mean the implicit pressure of the fact that most people around you are doing something? If so...man, that is so interesting, and SO difficult for me relate to caring about. I think you're getting one thing really right about me here, which is I'm very weird in this regard---it is really hard for me to muster much personal interest in whatever everyone else is doing. It seems like that would be a really hard thing worry about all the time.
Ahh that makes sense, and it would track with my experience. I've always valued models who do weird or unique things and thus always valued that mindset in myself, so I probably go out of my way to imagine unusual things to do. But that's itself a strange setting to come programmed with, and without it, it would be hard to see options that aren't modeled. It's hard for me, even with those natural settings.
yeah i think growing up in the middle of nowhere and sort of being tracked into successful career path, i just didnt question these things.
around 26-27 though with podcasts, i started following almost exclusively people with weird paths, but even then i knew no one doing weird paths (east coast reality), so it took me 3-4 more years to notice i wanted that
Just hopping in (hi friends!!) to +1 to Paul’s point. It’s hard to imagine doing it a different way without hearing/knowing about others who have. Without that, we’re just left with that nagging/gnawing feeling that something’s off but we’re not sure what the way out is.
I’m mega early on this journey, but it’s been interesting for me to hear from my (teeny) audience that what they’re valuing most is hearing my reflections on shifting from default path to trying things a different way and hearing other similar people’s stories so they can start to imagine what “different” might look like for them.
I wonder if it's actually the flip side that's more (unconsciously) unbearable and that's why we do it.
If you believe "society expects" XYZ and that everyone is judging you, that's a good shield against being psychically alone, unnoticed, disconnected and irrelevant. "Nobody cares" is usually said like a cry of empowerment, but change the tone and it's a quiet personal tragedy.
Sorry, one more thing: I fully respect all the points you made here even if I don't agree with them, EXCEPT that second footnote about full-time parenting. Again, this is an area where the mom experience is hugely different. A mother who is working full-time in a two-job household is still almost always the "default parent"-- the one who has to arrange childcare, be on call when the kids get sick, rearrange her schedule for pickups and dropoffs and appointments. Call it the wage gap or the biological bond or **societal expectation** but whatever the reason, moms do not get to clock out from being moms-- even mentally-- when they're on the clock for a paycheck.
Completely agree that a full-time working mother in a two-job household is almost always the default parent; COMPLETELY agree that this is WAY more weight of responsibility than a working non-default parent.
I do still disagree that this path can fairly be described as "full-time" parenting. First of all, there's the pure definitional issue---we need a name for a parent whose only job is parenting, who doesn't work outside the home. If you want to use another name for that, then fair enough, but I don't really see what's wrong with "full-time parent."
Secondly, I also think saying this threatens to erase the efforts of people whose work is childcare, like nannies and daycare workers (and parents who don't work outside the home of course). I'll admit that I have skin in the game here, because as you may know, I'm a full-time dad, and I think my wife would agree that I do "more parenting," even just in terms of hours per day, than she would be doing if we were both still working and she were the default parent.
Now, three big caveats:
1. Parents/mothers who are default parents + work full-time may very well have a net *harder*---maybe much harder---set of responsibilities than parents who don't work outside the home, especially depending on the nature of their job. But for the purposes of this discussion, that's not the comparison I'm trying to make, and I think there are several meaningful distinctions to made between the two paths.
2. If a parent works from home AND doesn't have childcare, somehow balancing both full loads at the same time (a feat which I admit sounds unfathomaby difficult, but which I know some people somehow find a way to do), then absolutely I'd apply the term to them as well.
3. A parent who works outside the home still likely puts in more hours of parenting per week than is required by a "full-time" job.
Maybe I'm talking myself around to your point, actually. I think the problem here really is that we just need better terms to distinguish between parenting who work full time inside the home, and default parents who have full time jobs outside the home. I assume that you would agree that those experiences are meaningfully different. So I'm curious if you have preferred terms to distinguish them.
Sorry it took me a while to get back to this! I wanted to write a longer and more thoughtful comment but honestly I agree with just about all you're saying here. I prefer the term "full-time caregiver," because it a) doesn't sideline the hard work of working-for-pay parents or imply, even unintentionally, that they aren't fully invested in their child's well-being, and b) encompasses others who spend their days meeting another person's needs and keeping them safe and well (those who work in childcare, care for the elderly, etc). You can also be a full-time caregiver AND a parent who works for pay (hi! It's me!) because the economy we live in is making it harder and harder for many if not most families to survive on a single income. I work in childcare but my kids accompany me to my outside-the-house job (gym daycare) and they're here when I babysit in my home as well. So though the phrase "stay-at-home mom" implies I'm not working in any other capacity, I would still claim the title "full-time caregiver."
I know a lot of this is just semantics, but as a mom and a writer who thinks a great deal about language and how we express our self-identity *and* the way we perceive others, I think it's important to be precise about what we want to convey. Ultimately I think nearly all parents want what's best for their children and want to be fully involved and invested, no matter what their career or schedule looks like, which is why I want the terms I use to reflect that.
This is great! I'm almost never not down for more precise semantics (lawyer holdover). And i was mentioning your points yesterday to my wife before you posted this comment and she actually also suggested "caregiver" as the better term, and I meant to mention it here because I like it! So, same wavelength.
Ok, I have some pretty obvious bias here 😅 but I'm gonna push back on a few points:
-*Motherhood* expectations are not the same as generalized parenting expectations. This is kind of a sad thing to have to say in 2025, but let's be real.
-I think you may have interpreted some of Lauren's points as "I am a working mom because society expects me to be" which is not what she was saying. Being a working mom is her starting point, one of necessity and not choice. All the other societal (or personal) expectations have to exist *around* that-- i.e. giving her kids an unscheduled, relaxed summer.
I think you make some great points about poking expectations here! But I'm not sure the questions you're asking are as open-ended and nuanced as they appear.
I should also note I haven't read your follow-up piece yet because I was trying to go through my inbox chronologically 😂 so this whole comment may be rendered moot!
Also, I want to be clear that I enjoyed the piece, and that it wasnt my intention to jump on Lauren's statement too specifically---I just saw it as a well-cued-up example of a sentiment I hear expressed very very often and which I thought was worth addressing. I know that a LOT of people feel exactly the way that she says she does in that line, and it was a good springboard for me to share my thoughts about it more generally and invite discussion on it
1. In the follow-up I directly address the gender divide on this, because I got a lot of comments about that. I'm very interested to hear more about it (though nobody in the comments on the follow-up is really engaging with those ideas so far).
2. I think this is a fair point. But I don't think I so much meant that society expects her to work per se, so much as it expects her to do everything all the time. For instance, I think by and large, people/"society" understands that if you work full-time, you have less bandwidth to do things directly with your kids. I took her point to be that society gives you no slack for this re: structuring your kids' summer, which, as a member of society, I'm skeptical of.
3. I'm in agreement that kids are generally overscheduled---i thought that this was in large part because of perceived societal pressure to have our kids doing more all the time.
Or are you saying that the idea that kids are oversubscribed is actually a form of societal pressure/guilt to parents who work and thus have to keep their kids in camps etc. as childcare? If you can clarify I'd be better able to respond to that
Lastly, I think it's interesting that my questions might be "not as nuanced and open ended as they appear"...I definitely have a position on this and an argument to make, though I am also very interested in pushback and being proven wrong, which is why I'm inviting that and asking questions. I'm a "learn through the Socratic method" person in general, so the questions are often intended to challenge---but that doesn't make them not genuine questions!
I think by “society”, a lot of times we really just mean close family and friends. Or at least I do. The people whose opinions do actually matter, whether you like it or not.
Even in those cases, the reality is they’re probably thinking about you way less than you imagine.
But wanting the approval of your tribe, on some level, is probably natural.
I think you're exactly right! Both on the point that usually were referring to highly proximate sources of pressure, and you point that it's natural to want that approval. My question is: how useful/necessary is that want of approval? Could we be happier if we consciously tried to tone it down within ourselves?
This is a timely post as I’ve been having an internal dialogue of late about my decision to quit my job as a litigator in the civil rights space to focus on my writing. It came to a bit of a head in my head yesterday as I was drafting an essay on professional air guitar competitions and wondering whether writing about air guitar is truly meeting the moment. What would my friends think, let alone my former colleagues? But as you point out, none of them are wasting their time worrying about what I’m doing. The doubt is all internal. So I’m traveling back to the world of air guitar today with a little less baggage in tow. Thanks. And rock on!
These are great points and I always wonder about them when it comes to parents because they almost ALL universally complain about and seem to dislike the excessive parenting standards/safetyism...and yet for such a universal complaint, can't seem to change it. Are they all that terrified to go first? Maybe it just hits a really primal fear, to worry about everyone thinking you're a bad parent? It sure seems to, for women in particular. Though I notice that most of the lawyers I work with who are moms just don't worry about this at all, and don't care. Probably bc they're too busy to worry about what some other mom down the street who does not actually have any ability to impact their life thinks. And then with lots of things, as you've found out, it turns out way more people either don't care, or secretly agree with you anyway...and will laud you and thank you for being the brave one who decided to poke the standard and find out.
To your point about parenting standards and safetyism---I wonder whether there are generational explanations of this, like 30-yr-olds with kids are afraid they'll get the cops called by busybody 50-yr-olds whose kids are grown, or some variation of that. Or it could be current parents we're afraid of, but just 1% of parents being willing to call CPS on you is enough to scare the rest of the 99% away from doing anything about it. It could also be that we're overestimating the risk of getting the cops called on you because we've all heard like one story about it. This would be ironic, because it's this kind of fear that made people afraid of stranger kidnapping in the first place.
My take after um, running the experiments: in certain circles, the ones that are very concerned about appearances even if they complain about them endlessly … if you go first with not doing the things it’s not particularly welcome. It’s breaking code.
If “we all wear pink on Tuesdays” is a thing, however oppressive and annoying that is, the person who just turns up in black because they can and because it’s easier will not be viewed with warmth.
So for me it’s less safetyism and more that there’s not much good in letting your kids roam free if no other kids are out and about. It’s a collective action problem. If everyone let their kids hang out at the local park great, if it’s just your kid it’s boring and less safe. I’m pretty lax with my older son, but he still has to set up hang outs or otherwise he’s just riding around the neighborhood alone.
There's at least two things going on here. First, the mom who's quoted is mistaken. These are not societal expectations. They are class and status anxiety coming out sideways. The mom doesn't need to do these things because society expects them from every mom, but she does have to do them if she wants to retain middle or higher class status in the eyes of her peers. Secondly, and more obviously, society has been fragmented into insignificance. In the past, society would be neighbors on the block or in the building, plus church and other social groups, plus all the people you might meet while going downtown or to the mall and shopping in a series of stores. But with everyone on devices 24/7, not doing group social activities, and shopping less and in a smaller number of locations, it's almost weird to say you feel such social pressure. But if anyone does it is moms, who are most likely to manage things like kids soccer games and play dates, where the old social world of gossip and judgement has not gone away.
The status point is a really interesting one, I hadn't thought about that. As for whether it's *ever* useful to talk about "society" now (or even in the past)...I really don't know. Candidly I'd be interested to read some essays or theory about it or hear it debated. I haven't worked it through myself entirely!
I'm brewing up an essay on this very topic this weekend, which bc of you I have NOT dashed off into a Note, so hopefully I find the focus to actually draft it out. 😊 But IMO status anxiety and striving is often nowadays essentially a cognitive mistake. In the same way that historically humans were always on the brink of starvation and therefore learned to be obsessed with food and gorge whenever it's available, and it's now a problem that just leads to obesity in an age of abundant food, status consciousness and anxiety that may have been appropriate in a dangerous world where ostracization from your tribe meant death is just totally maladaptive in a modern world of billions of people and no one's going to die just bc someone else disapproves of them...mostly it's just unnecessary misery making and a total misallocation of energy to invest much worrying about status, in today's environment. I agree with your commenter that this unfortunate cognitive tic seems to arise in particular with mom groups, where it seems that something about the natural vigilance and worry about your own kid and their future prospects really pours fuel on these anxieties and triggers the old primal terror of losing status. Even though in today's world it really shouldn't be terrifying and probably won't even much effect your life.
By the way, today I took my own advice by posting a follow up essay and frontloading it with the question of whether this is gendered, something Im extremely interested in but would have been wayyyy too gutless to write about online. I just posted it and I still have butterflies about it, which I'm studiously ignoring. So we'll see if you're correct that I can survive the experience of "someone being mad at me on the internet" or whether I die alone in a cave
Oh I *deeply* dig this. Cannot wait for the essay. And thanks for putting it in a post ♥️😂
I don’t think this is quite accurate. I was homeschooled K-12 by religious parents. My family was socially isolated in some ways after my brother died of cancer because many of these same religious peers fervently believed in faith healing and the prosperity gospel and thought this was a sign that God had “cursed” us. Meanwhile, “mainstream” people were weirded out by our large family (and made nasty comments to that end), our habit of wearing skirts/dresses, and the fact that I had a high school job (I can’t count the number of adults who threatened to call CPS on me, a 16 year old working in a bakery at 6am before I started my schoolwork).
I struggled to make friends in college and to this day primarily remain friends with my childhood acquaintances. Women tend to police each other through social ostracization and because I did not dress right, wear the right makeup (or enough makeup), talked too enthusiastically about topics other than beauty, fashion, and celebrities, I was left on the margins. I got my period late and was bullied by the girls in my church youth group for it - they all developed at the age of 8 or 9, which is actually a sign of very poor health but what did I know? All I knew was that I was weird, lol.
It’s horrible being the “weird” kid and not having the ability to do anything about it. I married a “normie” and while we are doing a handful of counterculture things (Catholic school, attend church, no iPads) with kids, I let my husband decide what’s “normal and OK.” So far, so good.
I'm very sorry to hear about your experiences with ostracization and bullying, nobody deserves that. And I definitely don't deny that that exists.
I don't think that these facts necessarily invalidate my points here, though they nuance them. If you live way out on the margins of social norms, you're no doubt going to feel more social repercussions of that, because they do exist. But I think your experience is a pretty extreme example---much more extreme than something like "society expects me to be a perfect mother AND a career woman." I wonder whether it might be the exception that proves the rule that in most cases, people aren't that worried about your choices---at least not enough that you should really deeply take account of what they think as you structure your life.
Maybe another way to say this is that, in your very exceptional upbringing, you've poked the social expectation and found that there was something there in that case. In some cases, this will true; in many, it won't.
One last thought is that I think that children and young people often face much more acute social pressure than adults---children, in their immaturity, can be very cruel, and teen friend groups and social scenes are notoriously difficult to navigate. But I do wonder whether "what would Becky think??" is something that adults can and should mostly grow out of when they become their own people with their own lives.
I agree that “society expects” is an amalgamation of various judgements that everyone observes in their life. How much you care in general depends on your own personality, and probably varies depending on what's being discussed.
When it does bother you, it's difficult to stop caring what others think. Some people are very susceptible to social pressure and judgment, and such people probably bemoan what “society expects” on a regular basis. Telling them to stop caring is like telling them to stop liking their favourite ice cream flavour.
Yeah, a lot of this seems very dispositional. And I do think it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, in the sense that you tend to find what you're looking for. All of this makes me wonder if what you think you see in "society" is more a reflection of yourself than society in many cases.
I think generally we're well attuned to social pressures, because historically being oblivious to them meant death. That said, in the modern West you can get away with a lot if you're willing to put up with some stick. But it takes a certain sort to push that.
Thanks for the shoutout. It is always amazing to see Americans use this “manager in their head” as I like to call it to sort of externalize their situation. Neither my wife nor I “do both”. I think we’d probably just be worse versions of ourselves with a bit more money.
I do think there’s sort of a collective gravity around this stuff. Like almost everyone I know does the dual income thing. By % of parents it’s like 70% of parents in the us or something like that.
This is where reading weirdos like us can be a relief haha
Thanks to you for being a thought leader and example about this!
When you say "collective gravity," you mean the implicit pressure of the fact that most people around you are doing something? If so...man, that is so interesting, and SO difficult for me relate to caring about. I think you're getting one thing really right about me here, which is I'm very weird in this regard---it is really hard for me to muster much personal interest in whatever everyone else is doing. It seems like that would be a really hard thing worry about all the time.
I think I’m somewhat the same
I’m saying something simpler. That if you don’t see a different model around you, you default to not even considering it as a variable.
The complaint itself is the tell you feel trapped
Ahh that makes sense, and it would track with my experience. I've always valued models who do weird or unique things and thus always valued that mindset in myself, so I probably go out of my way to imagine unusual things to do. But that's itself a strange setting to come programmed with, and without it, it would be hard to see options that aren't modeled. It's hard for me, even with those natural settings.
yeah i think growing up in the middle of nowhere and sort of being tracked into successful career path, i just didnt question these things.
around 26-27 though with podcasts, i started following almost exclusively people with weird paths, but even then i knew no one doing weird paths (east coast reality), so it took me 3-4 more years to notice i wanted that
Just hopping in (hi friends!!) to +1 to Paul’s point. It’s hard to imagine doing it a different way without hearing/knowing about others who have. Without that, we’re just left with that nagging/gnawing feeling that something’s off but we’re not sure what the way out is.
I’m mega early on this journey, but it’s been interesting for me to hear from my (teeny) audience that what they’re valuing most is hearing my reflections on shifting from default path to trying things a different way and hearing other similar people’s stories so they can start to imagine what “different” might look like for them.
I wonder if it's actually the flip side that's more (unconsciously) unbearable and that's why we do it.
If you believe "society expects" XYZ and that everyone is judging you, that's a good shield against being psychically alone, unnoticed, disconnected and irrelevant. "Nobody cares" is usually said like a cry of empowerment, but change the tone and it's a quiet personal tragedy.
Sorry, one more thing: I fully respect all the points you made here even if I don't agree with them, EXCEPT that second footnote about full-time parenting. Again, this is an area where the mom experience is hugely different. A mother who is working full-time in a two-job household is still almost always the "default parent"-- the one who has to arrange childcare, be on call when the kids get sick, rearrange her schedule for pickups and dropoffs and appointments. Call it the wage gap or the biological bond or **societal expectation** but whatever the reason, moms do not get to clock out from being moms-- even mentally-- when they're on the clock for a paycheck.
Completely agree that a full-time working mother in a two-job household is almost always the default parent; COMPLETELY agree that this is WAY more weight of responsibility than a working non-default parent.
I do still disagree that this path can fairly be described as "full-time" parenting. First of all, there's the pure definitional issue---we need a name for a parent whose only job is parenting, who doesn't work outside the home. If you want to use another name for that, then fair enough, but I don't really see what's wrong with "full-time parent."
Secondly, I also think saying this threatens to erase the efforts of people whose work is childcare, like nannies and daycare workers (and parents who don't work outside the home of course). I'll admit that I have skin in the game here, because as you may know, I'm a full-time dad, and I think my wife would agree that I do "more parenting," even just in terms of hours per day, than she would be doing if we were both still working and she were the default parent.
Now, three big caveats:
1. Parents/mothers who are default parents + work full-time may very well have a net *harder*---maybe much harder---set of responsibilities than parents who don't work outside the home, especially depending on the nature of their job. But for the purposes of this discussion, that's not the comparison I'm trying to make, and I think there are several meaningful distinctions to made between the two paths.
2. If a parent works from home AND doesn't have childcare, somehow balancing both full loads at the same time (a feat which I admit sounds unfathomaby difficult, but which I know some people somehow find a way to do), then absolutely I'd apply the term to them as well.
3. A parent who works outside the home still likely puts in more hours of parenting per week than is required by a "full-time" job.
Maybe I'm talking myself around to your point, actually. I think the problem here really is that we just need better terms to distinguish between parenting who work full time inside the home, and default parents who have full time jobs outside the home. I assume that you would agree that those experiences are meaningfully different. So I'm curious if you have preferred terms to distinguish them.
Sorry it took me a while to get back to this! I wanted to write a longer and more thoughtful comment but honestly I agree with just about all you're saying here. I prefer the term "full-time caregiver," because it a) doesn't sideline the hard work of working-for-pay parents or imply, even unintentionally, that they aren't fully invested in their child's well-being, and b) encompasses others who spend their days meeting another person's needs and keeping them safe and well (those who work in childcare, care for the elderly, etc). You can also be a full-time caregiver AND a parent who works for pay (hi! It's me!) because the economy we live in is making it harder and harder for many if not most families to survive on a single income. I work in childcare but my kids accompany me to my outside-the-house job (gym daycare) and they're here when I babysit in my home as well. So though the phrase "stay-at-home mom" implies I'm not working in any other capacity, I would still claim the title "full-time caregiver."
I know a lot of this is just semantics, but as a mom and a writer who thinks a great deal about language and how we express our self-identity *and* the way we perceive others, I think it's important to be precise about what we want to convey. Ultimately I think nearly all parents want what's best for their children and want to be fully involved and invested, no matter what their career or schedule looks like, which is why I want the terms I use to reflect that.
This is great! I'm almost never not down for more precise semantics (lawyer holdover). And i was mentioning your points yesterday to my wife before you posted this comment and she actually also suggested "caregiver" as the better term, and I meant to mention it here because I like it! So, same wavelength.
Ok, I have some pretty obvious bias here 😅 but I'm gonna push back on a few points:
-*Motherhood* expectations are not the same as generalized parenting expectations. This is kind of a sad thing to have to say in 2025, but let's be real.
-I think you may have interpreted some of Lauren's points as "I am a working mom because society expects me to be" which is not what she was saying. Being a working mom is her starting point, one of necessity and not choice. All the other societal (or personal) expectations have to exist *around* that-- i.e. giving her kids an unscheduled, relaxed summer.
-Social groups and peer interactions aside, the idea that kids today are overscheduled to the point of anxiety is a pretty popular one. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2025/06/27/millennial-parents-90s-kid-summer/84334773007/
I think you make some great points about poking expectations here! But I'm not sure the questions you're asking are as open-ended and nuanced as they appear.
I should also note I haven't read your follow-up piece yet because I was trying to go through my inbox chronologically 😂 so this whole comment may be rendered moot!
Also, I want to be clear that I enjoyed the piece, and that it wasnt my intention to jump on Lauren's statement too specifically---I just saw it as a well-cued-up example of a sentiment I hear expressed very very often and which I thought was worth addressing. I know that a LOT of people feel exactly the way that she says she does in that line, and it was a good springboard for me to share my thoughts about it more generally and invite discussion on it
Thanks for the comments!
1. In the follow-up I directly address the gender divide on this, because I got a lot of comments about that. I'm very interested to hear more about it (though nobody in the comments on the follow-up is really engaging with those ideas so far).
2. I think this is a fair point. But I don't think I so much meant that society expects her to work per se, so much as it expects her to do everything all the time. For instance, I think by and large, people/"society" understands that if you work full-time, you have less bandwidth to do things directly with your kids. I took her point to be that society gives you no slack for this re: structuring your kids' summer, which, as a member of society, I'm skeptical of.
3. I'm in agreement that kids are generally overscheduled---i thought that this was in large part because of perceived societal pressure to have our kids doing more all the time.
Or are you saying that the idea that kids are oversubscribed is actually a form of societal pressure/guilt to parents who work and thus have to keep their kids in camps etc. as childcare? If you can clarify I'd be better able to respond to that
Lastly, I think it's interesting that my questions might be "not as nuanced and open ended as they appear"...I definitely have a position on this and an argument to make, though I am also very interested in pushback and being proven wrong, which is why I'm inviting that and asking questions. I'm a "learn through the Socratic method" person in general, so the questions are often intended to challenge---but that doesn't make them not genuine questions!
For all his sins & crimes I'm glad I read William Burroughs at a good age to learn we have cops in our heads and we gotta kill 'em
Such an interesting topic.
I think by “society”, a lot of times we really just mean close family and friends. Or at least I do. The people whose opinions do actually matter, whether you like it or not.
Even in those cases, the reality is they’re probably thinking about you way less than you imagine.
But wanting the approval of your tribe, on some level, is probably natural.
I think you're exactly right! Both on the point that usually were referring to highly proximate sources of pressure, and you point that it's natural to want that approval. My question is: how useful/necessary is that want of approval? Could we be happier if we consciously tried to tone it down within ourselves?
I think so!
Maybe it’s wishful thinking too, but hopefully you find a tribe that (mostly) supports you either way, at least when it comes to the big stuff.
A little bit less caring what others think, a little bit more understanding the people that really matter will be there either way.
This is a timely post as I’ve been having an internal dialogue of late about my decision to quit my job as a litigator in the civil rights space to focus on my writing. It came to a bit of a head in my head yesterday as I was drafting an essay on professional air guitar competitions and wondering whether writing about air guitar is truly meeting the moment. What would my friends think, let alone my former colleagues? But as you point out, none of them are wasting their time worrying about what I’m doing. The doubt is all internal. So I’m traveling back to the world of air guitar today with a little less baggage in tow. Thanks. And rock on!
This is awesome. Congrats, one former lawyer and current air-guitarist to another!
Society expects regular posts from you (At least I do as one of your adoring fans)
Uh oh 😬😬😬