Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood
In this reflection on motherhood--part journalistic, part historical, and part memoir--Jessica Grose examines motherhood in the U.S. and how systemic supports have lagged behind societal expectations, leading to burnt-out, stressed, and increasingly desperate women trying to fulfill impossible roles. COVID made this timely, but Grose makes clear that this issue is not new. The pressure to be perfect--at home and at work--comes from all sides, including internally, and is reinforced by judgmental online parenting subcultures.
Grose spoke with many different women, and their backgrounds and stories differ, but the overall feeling of desperation was consistent. Whether you relate to some or all of Grose's assertions, support for parents is no longer an individual issue but a societal one, and her book offers insight into both the problems and potential solutions.
Did You Know?
- Grose is an opinion columnist on parenthood for the New York Times 1
- She read diaries, letters, and historian accounts of motherhood from the past couple hundred years--and found that the emotions of motherhood have not changed much1
- She is seeing more hope for better parental support--but mostly at the state level, not from the federal government.2
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Publisher’s Description
Close your eyes and picture the perfect mother. She is usually blonde and thin. Her roots are never showing and she installed that gleaming kitchen backsplash herself (watch her TikTok for DIY tips). She seamlessly melds work, wellness and home; and during the depths of the pandemic, she also ran remote school and woke up at 5 a.m. to meditate.
You may read this and think it’s bananas; you have probably internalized much of it.
Journalist Jessica Grose sure had. After she failed to meet every one of her own expectations for her first pregnancy, she devoted her career to revealing how morally bankrupt so many of these ideas and pressures are. Now, in Screaming on the Inside, Grose weaves together her personal journey with scientific, historical, and contemporary reporting to be the voice for American parents she wishes she’d had a decade ago.
The truth is that parenting cannot follow a recipe; there’s no foolproof set of rules that will result in a perfectly adjusted child. Every parent has different values, and we will have different ideas about how to pass those values along to our children. What successful parenting has in common, regardless of culture or community, is close observation of the kind of unique humans our children are. In thoughtful and revelatory chapters about pregnancy, identity, work, social media, and the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, Grose explains how we got to this moment, why the current state of expectations on mothers is wholly unsustainable, and how we can move towards something better.