Mothering and Recovery Five
Mother as Label
When doing a Google Scholar search on glucocorticoid levels for mothers, there are no hits that don’t relate those maternal levels to a growing fetus or breast milk. 87,000 results and a pretty exhaustive search through all those pages yet nothing seems to turn up a study of the biological stress levels of mothers as the separate human entities they are from their children.
Then I found one:
“They found that the overall level of 11 biomarkers related to chronic stress, including stress related hormones and blood pressure, was 40% higher if women were working full-time while bringing up two children than it was among women working full-time with no children. Women working full time and bringing up one child had 18% higher level.”
And then I found another:
“The average stress score for employed mothers was 5.72 ± 4.7, and for stay-at-home mothers, it was 7.16 ± 4.3, which indicates a statistically significant difference in stress levels between the two groups (P = 0.04).”
Admittedly this was a study specific to the onset of the current pandemic and it’s not looking at biomarkers but rather questionnaire assessments. Nonetheless, other papers confirm that stay-at-home moms generally have higher stress scores than working moms going back more than a few decades.
There are of course many social sciences studies on stress for mothers.
“Those mothers who in early pregnancy had adequate social support, adaptive social strategies, and high self-esteem, and who had given birth vaginally, enjoyed breastfeeding, and whose spouse supported breastfeeding reported less stress 2 – 3 years later.”
I laughed reading that. I am surprised they had test subjects who managed to fulfill all those criteria to be able to arrive at those conclusions.
There are still a disproportionate number of social science studies that relate the mother’s stress to the health and mental status of the child: autism, allergies, preterm, hearing loss…In other words, maternal stress is still only worth studying when it relates to having to raise a child that is facing social, emotional and/or physical challenges. That’s not to say that studying those facets of motherhood is wrong, rather it remains only one piece of a mother’s experience.
The label “mother” isn’t an additive label for women, but rather a subtractive one. By contrast, “father” is an additive one for men. Men do not cease to exist as individual human beings with financial, health, social, emotional and cognitive needs distinct from their label, or role, as a father.
It means that women who have become mothers are no longer women with a health status distinct from its impact on the fetus and child. Even the social sciences offer up the near perfect financial, social, pregnancy and birth experiences (quote above) as merely reflecting “less stress” than those for whom any of those facets were less than perfect (that’s the majority by the way). Does the woman with the perfect pregnancy and birth experience, exceptional support and a great sense of self-worth have equivalent stress to the father/partner in that scenario? Does she have a higher level of stress than a partnered woman with no children? Or a single woman?
The two studies I uncovered above are hardly equivalent to 87,000 papers looking at the biomarkers of a mother’s stress purely for its relevance to a gestating fetus or growing child.
We have one data point confirming that a working woman with two children has significantly elevated stress biomarkers when compared to her female colleagues without children. We have another confirming that stress scores are higher for mothers staying at home with their children when compared to working mothers.
Stigma
“Across the countries where I conducted interviews, one desire remained constant among mothers. Women wanted to feel that they were able to combine paid employment and child-rearing in a way that seemed equitable and didn’t disadvantage them at home or at work.”
In countries where there are ample state supports for all mothers to have either tax-covered or tax-supported parental leave and childcare, there remains cultural stigma when children are raised by others (not mothers), thereby resulting in mothers dropping off full-time work in those countries. In countries, the US being the worst, where there are inadequate to no tax-covered or tax-supported parental leave and childcare, the stigma skews both ways: lacking a devotion to work and lacking a devotion to children.[5]
The reason that stay-at-home mothers have higher scores on stress questionnaires is because they experience increased social isolation, economic dependence/precarity and social stigma labelling a stay-at-home mother as an inferior status to that of a working parent. And although Bela Kellogg, quoted in part one of this series, was looking at tradwives, the following could just as easily be from stay-at-home mothers who would not define themselves as tradwives:
“As one tradwife puts it, “I’m not allowed to be tired or sore because my day doesn’t compare to his.” Another tradwife writes about feeling immobilized by burnout, “dreading when my baby wakes up (and) not wanting more kids.” Even then, she still proceeds to deny her suffering on the basis that it must be unequal to her husband’s: “I want to ask my husband to take on more of the mental load, but I feel so selfish and weak-minded when he works 40-60 hours a week… and all I do is just babysit 2 kids.”
Chandola T, Booker CL, Kumari M, Benzeval M. Are flexible work arrangements associated with lower levels of chronic stress-related biomarkers? A study of 6025 employees in the UK household longitudinal study. Sociology. 2019 Aug;53(4):779-99.
Nadri Z, Torabi F, Pirhadi M. A comparative analysis of stress, anxiety, and social well-being of working mothers and stay-at-home mothers during the covid pandemic. Journal of Education and Health Promotion. 2024 Apr 1;13(1):142.
Saisto T, Salmela-Aro K, Nurmi JE, HalmesmÄki E. Longitudinal study on the predictors of parental stress in mothers and fathers of toddlers. Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics & Gynecology. 2008 Jan 1;29(3):219-28.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/shouldstorm/201903/mothers-are-drowning-in-stress/
ibid.
https://www.michigandaily.com/arts/digital-culture/the-tradwife-trilogy-part-3-the-real-women-behind-the-tradwife-movement/
Image in synopsis: Flickr.com: Estelle & Ivy
