This Is a Good Mother

I’m not interested in what’s most affirming for mothers. I’m interested in what protects children. In my experience, by the time they reach the clinic as young adults, the prognosis is often poor. They are condemned to years of healing work for wounds that could have been prevented with clearer expectations and standards of care. But our cultural narratives resist this kind of prevention, because it would mean placing limits on women's pursuit of self-fulfilment.

How Motherhood Was Reframed

This is clearly reflected in a 2022 meta-analysis reviewing two decades of research on motherhood. It identifies five categories of mothers that women typically fall into: the ever-present mother, the future-oriented mother, the working mother, the public mother, and the happy mother. Yet, these types are defined without mentioning children’s needs, only by how well women reconcile motherhood with external pressures and personal identity.

The language is drenched in progressive jargon. Motherhood is presented as a branding exercise, a lifestyle choice. The goal is clear: eliminate the concept of an ideal altogether. By casting mothers as overwhelmed victims of capitalism and gendered pressure, the academic framing absolves them of responsibility. It protects ideology, not children. Modern feminism insists that motherhood be redefined as whatever the woman chooses it to be. Mothers are told that if they ensure their own well-being, the children will be happy too.

The previous article was about pathological motherhood - specifically, how an over-focus on empathy has had a negative psychological impact on children and society. The response was the predictable knee-jerk reflex: How can you woman-blame like this!?

The Forbidden Question

Intrigued by the accusation, left wondering if there’s anything we can hold mothers accountable for, I put the question - what makes a good mother? - to a clinical psychologist. “Well,” she wrote clearly uncomfortable, “you can only really answer that in the context of whether there’s a good father present.” Would she have said the same if I’d asked what makes a good father? Unlikely.

We seem to have no problem defining father’s duties, and certainly no hesitation in calling him out when he fails. Just look at a recent New York Times article where a surgeon publicly berates himself for being a bad father. That’s not controversial. It’s applauded. But try holding a mother to any objective standard, and suddenly it’s an act of aggression.

She’d be met with contextualization: “You did your best,” “You were surviving.” We reflexively protect women from maternal accountability. Even as we glorify motherhood as “the hardest job in the world,” we refuse to set expectations or define what doing a bad job looks like?

We’ve catalogued every way a father can fail—missing football games, traveling too much, never saying "I love you" and clearly tied it to conduct disorders, risk-taking, and low empathy. Yet, we refuse to name the female equivalent needed to prevent psychiatric symptoms later in life. Doing so would mean admitting there is such a thing as optimal maternal care.

Doing so would clash with the current narrative, one that allows opposite choices to be celebrated simultaneously: a mother who works is praised for breaking glass ceilings, while a homemaker is praised for sacrificing too much. When mom guilt creeps in, any blog will tell her: "live your truth" and dismiss any criticism as misogynist woman-blaming.

But the guilt doesn’t go away. The lack of clear lines between maternal care and child development leaves mothers anxious, searching for substitutes. So, they fixate on irrelevant compensations - organic snacks and timetables that look more like hostage negotiations than childhood. But we should glorify motherhood. We used to hold them in high regard with serious respect for the weight of their role. Because when it’s done poorly, the fallout is devastating. We’re seeing this in the clinics.

The Patient Who Ate Her Feelings

I once had a 17-year-old female patient, we will call her Jenny. She presented with symptoms of bulimia nervosa: recurrent episodes of binge eating followed by purging along with signs of moderate depression. Persistent low mood and motivation, feelings of worthlessness, difficulty concentrating.

In session, I asked, “What usually leads up to a binge?” She responded, “It’s after school. I go straight to the basement. I’m alone, and I eat.” When I asked how she feels afterward, she said, “Disgusted. Like I’ve ruined everything. Then I panic and throw it up, I need to lose weight.”

Her mother would be described by any on-looker as caring and decent. She worked until 4 PM, shorter hours than the patient’s father - whom the patient was very attached to - but she came home just as exhausted. The mother often muttered complaints while doing household chores, voicing how overwhelmed and underappreciated she felt. The patient described trying to help as much as possible, but said it never seemed to make a difference. “It was never enough,” she told me. “She’d still be upset. Still tired. Still annoyed.”

I asked, “Have you told her about being frozen out by the girls at school?”She looked down. “No. She already seems overwhelmed. I don’t think she’d want to hear it.” “And what do they say about you spending all your time in the basement?” I’d ask. With a shrug, she tells me matter-of-factly “there isn’t anyone home to notice and nobody asked yet.”

There was no abuse, no shouting, no chaos. Nobody would call this woman a bad mother, who simply did as everyone else; preoccupied with juggling a busy life and a strained marriage. This left her with little emotional bandwidth for anything not urgent or disruptive. Yet my patient loved her mother deeply. She desperately wanted her affection and approval. And in the quiet absence of both, she turned her distress inward, spiralling between food, shame, and the pursuit of control.

Ignoring The Obvious

When we discuss fatherhood, we allow for gradients. Absent father. Uninvolved father. Emotionally distant father. Authoritarian father. But with mothers, the spectrum vanishes. She’s either “good enough” or rarely a “toxic mom,” an unhelpful label to drive change. This binary creates a moral vacuum, a space where subpar mothering hides in plain sight, immune to scrutiny.

In Jenny’s case, her mother wasn’t toxic, she was widely seen as a pillar of the community: competent and well-grounded. But Jenny’s struggles didn’t come from dysfunction. They came from something subtler, her mother’s emotional insensitivity and low responsiveness. That lack of presence, not cruelty, impaired Jenny’s ability to regulate emotions and left her with self-destructive coping mechanisms.

By the time she reached my office, all I could offer was the gold standard of care: an SSRI - typically fluoxetine - and cognitive behavioural therapy to address the self-directed disgust that followed eating, and to challenge the distortions driving the binge-purge cycle. Long-term studies show, however, that only half of patients reach full recovery over a ten-year period, and roughly 30% continue to suffer recurrent symptoms.

Naturally, researchers call for early intervention, at the same time as responsibility is diffused across the child’s closest adults, as if teachers, doctors, and family members all share equal opportunity to prevent the problem.

Can we even ask whether the rise in certain psychiatric disorders among teens and adults may originate exclusively from maternal factors?

Through decades of research, they established the emotional and relational consequences of poor maternal care. The Minnesota Longitudinal Study found that early maternal insensitivity correlates with anxiety, depression, and insecure attachment. Bowlby and Ainsworth showed that maternal responsiveness is key to secure attachment; its absence often leads to disorganized or anxious attachment styles, which are strongly associated with chronic anxiety, poor stress regulation, and unstable adult relationships. Otto Kernberg went further, linking emotionally erratic or cold mothering to the development of borderline personality structure.

Maternal unresponsiveness isn’t limited to neglect or addiction. It fails long before that, when quantity time (in contrast to the new and elusive term quality time) and attention is missing. But instead of setting clear expectations, we diffuse the standard into “care, guidance, and love”, vague enough to fit any choice. A million ways to mother, all equally valid. Only you can define it. Meanwhile, research remains clear: children don’t register love as an abstract concept that can be tossed over the phone between tasks. For them, attention is love. What they internalize is whether we want to be with them, whether our presence feels gladly given or resentfully rationed.

The Courage to Ask for More

One such objective standard could be this: a good mother is present for enough quantity time to enable emotional attunement and secure attachment. Of course, many families can’t survive on a single income; this isn’t to condemn working mothers. But can we at least admit it isn’t ideal? Just as we’re allowed to say of fathers who travel for work: necessary, maybe even admirable but far from optimal for the child, or for him.

And yet, the cultural conversation refuses to name maternal shortcomings unless they cross into outright cruelty. Modern feminism has turned motherhood into a lifestyle choice - something to be customized, defended, and validated, no matter the outcome. But children don’t grow up in a woman’s "truth", they grow up in her home.

Hannah Spier, MD

Psychiatrist

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