Millennial Mom-Life Crisis
Why are millennial moms so burned out? A few charts show how at-home and workplace expectations have skyrocketed. (Plus, a breakdown of school board elections.)
Can millennials experience midlife crises already? My gut response is “no” but a quick search reveals that the oldest members of my generational cohort are 43 now. It feels like just yesterday that we were being cast as intractable babies whose workplace immaturity and avocado-toast habits would plunge society into eternal adolescence.
The New York Times has a new feature on Millennial Mother Midlife Crisis (MMMC). Young(ish) moms are feeling the squeeze, the Times writes, in ways particular to millennials. The essay nods at the pressure to keep up with social media’s unattainably perfect vision of parenting, and the shortcomings of “self-care” regimens that can end up looking distressingly like more work.
I’m most interested, though, in the idea that millennial moms are just doing more: more work in the home, and more work in the paid labor force as expectations of productivity and efficiency rise in both spheres. Parents, particularly mothers, are spending more time with their children than in decades past. An oft-cited 2016 study found that by 2012, American mothers spent nearly twice as much time on childcare as they had in 1965.
You might have seen that data visualized in this viral 2017 Economist graphic.
More recent data (2022) from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that for mothers of children under six, the figures are even higher. And while fathers, on average, are doing more parenting work than in generations past, they’re still doing considerably less than mothers across the board.
Some elements of millennial motherhood might be easier than, say, boomer parenting, with domestic duties streamlined by technologies unimaginable to our ancestors. But feminist labor critics have long been skeptical of the net gains from a technologically assisted household, noting that, as new supposedly labor-saving devices were unveiled, standards of household maintenance simply increased.
These ever-mounting expectations parallel a similar increase in workplace productivity, which has far outstripped increases in worker pay. The Economic Policy Institute calculates the gap between worker productivity and pay to have radically diverged beginning in the 1980s, with productivity growing more than four times the rate of compensation as unions were dismantled and taxes on the wealthy were slashed.
Why are millennial moms feeling squeezed? We’re doing more than ever, and expected to support our mental health with meditative breathing exercises instead of material workplace protections and a functional social safety net.
Let me do some deep breathwork and calm down after looking at the charts that make me angry. Primary elections in several states this week meant a preview of the races that will shape education in those states. Some of those early indicators look good!
In Maryland’s solidly blue Montgomery County, far-right media personality Bethany Mandel has been running as a Democratic school board candidate. Mandel, who homeschools her children, is part of a push to censor books about LGBTQ+ issues, and has tweeted of Palestinians that “not nuking these fucking animals is the only restraint I expect and that’s only because the cloud would hurt Israelis.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, with 255 of 257 precincts reporting, Mandel had the fewest votes of the three candidates in her race. (She still managed to pick up approximately a quarter of the district’s votes.)
While Mandel loses, Tennessee has just elected its first openly LGBTQ+ school board member. Democrat Zach Young will take a seat on Nashville’s school board. Young, who campaigned on filling district staffing shortages, especially for students with special needs, will take office as Tennessee lawmakers pursue legislation that restricts how LGBTQ+ students and educators express themselves. The state is currently fighting a federal antidiscrimination law that would protect trans students’ ability to use their preferred pronouns.
In Pennsylvania on Monday, a school board voted 5-4 to scrap its current, controversial bathroom policy that prohibits students from using toilets that correspond with their genders. The Pennridge school district was considered a bellwether for national educational policy during the 2023 school board election season. The district is located in Bucks County, a battleground between groups like Moms for Liberty and their opponents on the left. Under a recent conservative school board majority, Pennridge promoted a creationist tutoring service, hired a conservative educational consultant popular with MfL leaders, and pursued a strict gag order on student speech. When five Pennridge school board seats went up for election last year, all five seats were won by candidates opposed to the district’s right-wing policies.
The new bathroom policy is a little convoluted. The high school will now have six pairs of bathrooms that can be used by cisgender or transgender students, as corresponds with their genders. The school will also have one pair of bathrooms that can only be used according to a student’s assigned sex at birth, and four pairs of single-occupancy toilets. Seems like it would just be easier to let people go to the bathroom that feels most appropriate for them?
Elsewhere in school board battles:
-A New Jersey bill would give 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in their local school board elections. New Jersey Twitter conservatives are already mad about it!
-A right-wing talk show shock jock was elected to a Texas school board on fearmongering campaign about “Leftists looking to indoctrinate our kids into the ‘progressive’ way of thinking.” But after her election, Courtney Gore pored over school literature and found it to instead teach students “how to be a good friend, a good human.” A ProPublica/Texas Tribune profile of Gore describes her relatively rare step away from right-wing polarization, even at the expense of her political career. Gore says she now believes she was swept up in a statewide campaign to discredit public schools and promote vouchers that would divert public education funds to private and religious institutions.
-Syracuse, New York’s school district sent a local newsroom a cease-and-desist letter, appearing to threaten legal action if reporters did not stop contacting school board members for comment on news stories. As someone who often contacts school board members for comment on news stories, I am very happy to see the CNY Central Newsroom publish a story that, in very polite legal terms, tells the district’s lawyers to get fucked.
Finally, I hope you take the time to read this New Yorker feature on the case of Lucy Letby, a British nurse convicted of killing babies in a neonatal intensive care unit. The New Yorker makes a persuasive case that Letby was railroaded by bad lawyers, a media circus, bunk medical evidence, and above all an undersupported medical system that dooms workers and patients to tragedy. Letby’s hospital ward was understaffed with inexperienced workers who made frequent, sometimes fatal missteps. Even with Letby in prison for life, those structural shortcomings appear fated to continue unless met with new funding and more staff.
“This is now our normal working pattern and it is not safe,” one senior pediatrician wrote. “Things are stretched thinner and thinner and are at breaking point. When things snap, the casualties will either be children’s lives or the mental and physical health of our staff.”
Hey, thanks for reading MomLeft! If you liked this newsletter, I’d love if you tossed me a subscription! Also, a heads-up that I’m headed into some vacation time with family. Expect updates to be a little more infrequent until early June when I’m back at it.