Without the Public Infrastructure Needed to Support Families, Moms Will Continue to Feel Like Failur
(a most disturbing, important read)
Without the Public Infrastructure Needed to Support Families, Moms Will Continue to Feel Like Failures
5/11/2023 by Reshma Saujani
Motherhood is hard—but it doesn’t have to be lonely. Yet moms’ mental health remains a public health epidemic.
(Ben Bloom / Getty Images)
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Though the World Health Organization ended the COVID emergency, moms’ mental health remains a public health epidemic. Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, has been sounding the alarm about increasing rates of loneliness and isolation—and health implications for all Americans. Social disconnection, the surgeon general warns, can be as bad for our bodies as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. In other words, loneliness is literally killing us. For many moms who once found community in their coworkers, isolation is the new norm. During COVID, millions of women were forced from their careers, largely to care for kids at home. In 2020, moms were three times more likely than dads to lose their jobs.
Now, women have returned to work at pre-pandemic rates—driving the recovery and earning more money—and yet, we’re still the ones picking up slack at home. It’s no wonder that, more than three years after the pandemic’s onset, women continue to be more burnt out than men. And the way we work—sending off emails while packing lunches, trying to focus on Zoom when a sick kid is in the next room—can be stressful and isolating, too. Let’s be clear: The options for remote and flexible work are critical for moms if we want to succeed (or even survive) in the modern workplace. But without companies orienting their culture around flexible work, and creating other opportunities for connection besides bros congregating around the office water coolers, working from home can give moms a lot of FOMO—not to mention, stunt our professional progress thanks to a stubborn “Zoom ceiling.”
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But openly talking about these topics is only the beginning. Researchers have found that without the public infrastructure needed to support families, moms will continue to feel like failures when, in fact, we’re just subject to systemic neglect. To address the loneliness epidemic in this country, we need better mental healthcare—and to get it, we need our healthcare system to actually work. We also need more providers to meet increasing demand and ensure accessible, affordable care for anyone who seeks it.
For parents in particular, we need the public and private sector to do their jobs—to support our well-being so we can support our families and ourselves. That means quality childcare for every family, so working moms don’t burn out from the ‘double shift’ of care and career. It means paid family leave, and men taking advantage of it—to improve their partner’s postpartum health and to minimize the motherhood penalty. It means laws that protect us from guns and violence, allowing us to sleep through the night knowing our families are safe—and laws that protect our reproductive rights, so we can choose whether or not we become mothers in the first place. As we celebrate moms, this week and always, we should make them a more supportive, less isolating society. That’s how we can all, finally, appreciate motherhood for the gift it should be.
https://msmagazine.com/2023/05/11/motherhood-mom-lonely-mental-health/