Asking your children what makes a perfect mother is not, I suspect, a good idea. It ranks in the bulging file of questions you don’t ask because you fear you won’t like the answer, along with “what’s the point of it all?” and “how many calories in a McFlurry?”
Instead, women constantly judge others and themselves on what makes for perfect mothering: aw, look at Angelina; ew, look at Britney; my, that career woman up the street never sees her kids; oh, who brought organic cupcakes to the school fête? Privately we are wondering, will I succeed (or fail) like my own mother? Amid all the babble and bellyaching the poor ignored child tries to be heard, “Mummy!” but is firmly shushed: “not now darling, we grown-ups are having an Important Debate.” It’s kind of a parody really.
Now, a new cause for alarm: a report from the think-tank Demos that says “tough love” breeds smart children. After tracking the fate of 9,000 families, the authors claim that children of parents who set limits did better in later life. This has set a nation of mothers into fretting over whether they are “too hard” or “too soft”.
Serious social scientists would dismiss this as a classic case of sloppy thinking — the report makes no distinction between cause and association. The children of responsible people tend to grow up responsible, and the children of ne’er-do-wells tend to fail. Study after study of adopted twins shows that this is largely because of genetics and very little to do with parenting style. That successful households tend to be ones where consistent rules are important is just one of many good things that are passed through the generations.
Jen Lexmond, author of the report, Building Character, said that Demos had only gone as far as establishing an association between a “tough love” style and successful children, rather than a direct link. “But we have made some educated guesses about what is going on” to explain the rest. Hmm. So in searching for perfect motherhood, maybe it is just as informative to ask your tot as a think-tank.
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Still, it was with some trepidation that I looked at the results of the new survey of 3,000 children aged between 6 and 15 on what makes for a perfect mother, especially when it was headlined with “she bakes cakes and plays for 90 minutes a day”. The Frankenstein’s monster mother these children assembled for themselves seemed a mix of Sylvia Plath and Martha Stewart — impossible ideals of domestic goddess and slave. And look what happened to those women.
But on closer inspection, actually the opposite was true. And this goes for every piece of serious research conducted into the views of children on their mothers: the common theme is that mothers are worrying about exactly the wrong things. They project their own anxiety and guilt, and fail to listen to their children’s real pride and complaints. And that makes contemporary mothers not very perfect at all: in fact, we are such bad mothers, we have no idea why we really are bad. It’s fun to come up with a new accusation against modern motherhood that the Daily Mail hasn’t thought of, but I digress.
In this latest study, carried out by pollsters for The Baby Website, children were given a list of 33 attributes of motherhood and asked to tick as many as they liked for a woman to achieve perfection.
Despite the frankly 1950s options they were presented with, the majority did not tick chores such as “washing up” and “cooking meals from scratch”. Neither were “ferrying me around in the car” or “always get up with you when you wake in the night” prerequisites. This possibly reflects the post-feminist roles of fathers, who now do much of that stuff, but also that children are less our surly employers than we sometimes make them out to be. The number one attribute of a perfect mother is “enjoys spending time with you”, which is, as we shall see, a recurrent theme.
Interestingly, the only option on the list that came anywhere close to the tough love of the Demos report was “sets a strict bedtime routine”, and most children hated this, rejecting it almost entirely. This is probably understandable — most children don’t exactly thrill to the “no, but you’ll thank me when you’re older/in the morning” line of argument. No one has ever made a child’s toy called “deferred gratification”. And that, some would say, is the difference between being a good parent and a universally liked parent, or the difference between parenting experts and those who are parented.
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But the real zinger came when these children were asked: should the perfect mother work? This is of course, a loaded question, the subject of endless debate. When the political editor of The Observer quit her job for her child last week, it made front-page news.
Largely because women do not do any mothering at work, we could expect the rational answer to be a firm “no”. Children have also been raised on a body of literature that celebrates the “angel in the house”, the Victorian ideal of selfless devotion, something like Marmee in Little Women and nothing like Mrs Banks, the preoccupied suffragette in Mary Poppins.
So I found it astonishing that nearly two- thirds of children said that the perfect mother should work (although 80 per cent of those thought it should be part time). This is the same proportion as found in a survey of 1,000 American children aged 8 to 17 in 1987: 59 per cent preferred a working mother to a stay-at-home one.
That finding, however, accords with a thorough 1999 piece of research on the subject, Ask The Children, by the American sociologist Ellen Galinsky. Working mothers and non-working mothers got exactly the same rating from their kids. When she asked parents “what one thing would kids most like to change about the way their mother’s work affects their family”, more than half of mothers predicted that their children would want more time with them.
In fact only 10 per cent wanted more time with their mothers. Instead they focused on other things. A third said that they wished their mothers were less stressed and tired. Many said they hated feeling rushed. Less than half gave their mother an “A” for establishing family routines and rituals. A third said that they worried about their mothers often or very often.
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Of course, a child’s need of its mother changes over time. A survey asking again about “perfect motherhood” was presented at the American Psychological Association in 1992. It separated children into two age groups, 8-9 and 14-15. The younger children put far more emphasis on the mother expressing her love through physical closeness — and appreciated her part in acting as authority figure and protector. By contrast, adolescents no longer wanted to spend their free time with their mother (“like, why?”) and their overriding need was for their mother to respect them, and to understand their different interests.
By the time they reached adulthood, offspring wanted their mother in more of a friendship role. The latter is a natural evolution of the former. The renowned British psychologist Donald Winnicott said that a “perfect” mother was bad for children. “The good-enough mother ... starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure.”
Children, especially as they get older, don’t necessarily want you there more. But they do want you to be less grumpy when you are around. They don’t mind if you work, but they do mind if your work makes you a sourpuss. They don’t like the rush and chaos of busy modern motherhood. They just, as the children in the original survey said, want you to do something quite simple: enjoy spending time with them. Now, was that so hard?