The Myth of the “Good Mother”

May 11
2 min read

As Mental Health Awareness Month unfolds — and in the wake of Mother’s Day — we’ve been reflecting on the emotional, cultural, and political weight carried by those asked to mother, nurture, hold, and absorb.

Too often, conversations about motherhood remain sentimental while avoiding the systems that shape it.

The figure of the “good mother” did not emerge naturally. It was constructed.

Shaped by capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and systems of extraction, the “good mother” became a stabilizing force within society: self-sacrificing, emotionally restrained, endlessly available, morally flawless. Her labor is expected. Her exhaustion is normalized. Her anger is pathologized. Her needs are treated as secondary — or suspicious altogether.

Motherhood as a lived, relational experience is one thing.

Motherhood as an institution is another.

The institution privatizes care and survival. It shifts collective responsibility onto individual bodies and families, asking mothers to compensate for social fragmentation, economic instability, emotional isolation, and systemic neglect. Love becomes measured through endurance. The more she absorbs without breaking, the more virtuous she is perceived to be.

Under the culture of “intensive mothering,” women are expected to be constantly attuned, emotionally available, productive, patient, nurturing, and resilient regardless of cost to themselves. Collapse is rarely permitted. Rest is often moralized. Boundaries become difficult to access without guilt.

And yet grief lives here too.

The grief of lost autonomy. The grief of identity shifts. The grief of isolation. The grief of economic sacrifice. The grief of unmet needs. The grief of not being mothered while mothering others.

Much of this grief remains socially unrecognized, what many clinicians and scholars refer to as disenfranchised grief. When there is no space to acknowledge loss, exhaustion, resentment, or ambivalence, those experiences do not simply disappear.

They reorganize the body.

We see this clinically and relationally:

nervous systems locked in vigilance,
chronic tension and hyper-responsibility,
depression masked as productivity,
burnout reframed as devotion,
autoimmune vulnerability,
emotional numbing,
difficulty accessing rest, pleasure, or self-trust.

The body often carries what culture refuses to witness.

At According To Sykes, we believe mental health cannot be separated from the systems and narratives shaping our lives. Healing requires more than symptom management; it asks us to examine the conditions people are being asked to survive within.

To question the myth of the “good mother” is not to diminish care, devotion, or love. It is to widen the conversation. It is to recognize that care without community becomes unsustainable. That self-sacrifice should not be the price of worthiness. That mothers — and all caregivers — deserve support, spaciousness, interdependence, and humanity.

As we continue Mental Health Awareness Month, we invite reflection around: