Dear Mom: Do Less

What comes to mind when you think about Mother's Day?

- Priyanka Acharya

You probably think of brunch, a bouquet of flowers, and greeting card sentiments, all enveloped in an aura of springtime prettiness. Mother's Day traditionally celebrates moms at the surface level; we are sweet little women who are very content with the aforementioned gestures, some of us even waving away extra attention because we don't feel entitled to recognition just for doing our motherly duties. But behind every sweet exterior, the mind churns with what has been dubbed the mental load, or the burden of daily, nitty-gritty pain points and decisions that fall entirely to us. Even as we smile through brunch and say how lucky we feel for this day of indulgence, in the back of our mind we are making lists and mental notes as we prepare for the next day.

While this has been the case since the beginning of time, there is something very different about today's environment that is having a huge impact on mothers in particular. Social scientists conducted a survey of American families that concluded that “intensive parenting has swept the nation. Generally defined as a style of parenting that requires a great deal of time and money, intensive parenting can also be summarised by this quote from The Atlantic:

Supervised, enriching playtime. Frequent conversations about thoughts and feelings. Patient, well-reasoned explanations of household rules. And extracurriculars. Lots and lots of extracurriculars.” (Intensive Parenting is Now the Norm in America by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic, January 16, 2019)