Perfect mom image impossible to attain

Women should not allow the media to define what the "perfect mom" is because they will suffer from guilt and low self-esteem trying to achieve an impossible goal, asserts Susan Douglas, a communications studies professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and co-author of The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women. In fact, women should not be pigeonholed by the "new momism," a trend in American culture that causes women to feel that only through the perfection of motherhood can they find true contentment.

"The perfect morn is not attainable," Douglas contends. "The first thing [women] should do is take the blinders off. This vision of motherhood is highly romanticized and yet its standards for success remain forever out of reach, no matter how hard women may try to have it all."

Douglas and co-author Meridith Michaels, a research associate in the philosophy department at Smith College, Northampton, Mass., analyzed the past 30 years of media images about mothers: the superficial achievements of the celebrity mom, staging of the "mommy wars" between working mothers and stay-at-home morns, and the onslaught of values-based marketing that raises mothering standards to impossible levels.

In concert with this message, the authors note, is a conservative backwater of talking heads propagating the myth of the modern mom. The assessment of motherhood has been shaped by out-of-date mores. It is not about whether women should have children or whether mothers should work or stay at home; it is about how no matter what they do or how hard they try, women never will achieve the promised nirvana of idealized mothering. "Whatever mothers are doing for their kids, it is never enough ... mothers believe they must keep doing more, more, and more, and never make a mistake," says Douglas, who also authored Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media.

The TV character June Cleaver of "Leave It to Beaver" fame is the classic example of the 1950s mother who stayed at home and served her family. Yet, the level of detail a woman is expected to monitor and to anticipate "has gone through the roof--and just at the time when most Americans have less leisure time than ever."

In the 1970s and early 1980s, in the wake of the women's movement and an economy that required two-income households, mothers--and, in some cases, fathers--challenged the 1950s "common sense" about motherhood. Parents wanted daycare canters and women's magazines said it was okay to let the housework slide. It was during the 1980s that the media mistakenly considered stay-at-home morns a national trend rather than individual experiences. Newspaper and magazines profiled celebrity morns--such as Kathie Lee Gifford, Jaclyn Smith, and Connie Selleca--with idealized and romanticized primers on how to be the perfect mother.

"They promoted levels of nonstop maternal joy, over-the-top consumerism, and ceaseless devotion to one's child--despite a career--that were both seductive and unrealistic, even for them," Douglas maintains.

By the 1990s, the myth of the perfect mother who does it all or must stay at home for the sake of the children returned with a vengeance. The government showed little sympathy for working mothers as it failed to offer funding for daycare and propagated how the modern mother should behave. Today, the perfect-mom images continue bombarding all forms of media and entertainment, including cartoons and movies. For example, "Rugrats," a TV animation show about babies, depicts a working mom often with a cell phone to her ear apparently more concerned about her career than her kids.

Ultimately, Douglas theorizes, these images affect a woman's self esteem because she may feel she is not a good parent. She may question what it takes to be a good mother, including deciding whether to buy the latest gadgets for her child.

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