One way to manage those less-than-happy feelings is to rewrite the stories you’re telling yourself about what it means to be a good mother.
This is something I spoke with author and registered psychologist Vanessa Lapointe about recently, while I was researching my CBC Radio parenting column. Here's what she had to say: "The idea of being happy really begins with going kind of deep down within ourselves and beginning to tell ourselves a narrative or a story about our our life about ourselves as mothers, about our children, about our partners, about the world that we live in….that we concoct a story that works for us rather than a story that works against us."
So acknowledge that things are hard and then work at rewriting the script in your head — the one that tries to tell you that you're not a good enough mom.
Of course, a mindset shift isn’t going to be enough to move the happiness dial in a major way for a mom who is feeling really crushed by the demands of work-life imbalance or who is feeling frustrated by the fact that she seems to be shouldering a disproportionate amount of the parenting load.
And, as it turns out, these two factors are really key ingredients in the recipe for maternal unhappiness. So if you’d prefer to whip up a batch of maternal happiness instead, it’s pretty clear what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to switch up the recipe a little.
Reduced work-life conflict = happier moms
Research conducted by the US-based Council on Contemporary Families highlights the fact that parental happiness levels increase in the presence of policy that makes it less stressful and less costly for parents to juggle the competing demands of work and family.
When things aren't working well on that front, mothers in particular tend to experience a lot of guilt. A 2017 study published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies found, for example, that mothers experience significantly higher levels of "work-interfering-with-family guilt" than fathers do.
The good news is that access to quality affordable childcare is a complete game changer for moms, allowing parents to juggle the competing demands of work and family more easily. It helps to minimize work-life conflict, encourages greater equity in couple relationships, and eliminates the so-called motherhood tax (the fact that mothers are penalized in the workplace in terms of both income and opportunity because they still tend to be the ones in their families who take the lead when it comes to caring for children).
So better family policy that actually reflects the realities of what's happening in Canadian families in 2019 is definitely a key ingredient in the recipe for a happier mom. And it may explain why childcare is showing up on the wish lists of a lot of moms this Mother's Day. I actually spotted a hashtag on Twitter this week that declared #childcarenotchocolates. I don’t know about you, but I loved that so much….
A more realistic job description for the position of “mother” = happier moms
If you've always had a nagging suspicion that being a dad tends to be whole lot more fun than being a mom, well, it turns out that science is on your side. A 2016 study conducted at Cornell University concluded that mothers report "less happiness, more stress, and greater fatigue" during the time they spend with children than fathers do.
