Motherhood in America, while a bonding experience in many ways, is a very different experience among women, especially when you look at motherhood through the lens of identities and intersections. Too often, we conflate motherhood into one type of experience (the white, able-bodied, straight, middle class, cis gender woman, who is also a salaried worker.)

Let’s create space to reflect on our social and personal identities and how they inform our parenthood. Let’s also create space for others to do the same. And we need to advocate for policies and practices that support every mother, not just what we’ve conflated- and mistaken- to be the “norm.”

Take it further and consider these questions:

1. What are your social identities and how have they influenced your parenting experience? Social identities include race, gender, class, age, sexual orientation, ability (physical, emotional, developmental), and nationality.
2. How might your experience and expectations related to parenthood differ from others given your experiences and identities?
3. When you think about “parenthood,” what image comes to mind? How might you expand that to include more perspectives from those with different identities than yours?
4. When you advocate for parents, are you considering needs of all parents across various identities and experiences?

Further reading:

Amy Westervelt’s Forget Having It All does an awesome job of walking through various identity group’s experiences with parenthood in America.