Alex Bollen (Verso (UK, out now; US, pending))
Relax, but be on constant alert. Enjoy your baby, but take them very seriously. Follow your instincts, but do exactly what the scientists and health professionals say. Amid such a deluge of “expert” advice, is it any wonder that the experience of modern parenting – motherhood, in particular – can often feel exhausting and impossible?
Thankfully, a handful of well-researched books are questioning this stress-generating situation and, in the case of Motherdom: Breaking free from bad science and good mother myths by Alex Bollen, revealing the role bad science has played in creating it.
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The term “intensive mothering” defines the expectations I didn’t realise I was up against until I read about it. Coined in the 1990s by sociologist Sharon Hays, author of The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, it describes a parenting ethos centred on the ideas that children need very large amounts of a mother’s energy and resources, and that mothers need to be sharply tuned in to their children’s cognitive, psychological and emotional needs.
Intensive mothering is child-centred, labour intensive, financially expensive and – notably – highly guided by experts. Think costly baby sensory classes and toys, play that is designed to “optimise” an infant’s brain development and worrying you aren’t providing the “right kind” of stimulation.
I first came across the concept in Lucy Jones’s important 2023 book Matrescence, in which she investigated what she called “the metamorphosis” of becoming a mother. That book was a welcome reality check, explaining why this transition can feel so difficult.
But what I didn’t fully appreciate until reading Bollen’s Motherdom is the extent to which science – especially neuroscience – has shaped modern expectations of parenting, and the degree to which it has been overextrapolated and misapplied.
Before providing support to new mothers as a postnatal practitioner with UK childbirth charity the NCT, Bollen was a director of market research company Ipsos MORI. She therefore brings an outsider’s perspective to academic research, marvelling at the small sample sizes used to draw conclusions when, in her former line of work, polling much larger cohorts was standard practice.
Like the economist and parenting author Emily Oster before her, Bollen brings a critical eye to the science used to justify child-rearing recommendations. But while Oster’s 2019 book Cribsheet is more of a manual, assessing the evidence in order to inform decisions on issues such as breastfeeding, sleep-training and discipline, Motherdom isn’t a guide to parenting. Instead, it is a dismantling of the myths, moral judgements and shaky science that have led to today’s prescriptive guidelines.
Its extensive survey of research, policy reports, parenting manuals, social criticism and more can become a chore to follow. But its critique of the undue emphasis placed on the need for a mother to shape her baby’s brain makes compelling reading. Bollen unpicks the scientific evidence that has been used to bolster claims, such as that a mother’s support can increase the growth of a baby’s hippocampus, or that stress can have toxic effects on a child’s brain.
She reveals how the evidence used to make assertions about baby brain development is often flawed – whether it is a result of small samples that are more likely to turn up weird results, contrived experiments in lab animals, the findings of which are implausibly extended to humans, or studying children who have experienced extreme neglect and then inferring more general lessons from this.
Bollen doesn’t hide her anger: “When I began to understand the flimsy scientific foundations of neuroscience narratives, I became incensed.” You can feel this as she traces the short path such research takes to becoming public policy.
Take , a UK government report published in 2021, which states that the infant brain “becomes hardwired by the baby’s earliest experiences, having a lifelong impact on their physical and emotional health”.
Bollen describes how similar narratives have been adopted by various charities and campaigns that frame a mother’s interactions with her baby as a crucial window for shaping that child’s future life. These often ignore the profound impact of poverty on children’s cognitive development, as well as decades of research that show brains are plastic and continue developing significantly into our early 20s.
If brain development needed such coaching, it is hard to imagine our species being as successful as it is
The end result, argues Bollen, is that parents “are expected to build their babies – and their brains”. This is evident in from the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, a collaboration of researchers in North America. It states that “the quality of a child’s early environment and the availability of appropriate experiences at the right stages of development are crucial in determining the strength or weaknesses of the brain’s architecture, which, in turn, determines how well he or she will be able to think and to regulate emotions”.
Bollen writes that such statements are now used to justify all sorts of prescriptions, especially in the way parents and carers interact with their children. One example is “serve and return”, the advice that appropriately responding to your children’s gestures, babbles and facial expressions plays an important role in shaping their brains. , “responsive, attentive relationships with a caring adult” not only shape brain development, but also “all future health and well-being”.
What I dislike about all this is that it turns many of parenting’s pleasures – such as cooing and smiling along with your baby – into critically important work which, if not performed adequately, puts that child’s future health and happiness in danger.
Many of the studies behind this kind of advice focus on so-called primary carers, rather than family life as a whole. The result is that mothers – who most often are the primary carer – now shoulder the daunting responsibility of “optimising” their children’s development.
The pressure is cranked up further by a “the-more, the-better” approach. “Right from birth, every time you talk, sing or play with your baby, you’re not just bonding, you’re building their brain,” , a UK children’s charity, has said.
“The implication,” writes Bollen, “is that every time you don’t do these things, your baby’s brain is not being built.”
Of course, there is a place for science in understanding child development and parenting. I was unsurprised that towards the end of Motherdom, Bollen looks to psychologist Alison Gopnik, at the University of California, Berkeley, and her excellent 2016 book The Gardener and the Carpenter.
What is so refreshing about Gopnik’s approach is that, rather than dissecting the parent-child relationship, she studies how babies and children really learn. Her conclusion is that they do so from everyone (not just their mothers) and are doing it all the time – through watching, listening and playing. Rather than attempt to shape infants into a particular type of person, Gopnik suggests that parents just need to provide a safe and stable environment in which they can develop.
Where does all this leave those of us wanting to take an evidence-based approach to raising our children? Unsatisfyingly, and in the absence of better studies, some of it has to come down to what feels right for you.
I will continue to “serve and return”, but I won’t feel guilty if my family’s main activity today is simply running errands instead of something special and child-focused. Pressure on mothers will remain for as long as governments continue to view intensive maternal input as an easy way to compensate for big problems like poverty and inequality.
But I really hope a better understanding of the science can reassure parents that we don’t need to meticulously shape our children’s brains to some perfect ideal. If brain development really did need such intensive coaching, it is hard to imagine that our species could have been as successful as it is.
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