The Hidden Cost of Praising Maternal 'Strength'
"Mummy, what do you want for Mother's Day?" This question, asked by children worldwide, highlights a cultural tradition of celebrating mothers with cards, flowers, and gifts. However, beneath these gestures lies a troubling expectation: that mothers should endure systemic neglect without complaint, framed as virtuous sacrifice.
The Resilience Trap: When Praise Becomes Exploitation
While motherhood is celebrated, the constant demand for resilience from mothers is not a gift but an alibi for systemic negligence. Resilience—the ability to adapt to adversity—is valuable, but when society praises mothers for surviving hardships it created or failed to address, it becomes a trap and a form of exploitation.
This exploitation is evident in unpaid care work, which underpins economies yet remains invisible and uncompensated. By praising maternal resilience, society normalizes this imbalance, reframing suffering as love and endurance as choice.
Forced Resilience: A Case Study from Nigeria
In contexts where state and social support are limited, such as Nigeria, mothers often face forced resilience. A recent study in Lagos involving mothers of children with Autism and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) revealed that mothers were altering negative education trajectories through extreme measures.
They founded schools when the education system failed their children, set up therapy centers due to lack of professional support, re-educated themselves as special needs experts, and created peer support networks absent from official channels. While this brought benefits for children and society, it came at significant costs to the mothers.
The Profound Costs of Endurance
The costs of forced resilience include higher social and economic pressures, multifaceted psychological stress, and lower well-being. Mothers experienced burnout, self-doubt, career truncation, and "lost aspiration grief"—mourning careers and identities sidelined by caregiving.
In the study, most mothers left professional careers due to caregiving demands. One mother had a career advancement offer revoked after requesting support for her child's schooling. These experiences, often missing from leadership statistics, contribute to the motherhood penalty, where wages stagnate and career trajectories narrow after childbirth.
In Global South contexts like Nigeria, where adversity can be prolonged, women are especially vulnerable to exhaustion from repeated reliance on resilience due to gender-related factors like caregiving. This dynamic extends to single mothers and women caring for elderly relatives, with similar underlying logic.
A Call for Systemic Change Beyond Mother's Day
The paradox of resilience is that the better individuals endure, the easier it becomes for institutions to remain unchanged. Endurance is mistaken for adequacy, and survival is treated as success. Flowers and gifts do not address the structures that make relentless resilience necessary.
If Mother's Day is to have meaning beyond sentiment, it must prompt collective responsibility. Instead of platitudes, consider:
- Voting for policies that reduce the need for resilience and ensuring their implementation.
- Improving workplace provisions: paid parental leave, affordable childcare, flexible working arrangements, mental health therapy, insurance for child disabilities, and workplace re-integration for mothers.
- Listening to mothers without dismissing their distress as ingratitude or weakness.
- Dismantling cultural and patriarchal barriers that frame mothers as solely self-sacrificing.
- Committing to collective action across gender, institutions, and society.
Mothers do not need more praise for their endurance; they need systems, structures, and allies to make that forced endurance unnecessary. True support does not romanticize suffering—it works to end it.
