Maternal Instinct is Just Another Word for Anxiety
Negative cognitive biases and the consequences of believing in a maternal instinct
Trust your gut, mama.
This mantra is echoed in almost every parenting comment section I read. It’s the perfect answer to any and all parental worries, from “When should I stop using a pacifier?” to “Are allergies real?” It directly relates to the concept of maternal instinct, that sacred wisdom that is supposedly bestowed upon every person who becomes a mother. It’s comforting to be told that all you have to do to be a good parent is trust yourself and listen to your intuition. The answer was within you all along and, hey champ, you’re already right.
Unfortunately, it’s a lie. I’m here to tell you NOT to trust your gut, mama. In reality, your guts have shit for brains.
In my therapeutic work with new mothers, I often have to directly address clients’ rigid beliefs in a maternal instinct. People can adhere to it too strongly, following their “gut” in ways that are actively harmful (“It’s not safe for me to leave my baby alone with someone else”). Alternatively, some mothers worry that they lack this supposedly universal maternal instinct, making them feel like there is something wrong with them (“Moms are supposed to feel connected to their newborn, but I just don’t. It must mean I should never have been a mother”).
Of course, all of this is bullshit. Not every mother feels a special bond with their baby during pregnancy or immediately postpartum. Experiences like birth-related trauma, postpartum depression, and pregnancy-related anxiety all influence how bonded a mother feels to their baby after birth.
Other “mom superpowers” are also bogus. Moms aren’t better at identifying their baby’s cries compared to fathers, something I totally thought was scientifically true but indeed is not. And to the delight of my husband, moms don’t have the magical touch to detect a child’s fever.1 You win this round, thermometer!
While the concept of a maternal instinct is attractive, the idea that mothers are inherently better parents than non-mothers, or that there are these special, biologically-driven reasons why women are better caregivers than men, has a dark side. It puts people of all genders into these boxes and when we don't cleanly fit into them, we are severely punished. Black women suffer from racist notions that they lack a maternal instinct, resulting in things as horrific as government-sanctioned sterilization to harmful stereotypes like the “welfare queen” that just won’t die. Further, it lowers caregiving expectations for men so much that they barely exist, reinforcing the idea that it isn’t masculine to be nurturing.
When families don't fit into the heteronormative ideal that goes along with a maternal instinct, they are perceived as morally inferior to families that do. Single parents, queer parents, adoptive parents, polyamorous parents, multigenerational households, stay-at-home dads, and women who are child-free by choice are all family structures that are treated as “less than” because their existence threatens the patriarchal hierarchy that goes along with the existence of a maternal instinct.
Additionally, we know of plenty of women where trusting their “mama gut” means something nefarious, from refusing vaccines to calling the police on an innocent person of color to voting for a presidential candidate who is a threat to reproductive freedom and democracy itself.
Maternal instinct is not some “sacred wisdom.” Rather, it’s just another reflection of the biases, prejudices, and beliefs that already live inside of us. It’s not a compass - it’s a blindfold.
So what can we do about it?
A core component of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is understanding our thoughts and how they influence the way we feel and act. When we feel anxious or depressed, we tend to develop negative cognitive biases (also known as cognitive distortions), or unhelpful thinking styles that reflect and reinforce our negative feelings. By understanding how some thoughts may be inaccurate and unhelpful for our mental well-being, we can begin to implement strategies that allow us to see the world more clearly and, in turn, help us feel better.
For many moms, a belief in maternal instinct is societally-accepted fuel for such cognitive biases, just another way for mothers to punish themselves for not adhering to some strict, arbitrary idea of what being a '“good mother” means.
When we tell ourselves that good mothers always breastfeed, we are engaging in all-or-none thinking (thinking only in absolutes or extremes). When we tell ourselves that it’s our fault our child got sick, we are engaging in personalization (attributing personal responsibility for events outside of our control). You can read more and learn about other types of cognitive distortions here.
Perhaps the most common negative cognitive bias we engage in when we believe in a maternal instinct is emotional reasoning, or the assumption that if we feel something, it must be objectively true: I feel like a bad mom, so I must be one.
By understanding these cognitive biases, we can start identifying when we are engaging in these thinking styles and possibly change the we think about ourselves and the way we parent. For example, we could take a thought that makes us feel sad or anxious (e.g., “Other moms judge me for putting my child in daycare”), try to understand whether it’s a negative cognitive bias (e.g., “I’m engaging in mind reading”), and then come up with alternative thoughts that may just as likely be true and help us feel better (e.g., “I have no idea what other parents are thinking,” “Even if other parents judge me, it doesn’t mean I’m a bad mother,” “Putting my child in daycare actually makes me a better mother”).
Further, rather than relying on a nebulous concept like maternal instinct to guide our actions, we could try to identify our values to help us make decisions. We could also talk to a trusted friend or therapist to help us make sense of when we should listen to our “mama gut” or when our “intuition” is really just our anxiety in disguise, bullying us into feeling bad.
It’s nice to feel like you’ve gained some hallowed wisdom simply by being a mom; that you don’t need to be smart, strong, experienced, or even like parenthood on most days to have this unique power. That, despite everything, biology and evolution have your back and you just instinctively know what’s best for your child. You’ve got this, mama.
But don’t believe the lie. You don’t got this, mama. AND THAT’S OKAY.
I don’t want to live in a world where my self-worth as a person is determined by how well I conform to societal expectations of what being a “good mother” means. The brief feeling of moral superiority in how I parent is not worth the cost of my autonomy and agency, nor is it worth the subsequent denigration and oppression of others.
The benefits of believing in something like maternal instinct don’t outweigh the beautiful, messy, scary truth that we are the stewards of our own health and well-being. We get to decide what being a “good mother” means. And that’s something worth celebrating.
There are not one, but two separate meta-analyses examining whether caregivers can accurately detect a fever through “tactile assessment.” Across 11 unique studies analyzed in meta-analyses from 2008 and 2017, the researchers found that parents are actually pretty good at determining the absence of a fever from touch, with sensitivity between 87-89%. However, parents have about a 50-54% specificity rate of determining the presence of a fever. In other words, parents are wrong about half of the time when they think their kid has a fever by touch alone. This won’t stop me from touching my kids’ forehead when I think they’re sick, but now my husband has scientific support to make fun of me for it!