Vox just published a very lengthy feature article titled “How millennials learned to dread motherhood.” Despite being very long it’s not terribly hard to summarize. The gist of the piece is that millennials, the author included, are afraid to become mothers, partly because they’ve been mainstreaming a host of feminist authors who catastrophize motherhood and partly because they’ve been reacting against traditional women who celebrate it. The author does her best to try to climb out of those two traps though I think her efforts are only partly successful. Just to give you a sense of where she’s coming from, here’s the starting point of the discussion:

I’m not alone in struggling with the prospect of motherhood. Birthrates in America have declined across racial and ethnic groups over the past 15 years, decreases driven not only by people having fewer children but also by those waiting to have any children at all, many deeply torn about the idea. The animated Fencesitter Reddit stirs daily with prospective parents stressed over what they really want. One of the most viral TikTok videos last year, with millions of views and some 800,000 likes, is known simply as “The List,” featuring hundreds of reasons to not have children. (Reasons included: urinary tract infections during and after pregnancy, back pain, nosebleeds, and #89, “could be the most miserable experience of your life.”)

Uncertainty is normal. Becoming a parent is a life-changing decision, after all. But this moment is unlike any women have faced before. Today, the question of whether to have kids generates anxiety far more intense than your garden-variety ambivalence. For too many, it inspires dread.

I’m sure the dread the author feels is real but as she admits in the next section of the piece, it didn’t arise from her own experiences. Primarily the dread of motherhood is something that has been fostered by a certain segment of our mostly progressive media. Mommy doomerism has been hot on the left for a while now.

In 2014, the heroine of Jenny Offil’s novel Department of Speculation drew praise for presenting “an unflinching” and “more honest” portrait of modern motherhood, while author Sheila Heti made waves in 2018 with her bestselling Motherhood, narrated by a 36-year-old woman who fixates on the boredom and unhappiness of moms around her. “I feel like a draft dodger from the army in which so many of my friends are serving,” Heti’s protagonist muses…

Or survey recent titles of mainstream nonfiction on the topic: Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood; Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood; Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America; All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership. (These are also almost always written by white, middle-class authors.) And then there are the anxiety-inducing news stories, like “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” (2012), “The Costs of Motherhood Are Rising, and Catching Women Off Guard” (2018), “Mothers All Over Are Losing It” (2021), and, of course, “These Mothers Were Exhausted, So They Met on a Field to Scream” (2022).

Should we stumble across moms on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok who do seem to be enjoying the experience of child-rearing, we’re taught to be very, very suspicious. Assume they’re “pitchwomen.” Assume they’re ridiculously wealthy. Assume, as Times columnist Jessica Grose put it, that they’re mostly peddling “pernicious expectations.”

But to her credit the author also recognizes that the doomerism doesn’t necessarily hold up when you ask real parents what they think of being a mom or dad. A Pew poll published in January of this year found the results were overwhelmingly positive. Respondents said parenting was rewarding most or all of the time (80%) and said it was enjoyable most or all of the time (82%). Forty-one percent of respondents said it was tiring most or all of the time though this varied substantially by the age of the children, with 57% of those who had children under 5 saying it was tiring while only 24% of those who had teenagers said the same.

In short, real parents don’t seem as down on parenting as the people who write trendy books and articles about it. And of course there is a political aspect to all of this. Progressives have partisan reasons for portraying pregnancy as a threat.

…in response to attacks on abortion rights, most progressive politicians, writers, and activists stress the real risks of pregnancy and the toll of parenting that no one should be forced to experience against their will, rather than any upsides to having children. This makes sense, but the result is that for many, the very act of becoming pregnant sounds harrowing, and giving birth less a choice than a potential punishment.

Even the progressives who know better, who know from firsthand experience that motherhood is much better than the left often makes it sound, have learned to keep quiet about it.

When I started asking women about their experiences as mothers, I was startled by the number who sheepishly admitted, and only after being pressed, that they had pretty equitable arrangements with their partners, and even loved being moms, but were unlikely to say any of that publicly. Doing so could seem insensitive to those whose experiences were not as positive, or those in more frustrating relationships. Some also worried that betraying too much enthusiasm for child-rearing could ossify essentialist tropes or detract from larger feminist goals.

But that conscientiousness — and occasional pessimism — is giving motherhood short shrift. “The pendulum on motherhood swung, and that was a necessary corrective to all these sugar-coated unrealistic fantasies, but we have gone too far,” Leslie Bennetts, a veteran journalist and author of 2007’s The Feminine Mistake, told me. In the book, Bennetts, now 74, observed that the mainstream media had long “harped endlessly on the downside” of juggling motherhood and work and rarely explored the rewards. This remains true 15 years later. “My entire friend group, we all raised great kids, but we’re not writing that because we don’t want to be insufferable,” she told me. “If we say anything about it, people hate you, and I understand that. There are cultural taboos against talking too much about it, and huge penalties for women bragging about anything.”

In other words, if joyful motherhood or equitable parenting is seen as a rare accomplishment these days, then, like many other small and large achievements, women learn to keep it to themselves.

Women learn to keep it to themselves. Which women? She’s clearly talking about progressive women like herself. This is one of the chief failures of progressivism as an entirely partisan guide to life. It is unwilling to admit it might have been wrong or, worse yet, that its enemies on the right might have been right about, well, anything. Better to keep quiet than to speak the truth about the joys of motherhood and risk giving aide and comfort to the enemy. Better to have people on your own side of the aisle confused and possibly missing out on one of the fundamental aspects of human life than to risk giving a point to the wrong team.

That’s surely not the lesson the author wanted anyone to take from her piece but I think it’s the most important one it illuminates. If you want to live a fulfilled life, start by tuning out the doomsaysers and tuning in the majority of actual parents, even if many of them aren’t on your political team. If the partisan left wants to shame you for enjoying motherhood and its rewards, consider that it’s much better to be personally happy and a bit politically adrift than the other way around.