We're launching a series called "All the Lonely People," diving deep into how loneliness shows up in our lives and how our culture shapes it. This week, why are moms so acutely lonely? Brittany hears from her listeners, and from the experts: Jessica Grose, New York Times opinion writer and author of the book Screaming on the Inside: the Unsustainability of American Motherhood, and parental burnout researcher at the Ohio State University, Kate Gawlik. They discuss what mom loneliness has to do with airplanes, lobotomies, and Tik Tok - and what we can do to help alleviate mom loneliness.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What does loneliness look like for moms?
I don't know how to build space to be a person beyond just being with my kids anymore. And I never saw that for me.
I am going to be honest, I have never felt lonelier. And being around other mothers, I can tell that we were all struggling in isolation and it sucks.
That was Ashley Ludwinski, Tayana Teal, Natalie Crowley, and Yasmeen Baroon. You'll hear more from them throughout the episode. But to break it all down, I'm joined by Jessica Groves, New York Times opinion writer and author of the book Screaming on the Inside, The Unsustainability of American Motherhood. So happy to be here.
Chapter 2: Why are moms feeling lonely in today's society?
And associate professor and parental burnout researcher at Ohio State University, Kate Golick.
Thank you so much for having us.
Kate and Jessica are experts, like their jobs are to talk to moms. And they're also both moms themselves. So they're here to tell me why moms are so lonely and what we can do to alleviate mom loneliness. To start, Kate, you have four kids and you told my producer Liam that you've experienced some of this mom loneliness firsthand. What did it look like for you?
Oh, yes, absolutely. It was probably the worst with my first. I had a daughter, and I was the first out of my family, out of my friends, you know, to have kids. And so nobody could really relate to me. And I think, you know, it's your first time around anyway, so you're kind of navigating that role change and that, you know, major life change.
And I will say that those first six months were so hard. I didn't have any mom friends. I didn't really know any of the resources yet that were available. And I remember one of my friends saying to me, you need to find some mommy friends. And I was like, I don't know how.
If you've never been a mom before, how would you even making friends is already can sometimes be tricky enough in adulthood. Like how would you even know to go about how to find mommy friends? Yeah.
Yeah. And so then we decided when my daughter was about one that we were going to move. And so I enlisted us in a music class in that community. And I remember thinking to myself, this is not about my daughter. It's about me. It's about me so I can find some friends. And actually, that did work.
And a lot of that loneliness went away because I had people to talk to that were experiencing the same things. And I will say that I feel like it was life-changing because... From doing everything on your own and, like, occasionally, like, calling my mom or, you know, something like that to having people to bounce things off of that were experiencing things in real time.
Like, it's different than having a spouse, right? It's that kind of connection is just different. So it was very life-changing to kind of build that support network there.
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Chapter 3: What role do societal expectations play in mom loneliness?
I think when you're getting the message that it is natural for you to just grow into this role, especially as a new mom, and you're not perfectly happy all the time, I think there's a lot of guilt and shame that goes along with that. And I think even if you do have close friends, I think that can be really hard to talk about. And I think it's really, really hard to ask for help.
So that's what I've heard as a reporter talking to parents for 10, 15 years on this beat. And so the barrier to asking for that help and support I think leads to more loneliness for some people.
And I think the other part of it and part of why making mom friends can be challenging for some people is, and I remember thinking this the first time I went to a mom group arranged around the birth month and year of my older daughter.
Oh, yeah. It's a very common thing that mom groups start. It's like, you know, you all have kids due February 2025. Then you'll, you know, be in a local mom's group together because, you know, you're gonna have kids around the same age.
Yeah, I remember looking around and thinking just because we all had babies the same month doesn't mean we had anything in common. And so it is not always the easiest to find parent friends who share your values, who you feel like you can be fully honest with without being judged.
While I've tried to make friends, like other mom friends, I don't have a whole lot in common with them outside of the fact that we have kids, which is difficult. And then people just don't have time, and so I don't have my people, per se.
Kate, I'd love to hear from you on this. Why do you think moms feel lonely even if they have a partner, even if they have friends?
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Chapter 4: How can moms build supportive friendships?
You know, even I have friends now where maybe they have a very certain thing they're dealing with. So they have a child with ADHD, for example. And I think it can be really hard for her to relate to other people when other people aren't dealing with those same challenges.
And I think that in itself, you know, having a child maybe with a special need or something like that also can contribute greatly to feeling that loneliness.
I have a son who can't talk, and that in itself makes everything else more isolating. Having a special needs kid, a lot of people don't understand, and loneliness is constant every single day, all the time.
You know, I think mothers also carry this weight of the household right on their shoulders. So they are the ones that attend to the physical, the emotional needs, you know, often not only of the children but of the spouses as well. And, you know, feeling that kind of weight can be very isolating and feel lonely sometimes.
Coming up, we get into the structural reasons moms can't catch a break.
There have been very well-publicized cases of parents who let their kids free-range more and the cops get called. Stick around.
I'm Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. At a time of sound bites and short attention spans, our show is all about the deep dive. We do long-form interviews with people behind the best in film, books, TV, music, and journalism. Here our guests open up about their process and their lives in ways you've never heard before. Listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHYY.
I want to zoom out for a second. What are some of the cultural reasons why moms feel so lonely?
I think one of the big reasons is that American culture can be quite unfriendly to parents. I want to say every two or three months, I see a viral post about babies on airplanes. Yes. And how they should be cordoned off or never leave the house or...
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Chapter 5: What challenges do moms face when trying to connect?
Like, just like, yeah, it's so wild to me, too, because I mean, I don't know, baby's got to go places. People act out on airplanes and they're grown. They fight with the people at the airline.
Exactly. And so I think that there is that attitude that is, you know, I think depending on where you go, it can feel quite pervasive. you know, we don't think about sort of the built environment necessarily as a reason for parents to feel lonely. But I think all the time about walkability and children being able to be independent in their communities and when that's able to happen.
If you spend all of your extra time as a mother driving your kids places, that's keeping you isolated more.
being a stay-at-home mom basically just being a chauffeur my son goes to school for half days four hours a day and then he goes to therapy and then you know I go and pick up my daughter every day is pretty lonely if I allow myself to think about it that way
I think I read a statistic somewhere that working mothers today spend more time with their children than stay-at-home moms did in like the 70s or something like that.
That is correct. The sociological term is intensive parenting. The derisive term is helicopter parenting. But I think that there's a cultural expectation that you never let your kids out of your sight ever.
And there have been very well-publicized cases of parents who let their kids free-range more, and the cops get called because you let your 10-year-old walk home from the park, which is something I did all the time. But I understand why, for lots of reasons, parents don't feel safe doing that for their kids anymore.
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Chapter 6: Why is asking for help difficult for moms?
And the more that you feel like, oh, I have to hover, I have to be on my kids for an ever longer period of time, I think that is tough.
We've been talking about mom loneliness, but dads are also pretty lonely. I mean, you know, 59%, as per the survey I mentioned earlier, I mean, that's nothing to sneeze at. Why do you think dad loneliness is comparatively lower than mom loneliness?
This just reminds me when I had just my first kid and I was mostly staying at home and my husband would go to work. And then if I was going to go do anything, he'd always be like, well, I have to babysit tonight. I'm like, you're not babysitting. It is your own child. Yeah. You know, so there's just like a different type of mentality when it comes to, you know, parenting.
And I think we're starting to see a shift with that as more dads stay home. But I do think that's kind of where these rates look different between moms and dads.
I don't think they feel as responsible for the emotional thermometer of the family. And I do think part of the reason that when mothers have negative feelings, they feel them so acutely is because they feel this additional sense of shame about the feeling. Because they're like, oh, I'm a mom now. I should be some other kid.
category of person who doesn't feel as bad as i used to feel yeah that's yeah i remember this woman i interviewed for my book her name is angela and she said i thought i was going to become the amazing angela like the best version of myself and like i'm still the same version of myself for good or bad sorry you made me make me reconsider some things i'm like oh
No, I think I'm the big change for me is I think I am a lot more patient. I have found reserves of patients that I did not know existed within me, but I didn't have a lobotomy. I just, you know, I'm still a version of the same person. And so you'll still struggle with whatever it was you struggled with before you had kids.
But I do feel like there is this extra layer of guilt and shame that a lot of people feel because they expect that they're not going to feel those bad feelings anymore. And that's not realistic.
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Chapter 7: How does having a special needs child impact feelings of loneliness?
You know, we talked about the cultural reasons for mom loneliness, but I wonder what part of mom loneliness is structural?
My body of work really is around parental burnout. And we did the study on loneliness where we found really a very high association between parental burnout and loneliness. So the lonelier the parent was, the higher the burnout was in the parent. And I like to think about, and I often reference this study. It was done by Isabel Rotham, and she looked at parents across 42 countries.
And Europe, United States have this what she calls like an individualistic society.
So it's this social framework where individuals are expected to really just take care of themselves and their immediate family versus many of the other societies are in this collectivism type of framework, which is really this tightly knit framework in society where individuals are integrated into these strong extended family cohesive groups.
Chapter 8: What structural issues contribute to mom loneliness?
And so burnout is decreased in a lot of these countries that have this more of this collectivism framework. And so this study only looked at burnout. But because burnout and loneliness are so closely linked, I would guess that loneliness is higher in these individualistic societies.
It's really difficult to be a mom when you feel like the society isn't set up to support mothers. Just even looking at like the schedule for schools, it's just impossible. And I can't help but see that like all the moms and all families in our society are just doing the impossible to get by.
You know, thinking about all this stuff, we've unpacked a lot today. And let me tell you, as somebody who is mom curious, I have learned a lot today in this conversation. But how do we fix it? What needs to change?
I mean, I think we have to look at things right at the individual level and then the larger societal level. And with the individual level, you know, really trying to help moms with connections. Connection is the antidote to loneliness, right? So I think... It's the first step, getting a mom or a dad, whoever is feeling the loneliness, to do that first step, like join the music class.
And then finding those people that are your people that you connect with. You know, doing something where you're going to see the same people kind of on a regular basis over and over and over. And that's how you form those relationships. So it's those frequency of encounters.
And then at the societal level, you know, like we don't have these amazing policies where we are working and then we have a baby and we get a year off to spend with the baby. So we don't have the policies and the framework, I think, in the United States to really support parents. We could have such better policies on returning to work or sick day care or flexible work schedules.
But even just being less judgmental, I think we could all serve to say that being less judgmental to parents matters. You know, you never know what the parent's doing. I definitely have times where I'm like, man, if anyone ever saw me like right now, they would be like, she's not doing a good job being a parent. You know, and we all have those moments.
And it's just kind of giving everybody the slack there and then just kind of building our systems and our relationships. policies to make it more parent and family friendly, I think could do a lot as far as helping those pieces of loneliness.
Kate, Jessica, thank you both so much.
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