Motherblame

Anna Vaux

• Bad Mothers: The Politics of Blame in 20th-Century America edited by Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky
  New York, 416 pp, £16.00, April 1998, ISBN 0 8147 5119 9
• Madonna and Child: Towards a New Politics of Motherhood by Melissa Benn
  Cape, 288 pp, £12.99, January 1998, ISBN 0 224 03821 4

What makes a good mother? How many do you know? Perhaps you think you are one, or that your mother is – though it’s not very likely that you and your mother will agree on this. Fashions in mothering change, as Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky point out. Even within a given era, the experts do not agree – about breastfeeding, about solids, about sleeping habits. Americans are divided on whether mothers should stay at home with their children and on whether a good parent would spank a child. They can’t decide what age a good mother should be. They don’t know whether allowing a baby to sleep in its parents’ bed builds a more secure child or an excessively dependent one. They don’t know if it is bad to breastfeed a toddler, or give a newborn a bottle.