We've been in a liminal space for the last 15 months or so, since COVID shutdowns.  (The word 'liminal' comes from the Latin root limen, meaning threshold).   It’s a place where a certain part of our lives has come to an end but the next thing hasn’t yet begun, so we’re in a transitional state.

We're finally starting to see the end of this liminal state but before we can fully emerge into the new world, we need to ask ourselves: what do we want that world to be like?

Do we want to go back to what it was before?

Because the world we had before wasn't working for a lot of parents.  We were constantly rushing our children around from one activity to the next, maybe also trying to balance a career at the same time, attending thirty kids' birthday parties a year and just feeling completely spent, most of the time.

If we don't take the time to think about what we want life to be like when we reopen, chances are it'll look pretty much like it used to.  And that can seem safe!  It's always safer and easier to go back to what we know, rather than forward to what is unknown and scary.

What would something different even look like?

Maybe we would have fewer friends, whom we know much better.

Maybe we would do fewer activities, and spend a bit more time being, rather than always doing.

Maybe we would actually support families financially instead of having a 'families are the bedrock of our society...but you're on your own to provide for it' approach.

In this Mother's Day Momifesto, I explore all of these issues, and encourage you to think about how YOU want to be in this new world.

And if you need help figuring it out, the Parenting Membership is here to help.  We'll support you through the challenges of today (how to prevent tantrums!  raising healthy eaters!  navigating screen time!) while keeping an eye on where we want to go.  Because you need both.

Join the waitlist to get notified when doors reopen in May 2025. Click the banner to learn more.

Jump to highlights:

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• (01:27) The Mother's Day Momifesto
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• (02:04) COVID shutdown
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• (04:28) School reopenings
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• (07:04) 18% of women in the US have taken antidepressants
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• (09:29) We try to control our bodies in a variety of ways
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• (12:27) Success is defined for men
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• (19:38) Women working communities
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• (20:25) Plenty of parents and children's needs are not met by the school system
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• (22:47) Intersectionality - the idea that different parts of our identities intersect
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• (25:10) Public transit systems are geared around men
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• (26:17) Contribution of scientific research on COVID 19- women scientists have published 19% fewer papers as lead author
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• (29:26) Standard Body Mass Index calculations are based on the weight of White people
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• (31:41) Nonviolent Communication
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• (34:06) How we can begin to make a difference
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• (44:55) Learning how to meet our own needs is a great place to start
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• (46:44) Reopening of your Parenting Membership will close on the midnight of May 12
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Jen Lumanlan  00:03

Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research on principles of respectful parenting. If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won’t listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head on over to your YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. ou can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you’ll join us.

Jen Lumanlan  00:54

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today I want to do what feels a bit like going out on a limb and connect some ideas across the podcast episodes and some reading I've been doing and some thinking and some work I've been doing outside of these episodes as well to ask: Where are we going? Not just where am I going? Or where's the podcast going? But since today is Mother's Day in the US, although I know it has passed in many other places where it's celebrated. Where are we as mothers and more broadly, we as parents going? And I think I'm going to call this episode The Mother's Day Momifesto which really did seem revolutionary when I thought about it in the shower this morning. After all, how can I call something about mom's a manifesto. But now I google it, I see that I'm not the first one to think about it. But anyway, I think the idea stands and run with it.

Jen Lumanlan  01:42

I think it's time to look at this idea of where we're going right now is because we're in something of a liminal space. The word liminal comes from the Latin root, lemon meaning threshold, it's a place where a certain part of our lives has come to an end. But the next thing hasn't begun yet. So we're in something of a transitional state. And in a way, we've been in a liminal space for over a year now, once COVID shutdown started, life changed pretty dramatically. For a lot of people, the old way of life had ended. And for most of us, it was very much against our will. And now we're entering a new phase of the liminal space where mass vaccinations are underway in many countries, although vaccination rates within countries of high wealth as well as across countries still show that life isn't valued equally, and that Whiteness and money are associated with higher vaccination rates. Suddenly we can see that there may be some light at the end of the tunnel, and that we're coming to the end of this liminal space, and we're coming into what's next.

Jen Lumanlan  02:40

But what is next, the natural tendency is very often to go back to what we had before. And I see this play out in protest to reopen schools. Yes, having schools closed for such a long period of time has been incredibly difficult for a lot of people, and most of all, for people who have no choice but to leave the house to work every day. But in all the protests, where I've seen mostly affluent parents and children campaigning to reopen schools, what I haven't seen is any discussion of what we want to reopen.

Jen Lumanlan  03:07

Because let's face it, schools were not working very well for the vast majority of children before COVID. Even if we accept that standardized tests are acceptable measure of achievement, we can see the average scores in reading and math hovers somewhere between 250 and 300. On a scale of 0 to 500 points, that's between basic and proficient. In other words, on average, in the richest country in the world, our average student performance is somewhat less than what we consider to be average performance, and far below anything approaching superior performance. And as we all know, huge discrepancies in school funding that's driven by using property tax as the main source of income for schools means that children in some schools are doing quite well at passing standardized tests while others are essentially not learning anything at all.

Jen Lumanlan  03:55

I'm not seeing any discussion about whether we want to keep using standardized tests as a measure of our children's learning or what steps we want to take to fund schools more equitably, or to completely reimagine what school looks like. So it's actually a welcoming place for all children and all parents, and not something that creates and perpetuates ongoing trauma, while socializing children to participate in a system governed by White supremacy. And if you need more information, and full references on that, I encourage you to check out Episode 117 on school socialization.

Jen Lumanlan  04:27

I'm using school reopenings as an example here, because it's one we can see playing out in the news, because the conversations I'm not seeing at all are about what we want parenting and specifically mothering to be like as we move into our new beginning.

Jen Lumanlan  04:42

Because if we're really honest, parenting and mothering, were not working for us before the pandemic either. We were probably spending a lot of time rushing around trying to get up early in the morning so we can get a tiny bit of exercise in and realizing we've failed again as our child wakes us up and suddenly we're scrambling to get ourselves ready for our day. Get some kind of food into our children teeth brushed clothes on out the door and time for daycare or preschool drop off, get us to the train on time to work sort out somebody else's problems for eight hours rush back to meet the precise train that we need. sort of hoping it'll be late because we left the office a minute late, so we might not make it if it isn't. But also knowing that if it is late, we might miss pick up time and get fined by the minute and incur the teachers weathering looks for disrespecting their time. And then we're rushing home trying to spend a few minutes or something that looks like quality time while somehow also getting dinner on the table, getting bath time done everyone in bed at a reasonable hour, before we just collapsed on the couch in front of Netflix. And then we got up and did the whole thing over again the next day. While feeling endlessly guilty about the tiny amount of time we were spending with our kids.

Jen Lumanlan  05:47

Or if we weren't working outside the home perhaps our days were spent in an endless monotony of trying to get the baby down for a nap while the older one has independent playtime. But just after we sit down to eat lunch, the baby wakes up needs help resettling, we barely get to finish our meal, the older ones getting restless and needs our attention again. And so every day is just passing in this whirlwind of activities that somehow needs to be done and yet are so mind numbing that all the days blur together. Because if we aren't working and we're taking time to be with the children, then that's our job, right? And we're supposed to be completely devoted to it and not need any help. And if we ask for help, then we feel guilty because we feel like we should be able to handle it all. Because isn't everyone else doing it?

Jen Lumanlan  06:29

And here's the real kicker. If we realize we can't handle it all and we're falling apart, we go to the doctor for medication. Now I'm not dismissing or shaming medication at all. I know many parents who have found it a lifesaver, literally. But what I want to point out is that at no time in the process of falling apart and going to the doctor and getting medication, do we ever question that there's something wrong with the system rather than with us? Right now, our system says if we can't cope, the problem must be in us. My point is that when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us almost 18% of women in the US have taken antidepressants in the past 30 days when they were surveyed between 2015 - 2018, 86% of women aged 40 to 44. Being mothers, there are a massive number of mothers who are taking antidepressants to cope with the everyday experience of being a mother in our society. And these antidepressant usage is not spread evenly across all mothers. If we can assume that a similar proportion of mothers are taking antidepressants compared to all women, more than 22% of White women are using them compared to 10% of Black women 9% of Latino women and just over 3% of Asian American women. So there are probably a lot of cultural variables here with White women being more likely to have access to health care, and also a greater acceptance and of intolerance for medication as a solution to what seemed to be melt mental illness in the White community.

Jen Lumanlan  07:55

But overall, there seems to be between 10 to 20% of women in the US who are so overwhelmed with life that they seek medical help. And my guess is there is a far greater proportion who don't seek medical help but are either depressed at a subclinical level, or who have simply accepted that this is the way life is and that if something doesn't feel right to them, it must just be that they need to cope better, planned better, hold it together better. And not that there's something wrong with the system they're trying to function within.

Jen Lumanlan  08:27

What does it look like when we're in this state? Well, obviously, it looks different for different people, but it can look like feeling frazzled, like our brain is always turned on. Like we don't know how to shut it off. So maybe we need sleeping pills to turn our brains off at night and then coffee to wake it up again in the morning.

Jen Lumanlan  08:43

It can also look like control. So much of our lives seem outside of our control, not least of which is our child's behavior, which very much looks like a black box. A lot of the time. We input something in one side that was completely innocuous yesterday, and today output screaming and hitting. When our child's behavior seems out of our control, we try to control it more.

Jen Lumanlan  09:02

When our partner doesn't do things like feeding the toddler or loading the dishwasher or planning a vacation the way we would do it. We just say Oh, nevermind, I'll do it. I was talking with Nicole who's in my parenting membership in an interview that was published on the podcast a couple weeks ago and she said she clearly remembered realizing something needed to change when she found herself yelling at her husband from the other room when he was changing the baby's diaper saying you're doing it wrong.

Jen Lumanlan  09:28

We also try to control our bodies in a variety of ways. We pay excessive attention to what we eat. We try to control the shapes of our bodies. I can't remember or find the original source but I remember reading something along the lines of if White women spent as much time thinking about racism as they do about being thin the world would be a very different place. We're also told to control our bodies in a variety of ways. Breastfeeding has benefits for our baby of course, but one big reason to do it is because it will help you get your body back. If our bodies don't fit in this tightly prescribed box of height, weight, corvinus lack of lumpiness, muscularity, hairlessness and color. Then we're sold a host of lotions, potions, workout regimens, weight loss pills, diets, makeup, hair removal products to make them fit in that box. I'd venture to guess that not many of us spend hours each week managing our bodies to fit into this box because we enjoy it. We do it because we're expected to do it, or we risk social ridicule and ostracism if we don't.

Jen Lumanlan  10:29

The problem with all of this is it becomes so baked into us that we lose sight of where we end and where social expectations begin. So just as a tiny example, I shaved my legs. I like how smooth they feel I after I do it. I also remember being ridiculed by the kids at school for not shaving my legs, because my stepmother refused to buy razors for me and my sister and my stepsister. And my parents tightly controlled our access to money so that we couldn't buy our own. And for people using my stepbrothers razor, used to blunt it pretty fast. So there was this humiliation of knowing that we weren't supported at home, and the shame that we were getting at school for not toeing the line of femininity standards. And of course, all the men I've ever dated have just assumed that I would shave my legs and have made fun of women who don't. And so yes, I do like how my legs are smooth after I shave them. But how much of this is me and how much of it is pressure from outside?.

Jen Lumanlan  11:20

And another example a parent in my membership, whom I was coaching recently had a revelation during our session. She's actually in my Supporting Your Child's Learning membership and we were having a coaching session, because she'd been having trouble getting started with the material. She was noticing that the content was really well aligned with her values of how children learn, which is very child LED, but she was finding herself gravitating towards something that she'd signed up for it that would send her daily emails telling her what to do to engage her child. And those activities can be fun when they happen to line up with a child's interest. So they're because they're going out to hundreds or thousands of parents, they will only be ever a small number of children who are actually interested in the topic of that day.

Jen Lumanlan  11:59

But the parent was telling me that she felt drawn towards those emails because she thought she needed the structure they provided. During our console, she had a huge aha moment. She has a master's degree. So she says she was in school from the time she was four until she was 24 without stopping. And she realized that this discomfort around lack of structure might not actually be the central part of her that she had assumed it was, but something that school had ingrained in her. She was still processing that thought as we finished the call,...