There was a woman I used to know who was a fan of Pat Benatar and looked like her, too. We would often talk about Benatar’s music, but I no longer remember how we became acquainted. She was one of those people who you are just meant to know for a season of life. A human waypoint. She said I had an “old soul.” That I never forgot.

I also remember that she didn’t have any kids. This was the pre-social media days and therefore antedated “childless cat ladies” memes. I don’t know why and didn’t ask why she didn’t have children. I just recall her being very warm and kind and motherly. 

I thought about this woman for the first time in over a decade while acquainting myself with the music of Chappell Roan. The 27-year-old musician reminds me of Benatar, incorporating a lot of dreamy synth pulsing beneath her swaying, hypnotic vocals—a style for which I am and will always be a sucker. Like many young pop stars today, Roan is very opinionated and impressionable. In a recent interview with Alex Cooper, host of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, she claimed that all her “friends who have kids are in hell.” Roan added: 

I don’t know anyone, I actually don’t know anyone, who is happy and has children at this age. Like, a one-year-old, like three-year-old—four and under, five and under. I literally have not met anyone who is happy, anyone who has, like, light in their eyes. Anyone who has slept.

Roan caught a lot of hate for those comments, mainly from conservatives. I think a big part of her problem is that she spoke so flippantly about a subject with which she has no intimate knowledge, which is always dangerous. But there is also a kernel of truth to what she said that probably struck a nerve, even if she said it in the worst possible way. Mothers, and parents in general, face unique challenges today that previous generations did not, and they have less support in facing them. It takes a toll. The episode was interesting, above all, because it revealed so many misconceptions and distortions now prevailing about parenting.

I’ll start by highlighting one particularly popular criticism of what she said from an X account called “Tallow Mom.” This person wrote that the debacle was “a prime example of why you cannot just vent to anyone” as a mother. In other words, people without kids do not have the proper context for interpreting these complaints—assuming they’re just harmless expressions of the lows that are as much a part of raising children as the highs. I think that’s true, and it cuts both ways. 

A whole cottage industry has emerged online around “traditional” living, presenting motherhood as a blissful, pain-free activity. Open Instagram, and you’ll find sepia-toned reels of women in linen sundresses gliding their fingertips over golden ears of wheat in one frame while, in the next, they are making bone broth from grass-fed beef while breastfeeding and basking in the lambent warmth of homemade candles. 

The problem with the concept of the “trad wife” is that she is an idealized fiction. The reality behind the photo shoots is that the mother probably has a well-paying modern remote job or a powerful support system others simply do not. It is a marketing hallucination peddled to modern women who, when they try to recreate that reality in their own homes, will undoubtedly suffer a painful disillusionment that turns to bitterness. Being a stay-at-home mother is an around-the-clock job that never ends, and any good mom will tell you that while profoundly rewarding, it is also utterly grueling. Yes, being a mother is a high calling for women, perhaps the highest. But that does not make that calling’s necessary denial of self any less easy. 

Many challenges of motherhood are just part of the territory, which is why idealizing motherhood can backfire. But certainly we also have a way of exacerbating these challenges with our modern patterns of life.

In the postwar era, Americans often relocated as a means of obtaining better education and economic opportunity. That translated into more prosperity for a greater number of people, but it also fragmented extended families and kin structures that in the past provided organic support systems for raising children. This put the nuclear family on an even smaller island and contributed to the outsourcing of parenting to third-party providers, like day care centers. 

To make matters worse, generational attitudes toward caregiving have changed. Put bluntly, many Baby Boomers do not want to spend their later years actively grandparenting. Los Angeles-based psychologist Leslie Dobson told Business Insider in 2023 that many of her millennial clients feel embittered toward their parents for having “chosen their life over meeting their grandchildren and building these relationships.” These people will often tell the same story: our parents are not interested in helping us be parents. 

Just how well these grievances align with reality is, of course, a matter of debate. It goes without saying that not all Boomers are consumed by juvenile selfishness in their golden years. Nevertheless, this complaint resonates among Millennials. In one recent viral video, a woman detailed how her Boomer parents rejected the notion that they had any duty to help out with the grandkids at all. 

There’s little doubt that these feelings of intra-generational resentment are heightened by the fact that many Boomer grandparents live large. At the time of Dobson’s interview, Insider reported that “boomers were outspending other generations on travel and dining out,” while holding “more than $78 trillion in assets—that’s around half of all wealth in the country.”

Throw in the deterioration of religious and civic communities that once provided families with support, and it becomes impossible to deny that starting and keeping a family together today is a tall order.

A less charitable take on this episode would be that Roan’s friends are simply the kind of people who would be better off as “childless cat ladies”—though perhaps not as cool as my old Benatar buddy. They’re probably college-educated white liberals anyway, and who needs more of those? Upon closer inspection, though, this common refrain is also divorced from reality.

Darby Saxbe, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, recently took a close look at just who is getting married, having kids, and staying together in a way that checks boxes typically associated with the preferences of conservatives. In an essay for her Substack, Natal Gazing, she found that in 2023, “women with a post-graduate degree actually had the highest birth rate of all educational groups.” Meanwhile, “women who did not finish high school had the lowest birth rate.” Moreover, according to Pew Research Center data from 2015, more people with a college degree (65 percent) are married than those without education beyond high school (50 percent).

Saxbe also points out that education closely aligns with divorce rates:

In fact, if you want to find families that live up to the purported conservative ideal of a stable two-parent marriage, you’d be best off looking in blue states with high average educational attainment, like Massachusetts, which has the lowest divorce rates in the nation, or at college-educated parents in the liberal bastion of California, of whom 80% are raising children in married two-parent households. 

It is the people who conservatives might reflexively denounce as “college-educated liberals” who are also more likely to live in a way that comports with the traditional ideal of the noble milkmaiden drifting through wheat fields. “More educated moms deliver healthier babies, breastfeed longer, and have kids with better language and cognitive skills who go on to do better in school,” Saxbe found. “The kids of more educated moms eat a better-quality diet and get less screen time.”

All this is not to take a shot at conservatives and tip a hat at liberals. They have more in common than they think, at least when it comes to how they believe child-rearing ought to be done. A large part of the disconnect is due to misperceptions reinforced through social media (a problem that Roan herself contributed to). Those distortions undermine the building block of the polis: the family. We should be more charitable when we talk about parents—and go easy on college-educated cat ladies, too, because, in the words of Benatar, love is a battlefield. ◆