“You F*cking Hate Motherhood, Ted!”

I’ve gotten this claim from readers, LinkedIn Lunatics, and even a few people adjacent to my social sphere before. It’s actually not true.

I personally believe motherhood is the strongest brand in the world — not Apple, no, especially not in the tariff environment we’re in — but I’ve also gotten shit over the years for hating on motherhood, which most small-brained troglodytes link back to infertility. Yes, infertility sucks to experience and you can feel like you let a lot of different people down, but it doesn’t color my view on motherhood. Solid motherhood is a massive win-win for society and for individual people and neighborhoods and communities. I love motherhood and most of the moms I know either socially or from afar are good people who want the best for their families (maybe not their entire community, but that’s a different story about American individualism).

Obviously with the rise of Instagram and TikTok, especially, we’ve seen tons of different approaches to motherhood, from “I make my kids bread from scratch” to “This is how I discipline” to “Kids as content,” and because everyone must have a take on everything, we’ve created lots of debates around motherhood, which is complicated because motherhood was and is already hard, and lots of people feel like they’re doing it badly but want to showcase to the world that they’re doing it well, and most new moms are getting reams of potentially-conflicting advice from their mom, their grandma, their friends, their co-workers, their aunt, etc… so it’s a confusing tapestry.

But no, personally I don’t hate motherhood.

Now, there are models of motherhood I think should probably be in decline, most notably these: