‘Hot Mess Mom’ messaging could be convincing an entire generation to ‘dread motherhood’

The headline flashed across my Instagram feed with two kids yelling in the background, two more who needed help getting dressed, and one who was pouting about not owning any hoodies (I assure you, he does). It read: “How millennials learned to dread motherhood,” a Vox article by Rachel Cohen.

I laughed at the headline knowingly, looked around at the chaos, and shrugged it off. I can see how many, many people would want no part of this life. Yet here I was, choosing it five times at least, on purpose. And yet, when people ask why or how or what the hell we were thinking, I defend parenting to the end — there’s been no great joy.

And that’s the conclusion that Cohen seems to come to, as she takes readers on a long, deep, and meaningful journey through the influences pressuring us to or to not have kids, and what is influencing our image of what that will be like.

She points to “The List,” based on a viral TikTok listing a zillion reasons why it’s totally not worth it, from pregnancy woes to being generally miserable. She points to hot mess mom culture showing millennials every day that they will, in fact, be a mess if they embark on this journey.

But what I love about her deep dive into the hardships influencing our decisions and vibe around parenthood, is that she unpacks the layers of research that really, in the end, reveals that it’s meaningful and worth it to many.

For example, she points to Pew Research that shows many parents think the job is harder than expected. But way down in the fine print, beyond what most news sources covered, 80% of parents say parenting is enjoyable all or most of the time, and 82% even said it was rewarding all or most of the time. Those are pretty solid odds, a narrative at odds with the rise of the DINKS, double-income households with no kids) leading the child-free movement.

Cohen takes on the narrative that we shouldn’t have kids in such a tough world, and that everything will be hard and awful. “We should have the courage to reject the all-encompassing crisis frame — which frankly isn’t working, anyway. We can’t expect to fully eliminate dread or even regret over having children,” she writes. “Rather, this is a gentle reminder that people can thrive doing the hard stuff, and we can build each other up without fear that we’ll sabotage prospects for bolder change. That’s a world that brings me hope. That’s a world I don’t dread.”

As someone thriving doing the hardest stuff I’ve ever done, her message validated the sense of hope, joy, and fulfillment I get from my own kids, where I feel my legacy lies. I carry that with me in the heart of the holidays where my fun single relatives shake their heads and shrug their shoulders at the chaos that is my life choices. I wouldn’t change them.