The motherhood script: why you never feel good enough as a mother (and why it isn't you)

The motherhood script is an invisible collection of rules, expectations, and norms about how a "good mother" should be. Nobody ever told them to you directly. But you try to live up to them. You judge yourself against them when you don't. And so does everyone around you.

The thought in the middle of the night that you're not doing it well enough. The guilt when you go to work. The near-physical resistance when someone suggests your partner could stay home with your sick child just as well as you.

It feels like your own voice. But it isn't.

It's a script. And it was written long before you became a mother.

Until someone names it. Only then does it begin to lose its power.

The script exists, and it is not your own voice

What I call the motherhood script is not a vague feeling. It is a system of implicit expectations about how good mothers behave, feel, and decide. Rules that nobody has ever spoken out loud to you, but that shape every daily decision you make as a mother.

Dr. Sophie Brock PhD, an Australian sociologist specialising in motherhood and my mentor in this work, has spent years studying what she calls the perfect mother myth: the ideal that is not written in any manual, that nobody has ever explicitly told you, and that simultaneously directs everything.

Precisely because nobody has ever said it out loud, you think the voice telling you that you are falling short is your own voice. That the doubt is yours. That the guilt is deserved.

But it's a script. Learned, not innate.

That distinction is everything. What is learned can also be unlearned.

It is not new, and it is not personal

In academic circles, the existence of this script has not been news for decades. Adrienne Rich named it in 1976 as "the institution of motherhood." Sharon Hays coined the term "intensive mothering" in 1996: child-centred, expert-guided, emotionally consuming, financially costly. Andrea O'Reilly extended the work and formulated exactly what demands the script places on mothers.

Because what we experience today as "natural" motherhood is not actually that old.

Until the eighteenth century, the attitude toward young children was relatively pragmatic and detached. Babies were sent to wet nurses, and high infant mortality was accepted as a regrettable but unavoidable reality. Only in the late eighteenth century, under philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and reinforced by the Christian image of the self-sacrificing mother as the embodiment of pure, selfless love, was total devotion elevated for the first time to a sacred duty. Those who refused it were "unnatural mothers."

In the nineteenth century came the mother-as-moral-educator on top of that: she was responsible for producing good, pious citizens. In the twentieth century, through Freud and his followers, the mother was assigned full responsibility for her child's psychological wellbeing, including the now-thoroughly-discredited "refrigerator mother" theory that attributed even autism to insufficient maternal love.

And from the 1970s onward, two more contradictory demands arrived simultaneously. On one side, the superwoman ideal: just compete in the male working world and do motherhood alongside it. On the other, the counter-movement of "natural motherhood": breastfeed as long as possible, co-sleep, no schedules, no formula, outsource nothing.

None of those layers replaced the previous one. They stacked.

The contemporary mother inherits all the demands at once. The sacred duty, the moral educator, the psychologically responsible, the superwoman, and the natural mother. That they contradict each other? Not your problem. They are all your responsibility.

What the script demands of you

In its most concentrated form, the script demands this: that you always put the needs of your child above your own. That motherhood always takes precedence over work. That you feel fulfilled and complete through that motherhood. That you are available 24/7 and fully responsible for the outcome, while in practice receiving little support and having little influence.

In daily life, that translates into a few recognisable figures.

The present mother. Fully attuned to her child, at every moment.

The future-oriented mother. Responsible for the optimal development of her child: physical, cognitive, emotional.

The working mother. Combines work and care without the work being visible to the family.

The public mother. Has control over her body, her emotions, and her children's behaviour, especially when others are watching.

The happy mother. Always grateful. Always inwardly content with her role.

What all those figures have in common are the emotions they do not permit: boredom, jealousy, anger, complaining, loneliness, regret, longing for the life before the baby. Contradictory feelings that almost every mother experiences but that the script cannot accommodate. They are treated as evidence of bad mothering. And so you experience them as evidence that you are failing, not as evidence that the script is impossible.

A game in which every choice is wrong

The script does not only operate through what it demands. It also operates through the way its demands contradict each other. Not by accident. That is precisely how it sustains itself.

Work five days? Then you're not a real mother. Work three days? Then you're lazy. Stay home? What a waste of your education. Work full time? Selfish. Ask for help? You're failing. Don't ask? Martyr. Don't always enjoy it? Ungrateful. Always enjoy it? Not realistic. Have boundaries? Selfish. Have no boundaries? You disappear. Watch Bluey with your child? Lazy parenting. Do sensory play, regulation, and connection, always? You're exhausted, and that's also your fault. Talk about how hard it is? Complainer. Pretend it's fine? Performative. Let the housework go? Not a good home for your family. Keep it running? You've lost yourself in small things.

Do you hear it? It is a game in which every choice is wrong somewhere. And your own opinion: nobody asked for it.

Why you don't see the script

A script that an entire society embraces starts to feel like the natural order of things. It simply seems like how it should be. The script's demands do not feel like external expectations. They feel like something you should genuinely want. What good mothers simply do.

It is not pressure on you. It is, it seems, who you are.

This also explains why all the well-meaning advice about "lower the bar" and "be kinder to yourself" does not work. The script does not operate at the level of advice you can follow. It operates at the level of what feels good or bad, at two in the morning, when your child is awake for the third time and you think you cannot do this anymore.

The most powerful counterforce is naming it. First that.

The so-called choices

If you look at the media, at other mothers' stories, it seems as though we do make free choices. Breast or formula? Co-sleeping or own bed? Organic food? Screen time?

But these are not free choices.

I compare it to an ancient Roman amphitheatre. In the middle, in the arena, these choices are fought over. Research flies at us from all sides. Mothers are called lazy, uncaring, selfish.

And I understand it. If you are uncertain about your own choices, it is comforting to belong to a group that makes the same ones. And how does a group feel most strongly bonded? By designating another group as wrong.

Insight and scientific research help. But these are not choices made in isolation. They are part of a whole set of other considerations that a mother and her family navigate. You cannot simply say "this is a wrong choice" without knowing the full context of someone's life. Anyone who thinks about these questions at all is already a caring mother. And that, ultimately, is what a good mother is: someone who cares, and who, given her situation, tries to make the best choices for her family.

But while we are busy in the arena, nobody notices that we are all trapped inside that large stone building.

That is the script.

We are so occupied fighting over choices within the script that we do not see that we are imprisoned in something that is limiting for the vast majority of mothers. The script is fine with that. Because as long as our focus is in the arena, we do not look around. We do not ask ourselves: what is actually outside these walls?

The walls are the same for all of us. Those walls say: you can always try harder. No negative emotions. No complaining. No ingratitude.

And that is the real problem.

Why the script exists at all

You might wonder: if this script causes so much suffering for so many mothers, how can it remain so persistent?

The short answer: it exists not despite the harm. It exists because certain patterns benefit from it. When care is defined as something that should be given naturally, freely, and out of love by mothers, that care does not need to be paid for or shared. When mothers never feel good enough, they keep trying for an endpoint they never quite reach: The Good Mother.

It is not accidental, Andrea O'Reilly argued, that the intensive mothering ideal emerged precisely when women from the 1970s onward became increasingly independent, socially, economically, and professionally. The script is a counterforce.

You do not need to remember all of this to see the script operating in yourself. But it helps to know: that you sometimes experience motherhood as heavy is not your own fault. That is, to a large extent, structurally designed.

The script makes you ill. Literally.

This is what the research now shows clearly: the more a mother tries to follow the script's rules, the worse she feels.

Mothers who believe that the mother is the "essential parent," a core demand of the script, report lower life satisfaction. Mothers who believe that parenting must inevitably be challenging have a higher likelihood of depression and stress (Rizzo, Schiffrin & Liss, 2013, Journal of Child and Family Studies). The finding has been replicated across multiple studies, including among mothers who say they do not endorse the script. You do not even need to believe in the ideal to be affected by it. It operates on you through others' judgments, through advice, through what you read on your phone.

In 2026, the Dutch Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (SCP) reported that nearly half of Dutch families frequently to always experience stress. The reasons families themselves name: guilt, trying to live up to a perfect picture, an ever-raising bar.

And this is important: trying to follow the script is not harmful to your child. You are not doing anything wrong. The problem is the harm the script does to you, precisely because you are trying so hard to be a good mother.

Seeing it is the first step

The script keeps working as long as it remains invisible. The most powerful counterforce: seeing where and when the script is influencing you.

When you feel: I am falling short. Ask yourself: have I fallen short of something I wanted? Or have I fallen short of something the script demands of me?

What is yours, and what is the script's?

It is a startlingly powerful distinction. And a liberating discovery: that the entire script says nothing about whether you are a good mother. It does not know your specific situation. It does not know what kind of children you have, what works for them, what your life situation looks like, what you and your partner consider important.

There are a thousand ways to be a good mother. We do not ask everyone to choose the same field of study or have the same hobbies. Why would we expect every mother to follow the same maternal rules? As long as you have your child's best interests at heart, and that applies to 99.99% of mothers, you are the person best placed to determine what is right for your family. That sometimes takes time. The script also makes it difficult to connect with your own knowing, because you have been listening to how it should be done for so long.

It is also exposing. You are genuinely judged for your choices: that is how the script sustains itself. Freeing yourself requires learning to handle criticism, and to set that criticism aside. It requires trust: that if someone rejects you for your choices, someone else who actually respects you will come in their place.

This is the real work of matrescence, the transformation you go through when you become a mother. Can you stand more fully for what you want? Without rejecting another person's choices, but simply because it is a choice that is right for you?

The right question is no longer how to become a better mother according to the script.

The right question is: what kind of mother would you be if you no longer had to follow it?

Seeing the script is the first move. It is not the last one.

Once you can tell the difference between what you actually want and what the script demands of you, the next question is what you do with that distinction, in your actual week, with your actual partner, your actual job, your actual children. That is not a reading exercise. It is a rebuilding one.

Mother on MY Terms is where we do that rebuilding together. Not a better version of the script. A different relationship to it entirely, built through the Working Mom Renaissance Method™, the guided path through the Matrescence Arc, for mothers who are done auditioning for a role nobody actually wrote for them.

The September cohort is open now.

See if Mother on MY Terms is right for you →

About Babette Lockefeer

Babette Lockefeer is the founder of Matermorphosis and an expert at the intersection of leadership and matrescence. She previously worked as a consultant at McKinsey and as the founder of TheoryY. She is mentored by motherhood sociologist Dr. Sophie Brock. Her work has been published in WIJ Ouders Magazine.

Matermorphosis · matermorphosis.com

Frequently asked questions about the motherhood script

What is the motherhood script? The motherhood script is an invisible collection of implicit expectations about how a "good mother" should behave, feel, and decide. Nobody ever told you the rules explicitly, but you hold yourself to them and judge yourself against them when you fall short. The concept refers to the fact that this is not a personal conviction but a culturally learned script: built up over roughly 250 years, consisting of accumulated ideals of self-sacrifice (Rousseau, 18th century), moral educator (19th century), psychological responsibility (Freud, 20th century), and simultaneously superwoman and natural mother (from the 1970s onward). Adrienne Rich named it in 1976 as "the institution of motherhood." Sharon Hays coined the term "intensive mothering" in 1996. None of those layers replaced the previous one: they stacked.

Why do I always feel guilty as a mother, even though I'm really doing my best? Because the motherhood script is built so that every choice is wrong somewhere. The rules are contradictory by design: if you work a lot, you fall short as a mother; if you work a little, you fall short as a woman. That guilt is not evidence that you are failing. It is the predictable result of a system that fits no actual mother. Research consistently shows that the more closely a mother tries to follow the script, the worse she feels, not better.

Is the motherhood script the same as the motherhood penalty? No. The motherhood penalty describes the economic disadvantage women experience after having children, such as lower earnings growth (documented by Kleven et al., 2019). The motherhood script describes the psychological and cultural system of implicit expectations that influences how mothers judge themselves. They are connected: the script legitimises inequality at home and at work, and that inequality in turn reinforces the belief that this is simply how it should be.

How do I escape the motherhood script? The first step is always naming it. As long as the script remains invisible, it operates as self-evident truth. Once you recognise it as an external, culturally constructed set of expectations rather than your own voice, you can begin to make a distinction: what do I actually want, and what does the script demand of me? Learning to make that distinction is the real work of matrescence. It is also precisely what we do in Mother on MY Terms.

Does the motherhood script affect my partner and the people around me? Yes. The script influences partners, employers, schools, and families too. It determines who gets called when a child is sick, who is held responsible when childcare falls through, and who feels guilty when dinner hasn't been made. The script operates on everyone in the system. That is also why it is difficult to step out of it individually: the walls of the arena are the same for everyone.