Woo-Woo Mommy Culture is Terrifying and Dangerous
If you’ve had a baby you’ve probably come across what I, and other “evidence based moms” like to call “woo-woo” mom culture.
You probably didn’t even realize it was woo (a nice word for anti-science bullshit) because it sounded so reasonable. For example, breast is best! Breastfeeding is so important, mama. If you don’t, your baby will not be healthy, smart or bond with you. Obviously use formula if you absolutely HAVE to, but you’d be better off buying donated breastmilk than not breastfeeding at all. And even if you pump, that’s not bonding, so you really shouldn’t bottle feed at all. Nipple confusion will prevent the baby from ever latching, eating right, or loving you. Right? Actually, completely wrong. Breastfeeding is marginally better on a macro level (say, if you’re observing trends in millions of babies) but is unlikely to make any statistically significant difference in one baby or even in one hundred babies. Doctors encourage it because there are benefits, but “lactivist” websites like La Leche League and Kellymom (both of which I thought were completely reliable before doing more research) peddle misleading myths about breastfeeding which at best, make women feel guilty for struggling to breastfeed (or simply not wanting to) and at worst, could actually put babies in danger (for example, insisting that there’s no such thing as low milk supply and never to use formula to supplement. Babies have actually died from starvation this way, although it’s rare, so don’t get too worked up about it if your baby has enough wet diapers.)
And therein lies the problem with woo-woo mom culture, currently popularized on Tiktok and, well, all over the Internet (a quick cursory Google search for a topic like “sleep training” yields more woo sources than evidence-based ones).
There’s no evidence behind what woo-woo moms say. If they cite a study that proves them right (usually trying to advocate for bedsharing, not vaccinating, or insisting sleep training is abuse) the study is usually either flawed or redacted. If the study hasn’t been debunked officially, there are at least five other, better studies proving the opposite point, which they conveniently ignore. Anecdotal evidence becomes data. “Mama instincts” become double-blind studies. It’s absurd and it needs to stop. It’s not only hurting the mental health of moms who watch this nonsense, but it could be putting babies in danger.
Take, for example, bedsharing. Woo-woo moms swear by it, and it’s not hard to see why. I love nursing my baby in bed because it’s comfortable, cuddly, and cute- and HOW I WISH it was just as safe to fall asleep with him like that. But, see, it’s not. The AAP has been extremely clear about this. Woo-woo moms insist that sharing a bed with your baby is the only good option because it “keeps mama and baby together” and is “biologically normal” (it’s also biologically normal to die at thirty from malnutrition or being stabbed by a sabre toothed tiger). They also say bedsharing is safe because “women all over the world do it” and “women have been doing it for centuries.” Well, infant mortality rate isn’t stable across all countries, so you can’t definitively claim bedsharing is safe because “other countries do it.” Moreover, infant mortality rate has been plummeting in the US since the 1950s. Citing some imaginary cottagecore “good old days” as a counterargument is also not evidence based.
Now, I’m not here to “shame” people who breastfeed or bedshare (I breastfeed, and while I am extremely anti-bedsharing, I don’t think shaming is going to help- plus, for some women, it’s a choice between bedsharing and being so sleep-deprived that they’re unable to operate a car safely, so I understand there are specific instances where the risks might be worth it.) What I am here to say is that woo-woo mommy culture is dangerous. It’s hurting moms and it’s hurting babies, now more than ever. Facts are not up for debate, and instincts are not facts.
I gave birth in 2020, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. I haven’t left my house in ten months except to see a doctor. I expect this to continue for some time. Compared to many other moms, I have it easy- I feel for women who don’t have the choice to stay home. But as long as you believe covid is real, you can’t deny that this year has been absolutely horrible for new moms. Being a new mom (especially a first time mom) is emotional, scary, wonderful, and anxiety-provoking. Postpartum depression and anxiety are ridiculously common. New moms are especially vulnerable right now, and often left alone (or in a best case scenario, alone with their spouse) to take care of their babies. The last thing they need is disinformation that seeks to guilt them or push them to unsafe practices to alleviate that guilt.
Sleep training is an especially heated topic in the mom community, and for good reason. It conjures up imagery of leaving a baby in a dark room by themselves, closing the door, and coldly sipping a glass of chardonnay, watching 90 Day Fiance, while your baby cries for your love and you callously ignore them. Of course, this isn’t the reality of sleep training. The Ferber method, the most popular sleep training method, involves going in to comfort your baby at very regular intervals, but giving them the space they need to learn how to fall asleep. It doesn’t mean that you stop feeding them in the middle of the night, and it’s typically not recommended until four months. And making sure your baby sleeps isn’t just about having “me-time.” It’s about having a baby who is getting enough sleep, which is essential to brain development.
Even extinction, which does involve leaving the baby to cry indefinitely, has not been shown to produce any negative effects on the baby.
In addition, babies can cry because they’re tired. It’s a common new parent rookie mistake to assume that a baby is always crying because they’re hungry or want to be held. Sometimes they’re crying because they’re exhausted, and sometimes they’re exhausted because instead of being left to fall asleep, they’re constantly being bounced, smooched, and having a boob shoved in their mouth. A baby crying in their crib could be crying because they’re hungry- or they could be crying as if to say “Man, I’m so tired, this sucks. I want to sleep but I can’t fall asleep, what is sleep? Ugh, I’m cranky. I had way too much stimulation today. I need to scream to block out all the noise from the other room. It’s so distracting and UGHHHH LET ME SLEEP!”
Many people who say they would “never sleep train” (not just as a personal choice, but as a repudiation of moms who do) fall into several categories:
- People who don’t have kids yet
- People who have kids who sleep easily and don’t need help learning to do so
- People who practice unsafe sleep (knowingly or unknowingly)
- People who, in an effort to avoid “abusing” their baby by sleep training, have overtired, screaming, unhappy babies because they’re unable to sleep.
- People who are physically able to let their child sleep on them whenever they need to sleep (which is, by the way, ~14 hours per day.)
I used to be in group 1. My mom sleep trained me, and even though it didn’t make me resent her at all (I love my mom and I grew up to be an amazing sleeper!) I insisted I would be “better” than that. This same instinct made me want to dress my baby in an exclusive color palette of brown, white, gray, blue and yellow (LOL) so that every picture I took of him looked harmonious in our photo album.
Then I had my baby, and in the early months, I became group 5- let him sleep on me whenever he needed (which I loved and had to time and space to do!) and wore him in a baby carrier if I needed to do dishes or use the bathroom. Then, I realized I sustained an injury from the birth that made baby carrier naps impossible and I became group 3- I started letting him take naps in an inclined swing, which as it turns out is extremely unsafe. Then, when I realized the swing was unsafe, I became group 4- assuming my baby would just fall asleep on me the way he did as a newborn, but by then, he wasn’t able to (the ability to just fall asleep “wherever” is usually gone by four months when they become aware of their surroundings.) So I had a miserable, screaming, crying baby who couldn’t ever sleep. Because I didn’t realize that babies could cry because they were tired, I stopped giving him naps and instead just cuddled him while he screamed at me because in his mind, he was probably saying “What the fuck, mom? I’m exhausted! I can’t sleep the way I used to and you’re doing itsy bitsy spider with me!?” The tricks that used to work with him no longer did. If he fell asleep in my arms and I transferred him to his bassinet, he would wake up minutes later, disoriented, confused and upset because he didn’t recognize his surroundings.
I was all out of options, but because I was exposed to so much woo-woo nonsense, I was terrified that sleep training would make me a bad mom. But, to use one of their terms, it went against my “mama instincts” to think that a baby who was miserable and exhausted 24/7 was a good or natural thing. Babies don’t have the ability adults have to realize they’re tired and say “OK, I’ll go to sleep now.” Perhaps some do, and congratulations to those unicorn babies, but mine wasn’t like that.
So I realized I had to sleep train. It was either sleep training, or sleep deprivation. If I’m going to borrow some of the hyperbole that woo-woo moms love, if sleep training is abuse, then sleep deprivation is torture. It’s not even entirely hyperbole- sleep deprivation is literally used as a torture method. I realized having my baby cry for a few days while learning to put himself to sleep would be far better for him than crying all day and all night for months because he was unable to get restorative sleep. As my husband and I settled in for a miserable night one of sleep training, we were shocked to discover he fussed for a few minutes, then happily fell asleep on his own after just one check-in. After just a week of this (he stopped even needing one check-in after a few days) he was a whole different baby — happier, more active, less crying.
What’s funny about the anti-sleep training crew is that they frequently cite the one study that “proves” sleep training is harmful. Except it doesn’t prove that, and it’s been debunked and countered by multiple other researchers. Meanwhile, studies that show sleep-training is not harmful are simply ignored because they don’t adhere to the “mama must always be a living breathing pacifier-slash-bed for her baby” narrative.
And besides, it was never about evidence. Woo-woo influencers use the notorious Middlemiss sleep training study to prove their point (the one I referenced above, which is extremely flawed and doesn’t prove sleep training is harmful anyway) but even if that study never existed, it wouldn’t matter to them. It’s about “instincts.” It’s not about facts.
Even if the sleep training argument is pretty inconsequential (no baby has died because they were sleep trained or not sleep trained) this type of thinking spills into issues that are absolutely life and death. These types of moms are almost always anti-vax. The belief that “mama instincts” are more reliable than what actual doctors say is what enables moms to give their children essential oils instead of asthma medicine or cause outbreaks of deadly diseases that could be prevented with vaccines. I’ve been on mom groups in which woo-woo stuff is allowed to run rampant, and many of the same moms who believe this nonsense also believe that covid is a hoax. This stuff has real-world implications beyond social media buzzwords like “mom shaming.”
These woo-woo narratives are also especially classist, ableist, homophobic, and generally exclusionary. Sure, maybe you have infinite time and resources to hold your baby 24/7, breastfeed exclusively, and never put your baby in anyone else’s care, but what about women who work 10-hour workdays in warehouses, or disabled women who can’t wear a baby carrier? What about single moms who have other children to care for, and no help from a spouse? What about adoptive moms, or gay fathers, who cannot breastfeed? What about moms with medical conditions that necessitate C-sections or hospital births as opposed to “all natural drug free births” in their bathtub surrounded by soy wax candles from Anthropologie? What about moms struggling with PPA/PPD who won’t be able to function enough to take care of themselves, let alone a baby, if they are unable to sleep? What about moms who survived sexual trauma and have aversion to breastfeeding as a result? Are all of their kids destined to become inadequately attached serial killers because they didn’t have a pretty, white, yoga-practicing, heterosexual, married mom with barrel-curled blonde hair and pastel Instagram filters, glued to them 24/7 and nursing them until they were four?
This disinformation is harmful, it’s bogus, and it’s so difficult to even identify because it’s peddled across websites that seem totally legitimate. I consider myself pretty good at differentiating fact from fiction (I built my online reputation on pranking forums with goofy one-off fake stories like this one, so I like to think I’m decent at spotting fakes.) But alas, I thought La Lache League was a reliable parenting source for months. It sounded legitimate. It sounded French. I was tired and didn’t have time to research whether it was legitimate or not.
And that leads to my next point. New moms are tired. Even ones with unicorn babies are tired because newborns need to eat multiple times per night. Sleep deprivation messes with your brain and makes you extremely susceptible to disinformation. Not to mention the hormonal PPD/PPA afflicting many new moms might nudge them to listen to sources that they’d otherwise disregard. Fearmongering and guiltmongering memes designed to make mothers feel shitty for not bedsharing, babywearing, and breastfeeding are going to affect moms struggling with PPD and either influence their behavior, or just make them feel shitty.
I know what people will say to this article. They’ll tell me that they bedshare, babywear and breastfeed and it’s been great for them and how dare I mom-shame them. Cool! I’m glad it’s been great for you. There’s nothing wrong with babywearing (I would have loved to do it for longer, if it weren’t for my injury), breastfeeding is a great and valid choice (so is formula, although I breastfeed and love it) and while the AAP warns strongly against bedsharing, it’s not my place to judge moms for doing it. Your personal choices are not the problem. “Influencers” who peddle disinformation are the problem. If you have a platform, you simply have to be evidence-based. You cannot in good faith provide guidance to new mothers based on “mama instincts” when science disagrees with you. You cannot in good faith vilify disabled, working class, LGBTQ, and single moms and profit off of it with influencer deals. You can’t rail against “Big Pharma” because of memes you saw on social media, without doing the hard work yourself of reading peer-reviewed double blind studies.
Stop the disinformation. Stop misleading parents.
