Is Motherhood Hard Everywhere, or Just in America?

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When I travel abroad I become a creepy parenting anthropologist. I watch (stalk) other parents. I chart the actions of their children. I clock the snacks they give them, how they handle a tantrum, whether anyone’s using an iPad. I point out things to Nick Aster (or text him when I’m away) like an unwell person: “Look at that playground. It’s WAY better than ours isn’t it?” or “Did you see that? That five-year-old just ordered grilled octopus and then said thank you to the waiter without being prompted,” “Is that two-year old really wearing tie sneakers? WTF!”

we once put a squid in front of Charlie in Sicily but he had no teeth

In Europe especially, it all seems better. There are more public parks (often within close proximity to cafes and bars). More child-sized toilets. More restaurants that don’t look at you like you’ve brought in an angry badger when you show up with a toddler.

an actual bar in Barcelona

I remember being in Sicily when my first baby, Charlie, was three months old. I ducked into the bathroom of a little restaurant to change him. A man followed me in, and I immediately tensed up. My brain went full American: this is it, he’s going to murder me and my baby in this bathroom. But instead, he opened a cabinet, pulled out a pillow, fluffed it, and made me a changing table on a windowsill. Then he brought me a glass of red wine. He just wanted me to have a comfortable place to change my baby and something to drink. No big deal. Just a little casual kindness. Nothing transactional. Just the bare minimum of decency.

Plus, the kids often seem calmer, more civilized, less feral.

So I ask myself, over and over: Is parenting easier in other countries?

That’s why I was so excited to talk to Abigail Leonard, whose new book Four Mothers actually answers these questions. She followed four real women across Japan, Finland, Kenya, and the U.S. through their first year of motherhood and asked what’s working? What’s broken? And what, no matter where you are, just really, truly sucks?

Before we get into all that we do indeed have to stop pretending that motherhood in America is just a little hard. That it’s a phase. A season. A thing we can fix with a the right stroller, a weekend away, one of those Infrared masks that makes you look like Hannibal Lecter, Matcha tea, or a very expensive app that tracks our baby’s poops in real time (I used this app once and it was so shitty….pun intended).

Motherhood in America isn’t just hard. It’s rigged.

We have no paid leave. No affordable childcare. No national health system. No protected time to rest. And what we do have is a culture that shames women for needing help, for outsourcing, for not finding this all “magical” as fuck.

What Abby found is that the way caregivers are treated in America is absolutely broken. But so is our culture. And we also aren’t alone in failing mothers in new and inventive ways.

Finland gives you a box of baby supplies, paid leave, universal health care, and a social contract that says, “We actually want you to survive this.” Japan offers postpartum rest and state-run community centers... but also no babysitters, few epidurals, and the deeply held belief that a “good” mother never, ever leaves her child.

Abby did find that across the board, mothers feel like they don’t know what they’re doing all over the world. They question themselves. They worry they’re screwing everything up. The difference is that in some places, a nurse will tell you, “Take care of the mother so she can take care of the baby.” And in others, you Google "why am I crying all the time" and get an ad for waterproof mascara.

Abby’s book doesn’t offer a solution since this isn’t a problem women should have to fix. But it does offer clarity and solidarity and proof that there are a million ways to mother and a million ways that our lives as parents can be improved.

I pulled a bunch of my favorite moments from our conversation. AND I am doing a giveaway of Abby’s book for full subscribers. Just comment MAMA below to enter. (U.S. only sorry Canada, still love you).

Jo: Talk to me about these women you spent a year with and the issues they faced when their babies came out of their bodies.
Abby: It was both universal and completely different, sort of depending on where I was. So I went to Japan, Finland, Kenya, and then I profiled a woman in the US who lives in Utah. This whole project started because I had my own three children in Japan. I moved to Japan when I was six months pregnant with my first, which was sort of a wild leap of faith. So my first year of motherhood was actually in Tokyo. I was navigating both new motherhood and a new culture, a new language, a new way of raising kids.

The woman in Kenya and the woman in the US said pretty much verbatim, in the moments after they had the kid, their response was, 'I cannot believe I am someone's mother.' That totally resonated with me—just that shock of the transition.

The difference between Japan and Finland was really interesting. They both have generous policies, long paid leave, universal daycare, but Finland is more egalitarian. Fathers are really involved. In Japan, it’s still the women doing all the caregiving, even though most women work.