Motherhood Smotherhood

Fighting Back Against the Lactivists, Mompetitions, Germophobes, and So-Called Experts Who Are Driving Us Crazy

By: JJ Keith

Narrated by: Karen White

What's the first thing a woman does when she thinks she might be pregnant? She Googles. And it goes downhill from there. While the internet is full of calming and cheerily supportive articles, it's also littered with hyper-judgmental message boards and heaps of contradictory and scolding information. Motherhood Smotherhood takes parents through the trenches of new parenting, warning listeners of the pleasures and perils of mommy blogs, new parent groups, self-described "lactivists", sleep fascists, incessant trend pieces on working versus non-working mothers, and the place where free time and self-esteem goes to die: Pinterest (back away from the hand-made flower headbands for baby!).

JJ Keith interweaves discussions of what "it takes a village" really means (hint: a lot of unwanted advice from elderly strangers who may have grown up in actual villages) and a take-down of the rising "make your own baby food" movement (just mush a banana with a fork!) with laugh-out-loud observations about the many mistakes she made as a frantic new mother with too much access to high speed internet and a lot of questions. Keith cuts to the truth - whether it's about "perfect" births, parenting gurus, the growing tide of vaccine rejecters, the joy of blanketing Facebook with baby pics, or germophobia - to move conversations about parenting away from experts espousing blanket truths to amateurs relishing in what a big, messy pile of delight and trauma having a baby is.

©2014 JJ Keith (P)2014 Audible Inc.

This woman gets me!

I have read a few books like this and so far this is my favorite. She was fun and super relatable and if she lived in Colorado we wpuld be bffs

I couldn’t have said it better myself

Generally a hard no from me in listening to audio books not narrated by the author, but the narrator did a fantastic job! An easy, quick (1.8 speed), comical listen. 👌🏼

Judging The Way Others Parent: The Book.

Sum of the book:

“Raise your kids however you want, but if you don’t do it the way I do it you’re an idiot”.

She starts off by essentially saying there’s no wrong way to parent, but goes on to bash parents who “go the extra mile”: from saying natural child birth isn’t worth it because she didn’t have a magical experience, to belittling parents who make breast milk jewelry, and making fun of parents who make their own baby food because she personally thought it was too much work. I don’t do most of the things she spends time making fun of, yet I was quite offended over her attitude, “do what you want, but not really. It’s dumb. I even tried some of it because it worked well for others, but it wasn’t for me, so now I get annoyed when people talk about it.”

In a nutshell: “It’s easier to do formula, epidurals, manufactured baby food, and outsource any effort you can to corporations, therefore it’s dumb to do anything else. Why would you even waste your time.”

The narrator did a good job reading, but that is all I can positively say about this book.