“This is not to say that there aren’t assholes who are moms; there are many such cases.”
I hate the “judgy mom.”
✨ Hate Read Season 2 is brought to you by the legendary champion of indie media herself, Ruth Ann Harnisch, of the Harnisch Foundation. ✨
There is a mythic creature around which a sizable part of today’s parenting-chat revolves, a fictional character without whom much of what many parents say and do would simply have no meaning: the “judgy mom.” Everyone talks about the judgy mom but no one is her. She haunts nightmares, she animates defensive tyrades both on and off the internet. We imagine her staring us down from across the room while we let our toddlers watch the iPad at the restaurant. We worry about what she’d think when we leave the house without a little hat for the baby. While we leave the daycare center to go to work, serenaded by the sound of our toddler wailing, we silently plead for her forgiveness. She makes “cool” moms feel smug about being cool sometimes, and guilty for being cool other times. It’s wild how much power she wields, especially since she doesn’t exist.
This is not to say that there aren’t assholes who are moms; there are many such cases. But something interesting happens when an asshole becomes a mom. They become harder to ignore, and their strong opinions and obtuse behavior acquire a new moral heft, simply because they’re moms. People start to refer to them as “judgy,” which confers an implied legitimacy on them that they did not earn. By complaining about them we conjure them into existence. Why can’t we just write them off as assholes and keep it moving?
It’s a lot easier to ignore “judgy moms” when you realize that they’re just assholes, who are probably also a little bit stupid. They are not interesting enough to be gossipped about. They do not deserve a lot of snark on Reddit or Facebook. I suppose you could offer them your pity, but that’s as far as your emotional engagement should extend. Assholes who become “judgy moms” are small-minded, provincial people. Like children, they can’t imagine that perspectives outside their own exist at all. They believe that strangers would benefit from their feedback, which is an embarrassing self-delusion whether or not you have children. They don’t usually have many friends.
Why is this uninteresting straw man such a central figure in parenting culture? There is plenty of blame to go around. Raising young children is hard in our culture — the reasons are very well documented, I assume you’re familiar with them — and parents understandably sometimes want to feel heroic, or at the very least like they’re the good-guy character in some kind of narrative. This requires a flesh-and-blood villain, so we press the nearest uptight schlepper into that role. We allow this person, the highly feared judgy mom, to make us feel terrible about all kinds of things, which creates heightened emotional stakes around our choices and casts us in the role of hero. This premise — “someone is judging me, and yet I am innocent” — has become the basis for almost everything that anyone says about parenting. It’s boring! There are so many other ways of relating to each other.
Of course the staying power of the “judgy mom” is also the internet’s fault. Moms were among the early enthusiastic adopters of blogging, and many of them went on to be popular personalities on Instagram and elsewhere. Appealing to their audiences as kindred spirits in a world populated by judgy moms was a way to build community in the early days of social media. It later became a way to be “relatable” among the relentlessly polished momfluencers of the late-aughts. But today, the “judgy mom” is a character who offers very little in the way of community-building utility or good jokes. She’s a construct whose time has passed.
Some moms reading this might be thinking, This is gaslighting!!! There is a judgy mom in my life, and she’s real! To this I would say: Perhaps this is a matter of narrative framing. Feeling judged is a subject position that people are primed for before they even have children. It’s become part of the cosplay of contemporary parenting: “I feel so judged.” We complain about judgy moms to signal to each other that we’re the normal ones. Feeling judged is a mantle you get to wear when you’re feeling exhausted and burnt out — it’s a personality for a period of your life when you’re scared your personality has dissolved completely. It’s understandable, to an extent, to want to cast a judgy mom in the role of your nemesis. To ignore her would be to forego a rare opportunity to feel righteous indignation. But after a certain point, when the judgy mom has come to occupy too much space, you have become part of the problem. It’s time to admit that she’s just an asshole. Call her by that name, and free yourself.
—Judy Rude
ICYMI:
As a mom, I love this reframe. But I actually think this goes back further, to a time when women's social position and power revolved even more around the domestic space and being deemed a failure as a homemaker, mother, wife, etc. led to more tangible consequences to your status or acceptance by the community. It's hard to shake that sense that it matters when your mother-in-law or the most annoying PTA mom makes a judgy comment, because we've been socialized to feel that it does, because historically it did. (I notice that men don't have this history, and don't feel this much anxiety around other parents judging them.)
my mom was a divorcée in india in a time when no one was. the shit she had to put up with was real, societal, bitter and brutal judgement, and it came from men more than women. over the years i have watched other moms make digs at her, but they almost always come off as insecure to me. “oh, your daughter works overseas? i guess she’s never coming back now. you’ve lost her for good. shame” and my mom would go like, “yeah i fucking worked my ass off to send her there, she better stay away.”