by Meredith Carlisle, LCSW, Perinatal Social Worker and Supervising Social Worker
Like much of the country, I was fixated on the Lindsay Clancy trial. During the day, I was steeling away to watch live court feed. At night, I listened to commentary by amateur investigators espousing inadequate inquiry. I listened while washing dishes or folding my family’s laundry. I asked other moms about it at our kids’ baseball games. On a group text with longtime colleagues, we deliberated the clinical particulars, trying to identify the tipping point or
mistakes.
This case has unequivocally poked at something in the American psyche, and American motherhood specifically. The details of the case are extreme and graphic, and yet not all of the data makes sense. Forensic evidence wasn’t collected; stated facts contradict each other; it’s messy. But mothers, by and large, were not calling for a guilty verdict. And as we now know, the jury was one juror shy of finding her not guilty by reason of insanity. Furthermore, one of the most unexpected turns in this case has been how moms rallied around Lindsay Clancy. The reason, whether we say it or not, is this all feels eerily familiar. Not the killing, of course, but the story of motherhood that preceded it: the exhaustion, the repeated requests for help, and the crushing reality that we have to get up and do it all again tomorrow. Moms are not ok. This case showed mothers something we recognize in our bones.
Nothing can change the most disturbing fact of this case: three children have been killed. Sitting with this is truly unbearable, and the instinct to fast-forward to assigning blame is understandable. The bad mother, the negligent doctors, the absent husband, the botched investigation. Punish, resolve, move on. It’s not wrong, just wildly incomplete. If we neglect, yet again, to zoom out for the wide implications, we are missing the systemic forest to scapegoat the tree. This trial shined a harsh spotlight on something mom’s have known for a long time: motherhood in American is not sustainable.
As a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, and a maternal mental health expert, I have been working directly with mothers for close to a decade. And as the mother of two tween boys, I live in the weeds of motherhood everyday. I understand the current landscape and pressures of modern motherhood first hand. While our understanding and treatment of perinatal mental illness has expanded quite a bit in the last decade, the underlying cultural expectations and attitudes toward mothers have not evolved nearly as far.
While the unspoken framework has always stipulated that motherhood is very challenging, the quiet but dominant implication is that motherhood is, at its core, joyful, fulfilling, and natural. Hardship, ambivalence, and anger are treated as occasional footnotes, resolved by reconnecting with the purposefulness of it all. That construct is fundamentally misleading and wildly erosive to the mental health of mothers.
Within this framework, there are three particularly costly fallacies. The first is maternal instinct, which holds that a mother simply knows what to do. That motherhood is natural, and thus a hardwired expertise materializes upon birthing a child. Needing help or not knowing is seen as a failure of the individual, not the system. The second is the interminably self-sacrificing mother, who eagerly loses herself in her family’s needs without complaint or regret. The roots of this are religious and recently rebranded by trad moms for the modern audience. Last, least, and perhaps the most consequential myth of our time: the supermom. A mother with a serious career who is still expected to be primary caregiver and household manager. All while remaining ambitious, regulated, and all-knowing.
What makes the supermom ideal inherently toxic is not that it’s culturally sanctioned. The call is coming from inside the house, as they say. Mothers believe it. In my practice, so much of the work is not correcting some external pressure or ideal; it’s helping women unlearn distortions they hold about themselves: that doing it all, without help and without needs, and to the highest degree, is what loving their children should look like. That it’s not only possible, it’s simply synonymous with motherhood.
The data bears this out. A Pew Research Study (2007) found that seven in ten Americans believed motherhood was more demanding than a generation ago. A JAMA Internal Medicine study tracking nearly 200,000 mothers found a 12% decline from 2016 to 2023 in mothers rating their own mental health as “excellent,” a fact that held across socioeconomic levels. Belief in intensive, child-centered parenting is now nearly universal across race and class (Ishizuka, Rhodes 2018), and parents are expected to be ‘highly involved, emotionally responsive and regulated, and providing individualized development’ to each child (Nomajuchi & Millie, 2020). Data from a time-use study (2013) showed that as mothers’ work hours have increased, so has direct childcare time. The demands have hit critical mass, and moms are feeling the squeeze.
None of this excuses what happened in this case. But when a tragedy of this scale occurs, we owe it to all those impacted to cast the widest net possible to piece to gather the contributing factors that help set the stage. Toxic motherhood demands everything of moms, and offers little structural support in return. We continue to ask mothers to give, to do, and to be more while steadily giving them less, and then we dare to be surprised when tragedy strikes.
We do not take the wellbeing of mothers seriously in this country. Full stop. We pretend we do, one Sunday a year. But ask any mother what she actually wants for Mother’s Day, and the honest answer is the same: a break, not to cook, not to be needed, not to pour from an empty cup. Progress has been slow, too slow. And the Lindsay Clancy trial is, whether we like it or not, a real-time case study in all we’ve been unwilling to fix.
The Motherhood Center is one of the nation’s premier non-hospital-based perinatal partial hospitalization programs, offering a continuum of care for mothers and birthing people from trying to conceive through postpartum.
If you or someone you care for is struggling with intrusive thoughts during the perinatal period, reach out to The Motherhood Center at 212-335-0034 or visit themotherhoodcenter.com.