Hacker News Reader

Damn but this is true. The levels of expectation involved in being a mother is ridiculous (eavesdrop on mothers talking with each other and count the usage of the phrase: "I know {I am|it makes me} a bad mother, but ..." followed by a completely innocuous parenting anecdote), and the bar for "good dad" is to be slightly more involved with your kids than a character from Mad Men.

View on HN

That will never change, because it's being driven by female intrasexual competition. Men simply don't compete with each other in the same way.

Are you saying that these women subconsciously set the bar for being a good mother unreasonably high by judging their own behavior worse than it is, and thus signal a superior ability to care for a child to the other mothers?

Couldn't it instead rather be signaling to conforming to the modern idea that child raising is an oh so important task?

Child rearing was always considered an important task. The particulars have changed over the years, but the idea isn't new at all.

I don't think it's so much that women are subconsciously setting the bar too high. Rather, as in any competition the level of the bar gets set in the aggregate. Some combination of the media and their social circle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com