Raquel Dancho: Motherhood deserves a place of equal honour

Being a mother should be treated as equally as choosing a career, writes Conservative MP Raquel Dancho. Photo by kieferpix /Getty Images/iStockphoto

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Recently in the Post, Kate Marland wrote on the corrosive effects of a culture that diminishes the importance of motherhood. That article was a meaningful contribution to our discourse — a starting pistol for a long-overdue discussion.  

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The decline of family formation is one of the defining social issues of our time, and yet it’s rarely discussed. However, while the piece is right that for a generation of millennial and Gen Z women, having children has too often been treated as something that competes with freedom, ambition, and personal fulfillment rather than being a meaningful part of life — I’d put the roots of this problem a little differently. It’s less about Carrie Bradshaw or Hannah Horvath, and more about a generational pendulum swing.  

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Boomer women were the first generation to truly have the option of career and/or family after generations of women who did not. Many understandably raised their daughters with a strong message shaped by a new world of freedom and choice: be financially independent, build a career, don’t rely on a man, and don’t let motherhood limit your options. Pop culture reflected and encouraged that message, but didn’t create it.  

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The result was a generation of women handed a powerful vision of independence and career primacy — one that brought real opportunity and freedom, but also came at a cost: motherhood lost status.  

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For millennials and Gen Z, what many of us absorbed wasn’t just that we could have careers — it was that in our 20s, we should prioritize education, career, travel, fun, financial security and self-development first, with family to come later — if at all.  

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Then our 30s arrived, and many women discovered that the biological clock is real: fertility declines, energy is lower, relationships are more complicated, and trying to “have it all” is far harder than we were led to believe.  

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And of course culture isn’t the only factor. Layer on housing costs, affordability pressures and high taxes, an ultra-competitive job market, workplaces still largely built around a one-income/one-full-time-parent model, and a culture that has not prepared enough men for the realities of husbandhood and fatherhood (another equally important issue, rarely discussed), and it’s no surprise so many women feel torn, delayed, and burnt out. 

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Marland makes an important point: a life ordered entirely around material success is not, for many people, a deeply fulfilling one.  

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Personally, no one — not school, university, pop culture, or even my own mother — ever taught me that motherhood might become the most meaningful part of my life. Like many women, I had to discover that myself. Historically, that is a remarkable shift: for most of human history, motherhood and childbearing were understood as central to family and societal continuity. In much of the modern West, by contrast, motherhood is often treated as secondary to other forms of achievement and self-development.