The singer Chappell Roan recently made headlines for her take on motherhood: “All of my friends who have kids are in hell. I actually don’t know anyone who’s, like, happy and has children at this age.” Roan, along with other social media influencers, would be surprised by research that consistently shows that married mothers are among one of the happiest cohorts in society.
It’s all too common that motherhood, when it is not denigrated, is treated as a private matter — personal, sentimental, and peripheral to the “serious” work of the world. Even when celebrated, it is celebrated for rooting the children in the bedrock of a homestead, for ordering a singular cell of society but not its whole.
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