Sanctimonious Moms Yearn for Performance Reviews

Breast vs. Formula: A Many Such Takes Special Edition

Another day, another thing for moms on Twitter to shame each other for. Honestly, it’s getting a little repetitive, since it feels like we just had this conversation. And if it’s not this, it’s daycare or sleep training. I actually had an article on sleep training planned for later this week but thanks to you loons I’m going to have to publish that later, as to not oversaturate my content with mom stuff. You’ll be happy to know, however, that this is not a deep dive into the differences in breastmilk or formula. I’m not even really going to be talking about that at all, because we’ve heard enough. I’m talking about what it represents, and why the shaming almost always seems to come from one specific corner of Twitter.

Anyway, the discourse started with this tweet:

The person who posted this later clarified that she was exclusively trying to shame moms who didn’t even attempt to breastfeed but it still begs the question: to what end? Why do this at all?

This stuff always activates something within me, even when it’s not shaming me or anything I did. In fact, I breastfed my first in a pretty textbook-perfect way (exclusively until age two) and I still breastfed my second, although she never quite took to it, and eventually she wound up combo fed. I still wouldn’t call myself a “formula mom” and the fact that I initially chose to breastfeed both times means I acknowledge that breastmilk is technically “superior.” I guess I just don’t think it’s superior enough for me to care that some women don’t do it.

If the concern is about the babies, there are a million things that are worse for babies than formula or sleep training—malaria, poverty, starvation, parental drug use, you name it. But somehow, we keep getting stuck on relatively inconsequential things like whether a baby’s bassinet is in your room or their room. I don’t mean to be that person who’s like, “How dare you complain about your weekend plans falling through when the Earth is literally burning.” Multiple things are allowed to be bad, and sometimes it feels pointless to post about the obvious bad things. But these silly topics come up so often that there’s a reason so many people prefer to post about them compared to any other topic. This should be obvious, but it’s all driven by insecurity, on all sides. I feel insecure when any mom is attacked for her choices, even when they’re different from mine, because I do feel insecure about certain aspects of my parenting so I take all mom-shaming personally. But I guess I have a hard time understanding the motivation on the pro-shaming side.

One thing I’ve noticed about mom-shaming discourse is that the party doing the shaming is almost always a particular type of mom. When people talk about mom-shaming they say things like “Breast or formula feed, daycare or stay at home…you just can’t win!” and granted, there are formula-feeding, daycare-using, sleep-training moms who shame those in the breast/SAHM/bedsharing category (and yes, I understand there are crossovers between these two “categories”) but let’s be real: unscientifically, about 93% of shaming comes from the latter cohort, usually self described as “crunchy.” Have I seen absolutely repugnant tweets from Snoo-using working moms shaming crunchy SAHMs? Absolutely, and it hurt when I was a SAHM. I still think it’s extremely nasty and uncalled for! But not only is it the minority, I’ve literally never seen any content made in 2024 shaming women for breastfeeding. Your boomer aunt doesn’t count.

Now, I know if anyone in that crunchy cohort is reading this, they’ll be quick to tell me that they don’t shame anyone. That’s great, but actually, I don’t think most moms engage in any shaming at all. Most moms are perfectly fine people who get along. In real life, I have friendly acquaintances who are SAHMs, WFH or part-time working moms, high-powered executive moms, liberals, communists, conservatives, gooners, whatever. We all get along. Most people are normal! I just think that when you see shaming online, it’s usually in one direction instead of the other. I know we like to be PC about this stuff and claim that every mom gets it equally, but that’s actually not true at all.

So I guess the question is: why is one particular group more likely to shame than the other?