Tween-related maternal depression: what about family size?

Time for a short mental-health blog post while I work on a different, longer one behind the scenes.

This article at NPR is going around on Facebook today: "Being Mom to a Middle Schooler Can Be The Toughest Gig of All:"

Many women assume that the first year of motherhood is the most precarious time for their mental health. But a recent study published in Developmental Psychology finds that maternal depression is actually most common among mothers of middle school children as they catapult into the tween years.

...[The study authors] discovered that the years surrounding the onset of adolescence are among the most difficult times for mothers. During this period of transition, women can feel lonely, empty and dissatisfied with their mothering roles. The researchers also found that compared to mothers of infants, these women experience the lowest levels of maternal happiness and are even more stressed out than new parents.

Luthar says that tweener moms reported feeling the most unhappy or depressed when their children are in middle school, but that the transition begins when children are 10 years old. Parents of teens are actually happier than parents of middle schoolers.

Two of my five children have already passed from tween years into teen years, and my third is entering that stage. I am familiar with how tricky it can be to adjust my parenting style towards each individual child in the years between ten and thirteen -- it encompasses a big change in autonomy, skills, and responsibility. They go from being baby-sat to being babysitters; they learn to walk to the store to buy a carton of milk; they learn to cook dinner, to manage their own schoolwork time, to make judgments about the media they consume. There is a lot going on, for sure, and it is not always easy. Sometimes I have despaired of my own competence -- whether I could figure out the right balance between guidance and self-guidance, between rules and freedom, for each young person.

But I was struck by one big difference between my experience and the experiences of the women who were profiled in the article:

I have never been totally immersed in my own feelings of incompetence. And that is, I believe, because I never have and never will have all my children going through those years at once.

When my very first child turned ten, I also had a seven-year-old, a four-year-old, and a baby. You might think that this would be tough, and of course I was very busy and frequently overwhelmed by how much there was to do. I had feelings of incompetence. But I wasn't paralyzed by feelings of incompetence (as if I had time for that) -- I believe that's because I got to feel competent at the same time.

Raising a ten-year-old was hard because it was new to me. And I was leery about my seven-year-old turning eight, because I remembered it being difficult to teach an eight-year-old. But at the same time as I was struggling to figure those out, I had the privilege of mothering a four-year-old who was utterly delightful, as all four-year-olds have been in my experience. And I was carrying around on my hip in a wrap sling a beautiful eight-month-old nursling that year, too -- lucky me, because I have always felt at the height of my powers with those nursing babies. Despite having a cerebral and analytical approach to life in general, I always felt able to tap into an intuitive, biological mothering style, towards babies, that has rarely steered me wrong during the first three years of life.

From the article:

Brizendine says that for most women, estrogen and progesterone levels start decreasing after age 42. With estrogen depletion, women may feel less nurturing. As a result, they can feel more agitated with themselves, their partners and their children. Additionally, mothering tweens doesn't offer the hormonal reward — the oxytocin "love rush" — that caring for little children provides.

But see, I am 42, and I am still caring for little children. I always wanted to have a teenager and a baby at the same time, and I got that. I got all the benefits of oxytocin (am still getting it -- my three-year-old nurses a couple of times a day) at the same time as I get to teach physics and set teens up with drivers' ed.

Just as things were only starting to get tricky at the upper end of my family, I was deeply immersed in parenting children during the years when I feel most competent and powerful. At least given that I did not suffer from any clinical depression, I could never have been fooled into thinking I was a bad mother in general, even if I might have wondered if I was any good at this older-kid thing.

I am looking forward to the mirror image of my experience at the end of my childraising years. When my very youngest becomes a tween, I will not have any babies or preschoolers to enjoy at the same time; but I will still have two teenagers in the house and grown-up children to enjoy as well. I will have, I hope, the perspective of having ferried several kids to the other side.

In short, for me -- grown woman that I am -- there are no "years surrounding the onset of adolescence." Each child will have his or her tween years, but I will not have any years that are all-tween, all-the-time. I could be wrong about the causality, but it seems like the broad age-span of my offspring has helped me feel less incompetent, less of a good-mom impostor, at every stage than I might have otherwise.

Smaller families and shorter periods of child-raising have accompanied many changes in living standards that are regarded generally as positive, I know, but there are unlooked-for consequences to all social change. I wonder if the feeling of "I totally don't know what I am doing here" is more widespread than it used to be when four kids wasn't a completely ridiculous number of children to have.

 

 

 

Comments

[Jamie]

YES. This is SO TRUE.

[Jenny]

I think there is something to it. Sally Thomas said something about this once. That having tweens and teenagers is easier when you still have a baby who loves you.

Also I think is somewhat related to the horror reaction when you tell people you have more than the usual number of children. They recoil as if you have four or five or six two year olds, all at once, which isn't usually true. People who only experience one age at a time have trouble imagining having a range of ages at once.

It's kinda sad that so many people go through all the hard parts of parenting and then never get to apply their expertise with confidence. It's all uphill, all the time.

[Melanie B]

"It's kinda sad that so many people go through all the hard parts of parenting and then never get to apply their expertise with confidence. It's all uphill, all the time."

That is so true. It's nice feeling super confident with the fourth and fifth children in a way I never did with the first three. Anthony and Lucy seem like easier children, but how much of that is my own competence and confidence?

[Jenny]

I've thought of this, too--my oldest (twins) are 10, and I can see the beginnings of puberty. At the same time, I've got an 8, a 7, a 3, a 1, and will have a new one in June. You're totally spot-on with the whole "even if I didn't feel as confident with the 10-year-old, I *did* have the confidence of nursing and toddler-raising!" thing. Like you, there's no way I have time to be "paralyzed" with anything, given the schooling/cooking/laundry/general caretaking I have to accomplish each day!