The Married-Mom Advantage

Judging by its press since COVID began, you might think that married motherhood is a pathway to misery and immiseration. “Married heterosexual motherhood in America, especially in the past two years, is a game no one wins,” wrote Amy Shearn in one of many New York Times op-eds about the difficulties of marriage in the time of COVID. “Moms Are Not Okay: Pandemic Triples Anxiety and Depression Symptoms in New Mothers,” read a headline in Forbes. Bloomberg went so far as to suggest that family life was a financial dead end for women in an article headlined “Women Who Stay Single and Don’t Have Kids Are Getting Richer.”

The COVID-induced stresses of juggling work, child care, kids’ schooling, and lockdowns clearly made life difficult for many mothers, and navigating all of this with a spouse could bring its own challenges. “During the height of the pandemic, my mom-friend group chats roiled: I’m going to scream, typed women trying to do it all. I am seriously going to kill my husband and/or devour my young,” Shearn wrote. The New York Times parenting columnist Jessica Grose had a similarly dispiriting article, titled “America’s Mothers Are in Crisis,” pointing to a group of New Jersey mothers who had become so anxious during the pandemic that “they would gather in a park, at a safe social distance, and scream their lungs out.”

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