How motherhood helps women expand their identities and perspectives

Motherhood is a major transition. Society tends to highlight the difficult parts of raising a child, from sleep deprivation to lack of personal time. Even research about parenting often focuses on what can go wrong. Yet a growing body of psychological studies suggest motherhood, like any other challenge, can facilitate profound personal growth.

Liz Hall, PhDopens in new window, a professor of psychology at Biola University in La Mirada, California, found in her research that becoming a mother can expand a woman’s identity and perspective, developing new personal qualities—many of which can transfer to other arenas of her life. Below, learn more about the potential positive transformation of mothering and how psychologists can better support parents to grow in the process. Also important: The identity and generativity changes for parents are also applicable for nonparents.

The phrase we use in our 2015 paper on the topic is that “motherhood expands the selfopens in new window.” It can create a structure that allows women to reorganize their identities. For example, there’s a high need for perspective-taking that occurs when children are in their infancy. Parenting a baby, a human with its own needs, often causes parents to loosen their identity boundaries and identify with the child. They’re taken out of their own perspective of the world and forced to see things differently.

This is beneficial for child-rearing, but building new traits also expands beyond motherhood. In our study, participants talked about motherhood helping them develop an increased sense of empathy not just for their children, but also for the world at large. They also reported developing compassion and awareness of others’ needs, even those different from them.

This expansion of self can also increase resilience. Women don’t only see themselves as a spouse or an employee, but also as a mother. So when things go wrong in one area of their life, they aren’t so shaken.

The empathy and perspective-taking gained in motherhood apply in any relationship. A lot of people go through life thinking everyone sees the world how they do. But with motherhood, you’re invested in someone who has their own needs, characteristics, and personality. You have to open up your eyes to the fact that your way of seeing the world is not the only way. If you have the capacity to incorporate that into the rest of your life, there’s a greater ability to be attentive to the needs of the people around you and respond accordingly.

These things can be valuable in women’s careers as well. All work requires interpersonal skills, and an awareness and attentiveness to others’ needs in the moment means you can interact more effectively. Through motherhood, mothers may also become more attentive and sensitive to the fact that others have needs outside of work.

In a study, one of my students found that feeling a sense of meaning can improve resilience in people’s lives. So those who feel more productive and purposeful in both their families and workspace have more capacity to respond to challenges in each domain. The more our various identities become integrated parts of ourselves, rather than jagged fragments that don’t fit well, the less internal conflict we will experience. If mothers feel being a parent is part of their sense of self rather than just a role they play, they may experience less of that feeling of being pulled in different directions all the time.

It really helps when the woman has some degree of self or identity developed beforehand—some level of her preparedness for having children. The other part that helps expand women’s identities in motherhood is a supportive environment. They should have people around them who are accepting of their struggles as they try to figure out who they are as parents and how they are going to incorporate motherhood into their identities.

Pressure and expectations to parent a certain way can be a barrier to this identity expansion, especially when women feel they aren’t measuring up. There’s been some good work on how the motherhood ideology our culture has imposed is the most extreme and unrealistic that has ever existed throughout history.

We all have our own motherhood ideologies. Most of us, including psychologists, have never thought about them intentionally. When we listen to patients, we may be unintentionally judging them and their actions against our own motherhood ideologies, for better or for worse.

We as mothers often moralize choices we make: what we feed our children, whether we breastfeed, if we decide to go back to work full time. It’s difficult not to moralize our decisions, because we think the well-being of our children depends on it. Psychologists should be self-aware enough to recognize their gut instincts about what patients should be doing.

There’s also the cultural aspect of parenting. We’re just starting to grapple clinically with how culture influences how people mother. Our own research was done with a primarily White, middle-class sample. We should try to understand how someone’s culture may be impacting how they parent.

You don’t have to be a birth parent to share in these benefits. For example, we had more than one mother in our sample who had an adopted child and they showed the same type of benefits as the birth mothers. And fathers can benefit from this identity shift as wellopens in new window. But psychology also supports the idea that those who don’t have children can grow in similar ways. Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development highlights generativity—nurturing something that will outlast you—as an important accomplishment of adulthood, and there are many ways to become generative.

It’s too easy in our society to keep a distance from people and to be self-sufficient and autonomous. It’s important to incorporate elements of caring for other people, whether caring for an aging relative, volunteering for a cause you care about, or caring for a pet. Pouring yourself into someone else can lend a sense of purpose and meaning we can all benefit from. It also ensures your identity isn’t just wrapped up in one thing in life, like your job or marriage. Any time you can find other things that are important to you and invest deeply in those things, especially relating to another person or people, you can expand your identity in a way that helps you grow and respond to challenges.