The problem is not the needs and requirements of young children. The problem is having to strive for an ideal within societal conditions that make meeting it impossible. Ultimately, the intensive mothering ideology serves those benefiting from the gender gap, those with money and power: in a society with a focus on competition, capital and accumulation, optimizing children fits right into neoliberal economics. There is an unnecessary, insidious cruelty to the societal construction of motherhood. An “invisible violence,” as Adrienne Rich puts it.
