By Basirat Razaq-Shuaib
Mummy, what do you want for Mother’s Day?” My children asked me recently. This is a familiar question that echoes in homes across cultures and continents. Every Mother’s Day, storefronts and various media platforms are plastered with platitudes praising mothers’ “strength” and “sacrifice.” We call them superheroes and celebrate their resilience with cards, flowers, chocolates and fancy gifts, but behind these compliments lie a troubling expectation: that mothers should endure systemic neglect without complaint. Afterall, they are lucky to be mothers and are doing the most virtuous and rewarding job in the world – nurturing children, families and societies. In this article, I show how this narrative is not harmless. It is a trap.
The Resilience Trap
While motherhood is amazing and its celebration commendable, the unending demand for resilience from mothers is not a gift but an alibi for systemic negligence. Resilience, which is commonly understood as the ability to dynamically adapt to adversity and recover from its negative impact, is a human trait that is both valuable and necessary. However, when society praises mothers for surviving hardships it created, enabled and/or failed to address, resilience becomes a trap, an injustice and a form of exploitation. This exploitation manifests clearly, for instance, in unpaid care work, which continues to underpin economies while remaining largely invisible and uncompensated. The praise of maternal resilience helps normalise this imbalance. Suffering is reframed as love. Endurance and survival are mistaken for choice.
When Resilience Becomes Exploitation
This distinction matters. When adversities happen and people respond creatively to the challenges they face, resilience serves a strength building tool that helps in the navigation of life’s uneven terrains. However, where individuals must repeatedly compensate for institutional negligence simply to survive, this is where exploitation sets in. It is this second form that dominates many mothers’ lives, particularly in contexts where state and social support are limited.
In my recent study involving mothers of children with Autism and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in Lagos, Nigeria, for instance, it was found that the mothers were altering the negative education trajectories that their children were predisposed to through forced resilience. Mothers were founding schools when the education system failed their children and setting up therapy centres due to lack of professional support. They were also re-educating themselves to become special needs experts and providing peer support networks absent from official channels. This forced resilience resulted in significant benefits for the children and broader society but came at huge costs to the mothers.
The Cost of Forced Resilience
The costs of this forced resilience were profound. Due to the intensive level of care required for their children and the absence of systemic structures of support, mothers were faced with higher levels of social and economic pressures, multifaceted psychological stress and lower levels of well-being. From burnout to self-doubt, career truncation and what the research identifies as “lost aspiration grief” – the mourning of careers and identities sidelined by caregiving, the psychological toll is well-documented. In the same study, though all the mothers started out in professional careers, most had to leave because of caring for a child with a disability. In the case of one of the mothers who remained in a professional career, a career advancement offer was revoked when she requested support for her child’s schooling in the new position. These experiences are rarely captured in leadership statistics or gender parity debates, yet they help explain why progress remains uneven.
Economically, this pattern also feeds into the well-documented motherhood penalty, where wages stagnate and career trajectories narrow for women once they start bearing children. Sadly, for many who praise mothers’ resilience, what gets missed is the toll that resilience often takes on individuals. The well of resources individuals draw from for support is not limitless.
This is particularly important within Global South contexts like Nigeria where adversity does not have a definite starting point within a person’s experience and can last for extended periods. Within these contexts, it has been argued that though individuals may demonstrate resilience, women are especially vulnerable to the exhaustion associated with repeated reliance on their resilience due to gender-related factors such as caregiving.
While the case study in this article has focused on mothers of children with disabilities, the underlying dynamics extend to many others, including single mothers and women caring for elderly relatives. The form may differ, but the logic remains the same.
A New Mother’s Day Demand
The more mothers are praised for coping, the less urgency there appears to be to change the conditions that demand such coping in the first place. This is the paradox of resilience: the better individuals endure, the easier it becomes for institutions to remain unchanged. Endurance is mistaken for adequacy. Survival is treated as success. Flowers, cakes and spa vouchers are great gestures, but they do not address the structures that make relentless resilience necessary. If Mother’s Day is to mean something beyond sentiment, it must also prompt collective responsibility. So next Mother’s Day, instead of just platitudes, let us consider:
Voting for policies that make “resilience” less necessary and make sure they are implemented.
Improving workplace provisions that support mothers. Paid parental leave, affordable and inclusive childcare, flexible working arrangements, well-being and mental health therapy, insurance cover for child disabilities, workplace re-integration for mothers and disability accommodation are all great examples of the things mothers would value.
Listening when mothers say they are overwhelmed without dismissing their distress as ingratitude, rant or weakness.
Dismantling cultural and patriarchal barriers that construct mothers in deficit and “self-sacrificing only” terms. We must stop conflating suffering with love.
Committing to collective action. Men, women, everyone needs to work together to make things better. Sustainable change requires shared responsibility across gender, institutions, and society.
Mothers do not need more praise for their endurance. They need systems, structures and allies to make that forced endurance unnecessary. True support does not romanticise suffering, it works to end it.
Dr Basirat Razaq-Shuaib is the founder of The Winford Centre for Children and Women and The Blooming Mum.
