Screaming on the Inside

The Unsustainability of American Motherhood

By: Jessica Grose

Narrated by: Suehyla El-Attar

In this timely and necessary book, New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose dismantles two hundred years of unrealistic parenting expectations and empowers today’s mothers to make choices that actually serve themselves, their children, and their communities

Close your eyes and picture the perfect mother. She is usually blonde and thin. Her roots are never showing and she installed that gleaming kitchen backsplash herself (watch her TikTok for DIY tips). She seamlessly melds work, wellness and home; and during the depths of the pandemic, she also ran remote school and woke up at 5 a.m. to meditate.

You may read this and think it’s bananas; you have probably internalized much of it.

Journalist Jessica Grose sure had. After she failed to meet every one of her own expectations for her first pregnancy, she devoted her career to revealing how morally bankrupt so many of these ideas and pressures are. Now, in Screaming on the Inside, Grose weaves together her personal journey with scientific, historical, and contemporary reporting to be the voice for American parents she wishes she’d had a decade ago.

The truth is that parenting cannot follow a recipe; there’s no foolproof set of rules that will result in a perfectly adjusted child. Every parent has different values, and we will have different ideas about how to pass those values along to our children. What successful parenting has in common, regardless of culture or community, is close observation of the kind of unique humans our children are. In thoughtful and revelatory chapters about pregnancy, identity, work, social media, and the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, Grose explains how we got to this moment, why the current state of expectations on mothers is wholly unsustainable, and how we can move towards something better.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Lots of complaining, without solutions

I understand the complaining, because parenting in today’s world is tough…but I just kept waiting for some solutions, or how she moved through these situations in a way that could be helpful to the reader.

So well said

I read many reviews before going into this reading. Some said that it touched on some issues but not all issues of being a mother. To this reviews I say…how would you touch on all of motherhood in one book? I think to appreciate the book you must be in a place of acceptance for what the author is saying. 7 years ago when I had three children under three as a full time bread winner for my family I would still have not been in a place to appreciate the validity of this book. Now, at 36, with four children, and with a career I am trying to grow-I identify with all the hardships of motherhood and identity discussed. I feel the stress of previous norms often vocalized through my own mother and my rejection of those norms feels ok after reading this book. So thank you for your dedicated research, and for humanizing and validating my feelings.

Wish it offered more solutions -- maybe follow up?

I definitely related to this book. I experienced much of the same as my entire "mom" experience from taking maternity leave, unequal shared childcare, no family support, lack of promotion in the workforce due to childcare constraints, and topped off with working full time + pandemic schooling. I wanted to love this book but I just felt it offered a lot of observations & history and not a lot of support in how to help fix it for yourself. I wish they focused on the mental health aspect more and possibly even how this impacts the divorce rates among couples, especially when the kids graduate high school. I left feeling more depressed and hopeless of my situation in a male dominated career field while being the primary care taker of 2 kids.

Wonderful, informative, and infuriating.

This book gave context to my personal observations and experience of the pressures of being a woman in the United States. The content of Screaming on the Inside is deeply important.

Left me hollow

This book was like a doughnut- so good at first, but leaves you wanting more and hungrier than before. Some of the facts presented are anecdotal at best.