The fear of motherhood: understanding anxiety about becoming a parent

One major decision in any adult’s life is choosing whether or not to have children. For some, it can be more a question of when than if; perhaps they’ve always imagined having kids or just known for their entire lives that motherhood is for them. For others, the pull to have one’s own children never really draws them in. 

But there’s also a large group of people who feel on the fence and can become quite stuck, with the question remaining painfully unresolved or avoided for years. They may find themselves moving back and forth between competing fantasies about the future, sometimes feeling certain and other times confused, rarely arriving at a consistent answer. 

For women, the decision to become a parent often feels more charged than for men, particularly for those who anticipate becoming the primary parent or would need to take significant time off work caring for a newborn. Beyond this, I’ve noticed that some women feel drawn to motherhood or family life, yet experience overwhelming anxiety or fear at the idea of becoming a mother. 

In this piece, I want to explore this emotional response to motherhood and consider where these anxieties might come from, drawing on psychoanalytic thinking. 

Past experience

We have all been babies and children ourselves at one point in our lives. And it’s difficult to understand what the experience of parenting, or being mothered, would be like beyond our own experiences with our parents. Of course, we can see examples from friends, colleagues or perhaps depictions of family in film and TV. But these are simply glimpses of other people’s experiences. Often our own understandings about how relationships and families work can only be formulated around our own experiences, shaped and developed over years through childhood and even our adult lives. 

For women, trying to imagine a future as a mother invariably gets linked with their experience with their own mothers or caregivers. Depending on what this relationship was like or is like now, it can have a significant impact on one’s view about what it might be like to be a mother. Perhaps questions arise such as “will I become like my mother, if I become one myself?” Or perhaps a question about whether your relationship with your own child will resemble the one you had with your parent. 

Loss of identity

Whilst it’s impossible to categorise maternal relationships in very one-dimensional ways, for the purposes of this piece it might be helpful to oversimplify things. 

So let’s take the example of a woman who had a very close and perhaps overbearing mother who is very involved in her daughter’s life.

Whilst there may well be positive aspects to having a very close relationship with one’s mother, it could also feel rather smothering or enmeshed. It could leave the daughter feeling that, around her mother, there’s no room for her own identity.  The boundaries between the two of them may get blurred and a sense of individuality or privacy is lost in a complicatedly close relationship. 

What this type of relationship might leave the daughter with is a feeling that if she were to have her own child, it too would be overwhelming or mean the end of her own identity and existence. I’ve heard women describe having a baby as feeling like the end of the world, or like a kind of death. I think relationships like these can sometimes foster the feeling that to have a meaningful relationship with your child involves abandoning one’s sense of a full identity or personhood. Perhaps it makes it difficult to imagine having boundaries with a child or see them as a separate person from you, despite there being a part of you wanting children. 

Emotional distance or indifference

Alternatively, we could think about a woman who had quite a distant or cold relationship with her mother. Perhaps she never felt fully loved or appreciated by her and considered herself an imposition or a burden on her mother’s happiness and life fulfilment. This woman may have developed a way of being very self-sufficient and not relying upon others, after learning early on that relationships aren’t there for mutual love and support. 

It’s possible that someone who’s had these kinds of experiences may associate becoming a mother with rejection, neglect or abandonment. It might be hard to imagine being affectionate or caring towards one’s own baby or child or make her question whether she will actually like them, even if she’s very different to that in her other relationships. She could see the baby as a burden to her independent life, or worry she might let them down, in a similar way to her own mother. 

The desire to have children may lead to panic and anxiety about whether the selfish and uncaring parts of herself may overpower her more caring and nurturing qualities. And deciding not to have children could represent a wish to avoid resurfacing unpleasant or complicated feelings associated with her own mother or childhood.   

Inconsistency and conflicting experiences

The reality for many women struggling with this fear is very likely to be a mixture of the above two simplistic scenarios. We all have varied experiences with our parents and our relationships with them rarely remain straightforward or fit neatly within a single dynamic. 

It’s possible that for many women experiencing a fear of motherhood, relationships with their own mothers or caregivers are (or were) very complex and conflicted. Perhaps their mother was incredibly caring but couldn’t show or demonstrate it in a direct way. Or possibly their mother was self-involved and uncaring, which was masked by being overly affectionate verbally, with little genuine care underneath. 

Furthermore, perhaps your experience of being parented was very inconsistent, with a combination of good and bad, making it hard to understand where you stand or how mother and baby relationships should work. This alone might lead to feeling overwhelmed or struggling to make a decision, with too much to process. 

Processing and change

Ultimately, the question of whether to become a mother may not resolve neatly into 100% certainty. It could remain something felt in ambivalence, with excitement, fear and uncertainty all rolled together. But rather than being a problem to solve quickly, it may be a decision that clarifies over time, through reflection, experience and a growing understanding of one’s self. 

In psychotherapy, these are the types of conflicts and issues that we work with to try and get to a place where uncertainty may not disappear entirely, but your feelings become understood well enough that whatever choice you make feels truly your own.