It’s sad to say, but mom shaming is a real thing in today’s society.
As a working gal and busy mother of three, Abbie Fox knows a thing or two about the all-too real judgements that come with being a mom.
The eye behind the lens at Foxy Photography recently went viral after sharing a series of portraits she captured to bring attention to some of the “hot button” topics around mom shaming.
We see it everywhere in today’s culture: mom shaming for breastfeeding in public, for not breastfeeding at all, for buying foods with high fructose corn syrup, or for letting their toddler have a full-on meltdown in the middle of a grocery store.
Mom shaming is happening on the internet—to moms who don’t even know that they’re being shamed. And to moms whose intentions and actions are taken out of context and cruelly put on full blast without any insight into what actually might be happening.
I even heard a mommy-to-be talking about her own mom shaming experience in TJ Maxx the other day, after her mother-in-law had told her she “wasn’t actually a mom” if she had a c-section.
HOW has it come to this??
“Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.” John 7:24
Mom shaming is adult-bullying at its finest. And it needs to stop.
Having been the target of mom shaming herself, Abbie knows what it feels like to be judged by others when you’re only trying to do your best.
“In this technology world where we spend tons of time on Facebook and in Mommy groups we find one major thing every day… Mom Shaming,” Fox writes on Facebook. “People roll their eyes and say it doesn’t happen anymore but it is alive and well, and it can be brutal. When I was a first time mom I would cry [over] things people said to me, and the main culprit were other moms.”
In an effort to shed light on the issue, Abbie turned to her passion of photography, and enlisted the help of some adorable subjects to start a conversation about mom shaming.
“I was shamed for a lot of things, especially the feeding part,” Fox shared with the parenting site, Motherly. She explained that when she was a first time mom to her oldest son Maverick, nursing seemed nearly impossible. For six weeks the family did everything they could to get him to latch properly, seeing doctors, nurses and specialists. Fox says she cried herself to sleep every night.
“I was being told that I wasn’t a good mother [unless] I could breastfeed him. And this was actually coming from people I thought were my friends.”
But the mom shaming didn’t stop there. Although she found more success breastfeeding her next child, Georgia, Fox says there was always something for people to pass judgement on.
“I also got shamed for allowing my kids to watch TV at a young age, I got shamed for being a working mom and then when I became a stay-at-home mom, just running this business [I] got shamed for that as well,” she says.
Like the rest of us mamas, Fox is only trying to do her best.
