Alex Bollen for Motherdom: Breaking Free from Bad Science and Good Mother Myths
Thursday 20th March 2025
Topping & Company Booksellers of Bath, York Street, Bath, Somerset BA1 1NG
6.30pm
7pm
Join us in Bath for an evening with Alex Bollen to celebrate her debut book: Motherdom. Drawing from her expertise as a researcher and a postnatal practitioner, Bollen writes a fascinating and thoroughly evidenced book on the blaming, shaming and flimsy evidence behind the myths of motherhood.
When Alex Bollen had her first baby, the fear of being a bad mother made her guilty and anxious. A researcher with twenty years’ experience, she went looking for answers. To her surprise the studies she looked at were exaggerated and misrepresented in the media, forming the foundation for what she calls Good Mother myths. These myths are an assortment of narratives, ideologies and stereotypes, deployed to censure mothers and blame them for every societal ill.
Incensed by the way bad science is used to shame mothers, Alex Bollen decided to set the record straight. With meticulous research and keen insight, Motherdom exposes both the shaky science and unjustified prescriptions about how mothers should ‘naturally’ behave. Competing visions of birth – ‘natural’ versus ‘medical’ – mean women can be criticised whatever happens, raising the odds that birth will be a damaging, even deadly, experience. Mothers are judged and belittled whether they breast- or bottle-feed their babies. Bogus claims about brain development and dodgy attachment theories mean that whatever mothers do, it is never enough.
Alex Bollen is a researcher, writer and NCT Postnatal Practitioner. She qualified as a Postnatal Practitioner with the NCT in 2012, and became an NCT Excellent Practitioner in 2015. The different strands of her work inform and enhance each other, and the common thread which links them is understanding what makes people tick and how our contexts shape what we feel, say and do.