Episode 11: You're Doing It Wrong!

Whether you are trying to become pregnant, working on a birth plan, have a newborn, adopted a baby or older child, or had complications through any of the steps leading to motherhood, ALL mothers are faced with an onslaught of information from every direction. Information from family, from friends, from medical professionals, from the internet, and from media “influencers” telling them what to do and where they are making mistakes. Who here has been told, “You’re Doing It Wrong”? Or perhaps worse, who has told themselves “I’m Doing It Wrong”?


In this episode of the Mighty Littles Podcast, I have the pleasure of talking with Margaret Quinlan and Bethany Johnson, the authors of “You’re Doing it Wrong! Mothering, Media, and Medical Expertise”. Margaret Quinlan is an associate professor in the department of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She explores how communication creates, resists, and transforms knowledge about bodies. Bethany L. Johnson is an instructor in history and an associate member to the graduate faculty and research affiliate faculty in the department of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She studies how science, medicine, and health discourses are framed and reproduced by institutions and individuals from the nineteenth century to the present.

Their book, You’re Doing it Wrong! investigates the storied history of expertise around mothering in the media, from the newspapers, magazines, doctors’ records, and personal papers of the nineteenth century to today’s websites, Facebook groups, and Instagram feeds. Johnson and Quinlan find surprising parallels between today’s mothering experts and their Victorian counterparts, but they also explore how social media has placed unprecedented pressures on new mothers wrestling with familiar concerns and crises from pre-conception through early toddlerhood.

In this episode, we explore all things related to mothering, from infertility to COVID to the NICU to current race riots in the United States. If there is only one thing you take from this podcast, let it be this:

“The perfect mom doesn’t exist. She never did.”