Word! The Language Column
Deadbeat Fathers and Family-Oriented Mothers

Mothers bear an endless burden of societal expectations. This was the case in the past, and it often remains so today. Our new columnist, Bettina Wilpert, critically examines thought patterns and linguistic imagery surrounding motherhood. She asks: Why are there no “deadbeat fathers”?

I was pushing my little daughter in her stroller while simultaneously pulling out my phone. An older man passed by me and made a rude gesture. I stopped and called out to him, asking what his problem was. His response: he waved his hand back and forth in front of his face, like a windshield wiper. I suppose he saw me as a “Rabenmutter” (a neglectful mother), because I checked my emails in the presence of my child.

Missteps Everywhere

As a mother in Germany, you can only do things wrong: you either breastfeed for too long or too short a time, return to work too early or stay at home with the child for too long. These societal expectations of what a “good” mother should be primarily affect women – this clearly stems from sexist and patriarchal thought patterns. Or have you ever heard of a “deadbeat father”?

When Did It All Begin?

The specifically German myth of motherhood has developed historically. The Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau laid the foundation for it with his work Emile, or On Education. While it was once common in bourgeois circles for children to be breastfed by wet nurses, mothers were now expected to breastfeed and care for their children themselves – thus creating the model of the housewife and mother.

Centuries later, during the Nazi dictatorship, mothers were ideologically glorified. The ardent National Socialist Johanna Harrer provided fitting literature with her parenting guide Die deutsche Mutter und ihr erstes Kind (The German Mother and Her First Child), which portrayed a woman’s role as that of a bearer and educator. Parenting goals at the time conformed to Nazi ideology.

After the end of World War II, the single-breadwinner family model became dominant in West Germany: mothers stayed home to manage the household and care for the children, while fathers provided financially through external work. To this day, mothers are primarily held responsible for raising children.

The situation was different in East Germany, where there were numerous working women and widespread access to daycare. However, even here, women bore the main share of caregiving – a challenge we now refer to as compatibility of family and work.

The Long Road to Equality

The counterpart to the term “Rabenmutter” (neglectful mother) is “Familienvater” (family father). The term “Familienvater” carries patriarchal connotations, suggesting a man who rules over his family. Even though Germany no longer has a classical patriarchal system, we are still far from achieving equality within nuclear families. Mothers take longer parental leave than fathers, and in 2024, according to the Federal Statistical Office, the proportion of fathers receiving parental benefits even fell to 25.8 percent for the first time. Women are more likely to work part-time and, as a result, are more often affected by poverty in old age. Many women still lack financial independence. For instance, this makes it harder for them to leave an abusive partner without facing financial hardships. This vicious cycle often begins with the birth of the first child.

Revealing Linguistic Images

The woman in a passive, dependent role, the man active – when relationships are seen or structured in this way, it is also reflected in language with phrases like: “She's got a bun in the oven,” “She's pregnant with his child,” or “He fathered the child.” Passive constructions like “the child was born” are often heard. For a long time, it was even said that the male sperm did most of the work. But who carried the child for ten months and did all the physical labor? Such passively constructed sentences render the physical effort of pregnancy and childbirth invisible.

As if that weren't enough, the German language is rather fear-inducing when it comes to birth: one hears terms like “perineal tear” and “postpartum discharge,” and even the German term  for “labor” – Wehen – already linguistically carries the pain. For this reason, many midwives prefer to speak of “waves.”

And then there are the words that seem to reveal an obsession with mothers: “mother’s milk,” “placenta” (literally “mother cake”), and “maternal instinct” (which, incidentally, does not exist). On the one hand, this ideology assigns all responsibility for the child to the mother. On the other hand, terms like “mother’s milk” reflect a binary gender perspective, as even trans fathers can breastfeed. How much better would it be to simply speak of “breast milk,” as in English.