Mumsnet, Mirror of Princes

The "Mummy Wars" are kingship theory writ small

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Political Theory Writ Small

Any mother who has spent time online (which, let’s be honest, is most mothers these days) will know the “Mummy Wars” genre of internet content. There are standard themes, exhaustively picked over on countless websites and hotly debated on the UK’s parenting forum Mumsnet as well as Instagram, TikTok and so on. Sleep training is a reliable standard, as is breast vs bottle feeding, weaning, where your baby sleeps, how you transport him or her, how many babies you have, even the specifics of giving birth.

The pattern is always the same. A professional opinion-haver, influencer, or social media denizen will take some firm, declarative position on a topic related to the care of very young children, and suggest in the process that if you do things differently You Are A Bad Person. Pandemonium will then ensue, as mothers who feel called out for being A Bad Person respond defensively with their specific circumstances and competing views.

Taken all together, these offer an inexhaustible source of identity-formation, moral grandstanding, and covert competitiveness all conducted in a carefully oblique register where the conflictual nature of the debates is always deniable. It’s always just about being a nice person, never about one-upmanship. If I wanted to churn out a quick hot-take, it’d be the easiest thing in the world to list a few examples and then give the “debate” pot another stir. But here I want to dig into a meta-theme that I’ve touched on a few times in different essays: the way in which all such debates are also political theory writ small.

As I argued at First Things, the main obstacle to every radical political programme has always been human nature - which means, in turn, that every political visionary ends up having opinions about how best to raise children. This has become steadily more pronounced with modernity, all the way from Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education to today’s increasingly fractious Mummy Wars. But there’s an important difference between the kind of educational ideas Locke propounded, and the modern Mummy Wars: the age of the children.

Mummy Wars are very rarely about school-age kids. It’s always in relation to some aspect of the care of infants. And this serves both to obscure the way these debates are always about something else as well as the care of infants, while pointing to what that is. Namely, a type of political relation that can’t be easily articulated, within the liberal paradigm: loving authority.

This is a category of relationship that liberals more or less implicitly assume does not exist. For someone to be set in authority over another is always suspect. At best something of this kind may be democratically agreed an/or formally assented to by all parties, in a contractual form that dqn be dissolved at any time by any party. As for the idea that such authority might be given - that is, neither opt-in or opt-out - forget it. You see this assumption everywhere in progressive politics, from those who denounce as “authoritarian” behaviour policies in schools that punish noise and disruption for the sake of everyone’s ability to learn, to public-order approaches that replace policing of antisocial street behaviour such as prostitution or tent encampments with social-work-led initiatives to “tackle the root causes”.

Still more deeply buried in this view is a conviction that no authority can ever be loving or just: a claim that now, for some liberal circles, extends even to children. For the most radical, “parenting” in general is tyrannical, and that children are an oppressed class: there’s a longstanding Left-wing tradition of arguing that children should be treated as autonomous, agentic beings on a par with adults, and that doing otherwise is dehumanising. There have been at least two books on “family abolition” in recent years, generally premised on the belief that family as such has fascistic assumptions and malign property relations baked into at the structural level. Madeline Lane-Mckinley’s Solidarity With Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy comes out later this year; University of Essex philosopher Lorna Finlayson is writing another on “Child Liberation”, out 2026.

In this context, there are two reasons why the Mummy Wars have become so visceral.