The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

Published by ‎ Simon & Schuster on January 4, 2022

The School for Good Mothers projects all the flaws of the child protective services system into a future that demands the complete subjugation of mothers to the state’s authority. That’s easy to imagine, given the ease with which children are snatched away from parents based on the mere suspicion that they might be at risk. Removing children from their parents is sometimes necessary to protect them, but it is traumatic for children and devastating for innocent parents. There are almost always better ways to protect kids who are not being subjected to clear physical abuse.

Rather than tackling that issue in a realistic novel, Jessamine Chan writes about an “experimental” program that threatens parents with termination of their parental rights unless they complete a one-year program. During that year, they raise blue robotic dolls that are programmed to behave like children. Social workers micromanage the parents’ behavior with their dolls as well as their personal behavior when they aren’t with their dolls. The parents are held in captivity and are under constant surveillance. They are given a monthly Facetime call with their real kids but social workers are quick to remove that privilege when parents fail to meet the social workers’ impossible expectations.

Frida Liu is a recently divorced American-born Chinese woman whose former husband Gust is living with a woman named Suzanne. Frida misses Gust and still sleeps with him from time to time. They share custody of their young daughter Harriet, each parenting her for half the week.

Frida is feeling pressured by the demands placed on her at work. She decides to leave Frida at home while she runs to the office to pick up papers. She answers emails while she’s there, loses track of time, and doesn’t return home for a couple of hours. Frida’s cries from her crib somehow attract the attention of the police. Harriet is removed from Frida’s custody and given to Gust.

Nothing Frida has done would remotely jeopardize her parental rights, but social workers threaten to have those rights terminated unless she completes the experimental program. Nobody in the outside world is permitted to know what goes on in the program. In the real world, any competent lawyer would tell the social workers where they can shove their program, but Frida’s lawyer tells her that she risks losing Harriet unless he complies. That advice parallels the reality that lawyers commonly advise parents to play along with social workers for fear that the social workers will otherwise abuse the enormous power they wield over families.

The story follows Frida as she raises her blue doll with other mothers and their daughters inside an electrified fence. Apart from teaching mothers the importance of being a helicopter parent, the school teaches mothers how to hug their children (not to long, not too short), how to change the blue liquid that fuels the blue kids, how to avoid activities (like chatting with adults or having sex) that distract from parenting. Instructors teach mothers that they should never shame their children while shaming the mothers at every opportunity. “I am a bad mother,” the mothers must chant, “but I am learning to be better.”

Men are also sent to classes, but not much is expected of fathers. They don’t lose phone privileges with their children. They don’t have talk circles in which they are required to analyze and confess their selfishness and bad parenting. The mothers are clearly being trained to be stay-at-home moms because, in the view of their instructors, devoting their entire lives to raising their children is the only purpose they should desire. The goal of ideal parenting, it seems to Frida, is to give no thought to your own needs while always displaying the kind of serenity one might feel after a lobotomy.

In its heavy-handed way, the novel illustrates important points. Children are too often made to suffer in the interest of protecting them. Limiting a parent’s time with a child does not promote healthy relationships between parents and children. Observing parents and children in artificial settings offers little insight into the parent-child dynamic. Constantly drumming into a parent’s head that they are a bad parent will likely turn them into a bad parent. Assuming that all parents should interact with children in exactly the same way, regardless of culture or personality, reflects arrogance rather than reality. Social workers often do what is best for the social worker rather than the family. Social workers can be vindictive and retaliatory when parents question their pronouncements about proper parenting. Parents are often made to jump through a seemingly endless series of hopes before they can regain custody of a child who has been removed from the home, and it often seems that the parents have been set up to fail.

The legal system gives enormous power to social workers. Many judges are too deferential to child protective services workers, but the Supreme Court has recognized that parents have a constitutionally protected interest in parenting their children. It is fairly easy to remove kids from a home, but it isn’t easy to terminate parental rights. The kind of nonsense that Frida endures in the program would not be tolerated by any judge, and certainly not by any appellate court. There is a place in literature for cautionary tales, but The School for Good Mothers isn’t 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale. Reducing a problem to absurdities isn’t an effective way to sound an alarm. If spotlighting a flawed system was Chan’s intent, a novel that took an honest look at how the current system traumatizes children and parents would have been more effective.

I admired Chan’s writing style. Some passages are quite poignant. Frida’s sense of loss when she’s deprived of time with her daughter is palpable. Other passages, including women who spend most of their waking hours trying to figure out how to have sex with each other, with guards, or with visiting male parents, are just silly. The blue dolls are bizarre. The novel alternates between being a light-hearted “band camp” story and a serious tale of abused parents. The lack of a consistent tone makes it difficult to take The School for Good Mothers seriously, while the ending undermines much of the preceding story and makes the reader question whether Frida really is putting her own interests ahead of Harriet’s. Despite its merits, the book is too muddled to earn an unqualified recommendation.

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