Would I Make it as a Pilgrim Mother?

No.

Image via National Museum of Women in the Arts

The other day I had a strange thought while trying to explain to my hysterical 3-year-old that we were not going to watch any more episodes of The Lion Guard and it was actually time to eat dinner: How did Pilgrim moms deal with tantrums? We don’t talk much about the actual day-to-day parenting of the past, but children must have been throwing tantrums since the dawn of time. Children are no different now then they were hundreds of years ago, and parenting has always been very hard, so sometimes in my most challenging moments, like trying to wash my 3-year-old’s hair, I wonder: would I be able to handle any of this if I was a Pilgrim? (Puritan? I like Pilgrim better for the purposes of this piece. I am not a historian.) Could I mother without modern conveniences such as indoor heat, a dishwasher, Disney+, or ibuprofen?

The answer, of course, is no. For so many reasons. First of all, I wouldn’t have even gotten on the Mayflower. If my husband was like “let’s leave England to sail on a wooden ship across the Atlantic to go camping forever with our children,” I’d be like *heart hands* “No, let’s just convert to the Church of England and stay here, I’m literally so tired.” There’s a very strict limit of time I’m willing to spend on a ship with my children and that limit is like, at most 2 hours, certainly not 66 days.

But say I was born in Plymouth and had a name like Patience Mercy, and I had no choice but to live there and raise my family there because it was literally impossible to leave because everything else was the woods. Would I be able to handle any part of it?

In reality, I probably wouldn’t have made it to the point of having children anyway, because I definitely would have died before then. I got strep like 500 times as a child, so if Scarlet Fever didn’t take me in my pilgrim youth, I also have OCD, and someone would have eventually burned me for being a witch once they noticed I had to tap the left side of the thatch every time I left my cottage and was constantly convinced I left my butter churn on. But say those things didn’t do me in, and I actually got pregnant, I definitely would have died after that because I’m blood type A- and my kids are B+. They definitely hadn’t invented the RhoGAM shot in the 1600s, so I probably would have died of blood poisoning at birth, anyway, after a miserable pregnancy where I desperately craved pineapple and Hot Cheetos but they hadn’t been discovered/invented yet, so I had to choke down venison and squash stew.

But just say, against all odds, I survived all of this and managed to bear children and now am raising them as a Pilgrim mother. Would I be able to do it? Let’s break down what exactly Pilgrim mothers and kids were doing, because I truly cannot imagine they were doing what my kids would be doing while I sat and churned butter (whining “MAMA WHY ARE YOU CHURNING BUTTER CAN YOU PLAY CORN HUSK DOLLS WITH ME NO NOT LIKE THAT”)

As a Pilgrim mother, I would have been expected to spend most of the day cleaning, cooking, hauling water, mending, canning, and caring for animals. None of that sounds terrible to me, to be honest. I love horses and I like to work with my hands. Except for the fact that I’d have to do all this while taking care of my kids. I can barely load the dishwasher while taking care of my kids, much less haul a bucket of water from a well. But the good news is, the kids would be sent off to work chores around age five, so I would only have to take care of the little ones, who were often on a leash. I don’t think my kids would enjoy being on a leash much, judging by how they each reacted to being put in their cribs when they didn’t want to be. (Jail for baby???? Jail for 1000 years???) but I do think they’d be psyched to do Pilgrim kid chores, like collecting eggs and digging for worms. I couldn’t get much info on what pilgrim mothers actually did with their small leashed children during the daily chores, probably because none of the men who wrote anything down noticed or cared, but I assume they didn’t sit there like well-trained golden retrievers. But then again, maybe they did, because the Pilgrims were really into beating their children into submission, which I would not be on board with. They also thought all children were born evil and had to be tamed of their satanic ways, but that’s obviously wrong: that’s only three-year-olds, and they grow out of it on their own. Anyway, even with all the beatings, I can’t imagine it was easy for Pilgrim mothers to keep their leashed toddlers at bay while they knitted. I’m going to go ahead and say I wouldn’t be able to handle it and would have probably run screaming off into the woods to find that mushroom that made everyone go crazy and accuse each other of being witches, but for my own recreational purposes.

Would my children have been able to handle it? Like I said before they would have been down with rounding up chickens and having access to dangerous farm tools. They also would really like this one particular thing Pilgrims did, which was for some reason they didn’t let their kids sit down to eat, they had to stand. My kids would be all over that, they can barely sit down to dinner as is. Although I can’t imagine having to try to convince my kids to eat anything the Pilgrims ate, stewed pumpkin, eel, cheese curds: not a buttered noodle in sight. They also weren’t allowed to speak, which would be difficult for my children, who haven’t stopped speaking since they learned how. And difficult for me, too, since one of the most fun things about having kids is hearing what insane things they have to say. My 3-year-old daughter recently told me she wakes up in the night gets out of bed, goes to her window and watches a cougar playing with a snowshoe hare outside our house. This is clearly a huge lie; we don’t have either of those animals in Washington, DC, and would have gotten her swatted with a buckle shoe or burned at the stake for sure in Pilgrim times. But I love how creative my kids are. Creativity is really not a Pilgrim virtue.

Kids did get to play, after all their chores were done. They had dolls and toys just like our kids have. I doubt their parents did much playing with them, which honestly seems like a benefit of Pilgrim parenthood. I can’t imagine a Pilgrim dad sitting on the floor playing carts and horses with his son and being bossed around about how to pretend to harvest wheat. (More like Miles Stand-offish, am I right?) The good thing is my kids would definitely not be bored with Pilgrim toys. I recently learned that, much like my kids, Pilgrim children blew bubbles, which seems wildly anachronistic, even though logically water and soap were around, so why not? As long as my kids didn’t know TV existed, they’d be fine, they can make anything into a toy. A stick that kind of looked like a lizard and some anachronistic bubbles would be enough.

In general, I think I would be a terrible Pilgrim mother and I’m glad I don’t have to do it. Aside from the freezing cold, the many petticoats, or having to supervise a toddler while also having to de-feather a turkey, I don’t think I could handle worrying my kids might die at any moment of measles or from falling down a well. I don’t think I could handle being expected to treat them like demons who needed to be tamed. I don’t think I could handle eating eel, it just has a really gross texture. It really puts modern parenting into perspective when I think about it this way. Of course, in 2026 there are many horrors. But at least we have indoor plumbing and vaccines (for now).