This Mother’s Day, there are a few Mother’s Day sentiments that I can really do without. I don’t really need to hear about “the joy of parenting” or how I should “cherish every moment” or how moms are “selfless superheroes.”

While these might sound like nice ways to honor moms on Mother’s Day, there’s actually a darker side to them: these same “positive” sentiments about moms can also be used to justify neglecting them, leaving them to fend for themselves in the messy maze known as parenting.

In business, this is known as passion exploitation. As researchers Jae Yun Kim and colleagues found, people are more likely to say that it’s okay to exploit someone at work if they’re passionate about their job, in part because people expected the work to be “its own reward” for passionate workers.

Sound familiar, moms?

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Balancing Love of Child and Love of Neighbor in a Competition-Fueled Society

If you’re like most parents, you care more about your own kids than you do a stranger’s kids. In fact, if you didn’t, we would worry. But can we take our love for our kids too far?

Our natural parental instinct is to help our kids succeed, so we try to give them every opportunity and advantage that we can. For parents with economic privilege, this might mean enrolling our children in an expensive private school or hiring a private SAT tutor. It might mean taking them to the museum and the ballet and France. When surrounded by expendable income, the greater danger is not in giving our kids too little, but in giving them too much. As much as we love our own kids, our love and compassion are not meant to be limited to the branches on our family tree. If we give our own kids big head starts, that makes it significantly harder for other kids to keep up.

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Not many things can bring all of America together these days, but one thing that did was the charming video of Marc Daniels, the dad who danced onstage with his two-year-old daughter—all while holding his baby in his arms—when she got stage fright at her recital. It’s no wonder the video quickly went viral. In the midst of our current cultural confusion on the subject of masculinity, “Ballerina Dad” was the hero we needed.

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