Little Fires Everywhere shows the cracks in trying to be the perfect mother

Hulu’s new series based on Celeste Ng’s 2017 novel shows that whatever way we bring up our kids, nobody can get it exactly right, writes Charlotte Cripps

Reese Witherspoon as Elena and Kerry Washington as Mia in Hulu's 'Little Fires Everywhere' (Prime Video)

Little Fires Everywhere’s Elena (Reese Witherspoon) has a seemingly picture-perfect life. Until she and her mini-me daughter Lexie (Jade Pettyjohn) have a bust-up. “There’s all this pressure to be all of these things…to be f***ing perfect. But I’m not. I’m not f***ing perfect,” says the teenager – who is finally unravelling. “Yes you are!” her mum shouts back. The bedroom door slams shut. “No, I’m not.”

Adapted from Celeste Ng’s 2017 novel of the same name, Hulu’s new family drama (streaming on Amazon Prime in the UK) is the latest TV show to centre around motherhood – a topic that, until recently, was chronically under-explored. Arriving in the wake of shows like BBC sitcom Motherland and Netflix’s Workin’ Moms, it stars Witherspoon as Elena Richardson, a wealthy, perfectionistic mother of four teenagers. Living in an affluent suburb of Ohio with her lawyer husband, she’s the type of person who has a colour-coded calendar on the fridge door (a “psycho calendar”, as her youngest daughter Izzy calls it). She gets the kids to wear tartan for the Christmas card photo. She makes pancakes in the shape of the first letter of her children’s names for breakfast, and sends her youngest child off to orchestra camp.

Sound familiar? Definitely not in my household. As a single mum of two kids under four, I have hidden any musical instruments in fear that the repeated noise of a recorder will finish me off. The nearest my children have got to a camp is a tent in the garden. The dog often gets to the kid’s breakfasts before they do.

But it made me think about those high-achieving mums I see at the school gates and at birthday parties. How I look in awe at their perfectly run households compared to mine. Is all the tiger parenting working? Or will pent-up tensions erupt in a meltdown, just like they do for Elena’s family?

Mia (Washington) and her daughter Pearl (Lexi Underwood) lead a nomadic existence travelling from place to place in a clapped-out blue car (Prime Video)

Little Fires Everywhere shows the cracks in trying to be the perfect mother. When single mum Mia Warren (Kerry Washington) – a nomadic black artist who moves from place to place with her 15-year-old daughter Pearl (Lexi Underwood) – turns up in Elena’s life, it’s clear the two women are at opposite ends of the parenting spectrum. Elena is a “helicopter parent” – always making sure the children are progressing academically. Mia still shares a bed with Pearl – that’s if they’re not sleeping in the car. It poses the question: what is motherly love and who actually gets it right?

Elena – out of a patronising sense of pity – rents them a house and even hires Mia as a “house manager” (a maid by any other name) to give her more income. That’s when the war of motherhood starts.

When Elena suggests Mia do family portraits for a living, Mia replies cuttingly: “The thing about portraits is you need to show people how they want to be seen. I prefer to show people as they really are.” Elena returns the favour, even going as far as to call Mia “a terrible mother”. “In my book, a good mother puts her daughter’s needs before her own,” she says. “She doesn’t smoke marijuana.”

Their feud reminds me of how often mums judge each other – whether it’s feeling superior or less than. There’s always a lot of finger-pointing and shaming over what is correct. I’m flexible about what time my kids go to bed if we’re out at the weekend – sometimes its 10 pm, much to the shock of my more rigid mum friends.

My children aren’t learning Chinese, as some mums boast their kids are, nor are they swimming before they can walk. They like screaming their heads off and painting mad pictures. I’m not cooking grade A vegetables every night for my children – in fact, much to one mum’s total horror, one of them doesn’t eat vegetables at all.

Watching Little Fires Everywhere made me realise that whatever way we bring up our kids, nobody has the answers. Motherland, a satire on middle-class motherhood in London, finds comedy in just that. While Elena and Mia are extremes, most mums fall somewhere in the middle, like Anna Maxwell Martin’s Julia, the permanently exhausted working mum. She's schoolgate frenemies with the perfect Amanda (Lucy Punch), who is the head of the alpha mums. They look down their noses at other mums – particularly the chaotic single mum Liz (Diane Morgan), who takes mothering to a whole new level with her feral approach.

Schoolgate frenemies: Anna Maxwell Martin as the stressed mum Julia and Lucy Punch as the perfect Amanda (BBC)

Who is getting it right? Nobody is. That’s the honest answer. It’s confusing for parents and kids alike.

As seen in Netflix’s Workin’ Moms, the fourth season of which premiered earlier this month, parents can even flip from one extreme to another.

The mum and psychiatrist Anne (Dani Kind) gives her unruly daughter Alice so many after-school clubs that she refers to it as “activities jail”. That is until she shifts her approach to letting teenagers navigate their own lives, or, “run her own train” as she puts it.

As Little Fires Everywhere comes to its flaming climax, there is one thing that remains clear: both Elena and Mia love their children fiercely. Like most of us, they are just trying their best.

So, are we just grappling around in the dark? Motherhood is the one thing you don’t get taught at school. Perhaps instead of pushing our kids, we’re all in need of some extra tuition.

'Little Fires Everywhere' is on Amazon Prime Video