At 25, I had briefly held a total of two babies. I was the youngest child in my extended family, and other than one friend who lived in a different city, I had no close friends with kids. This means that my only experience of babies and the care of young children was that of being taken care of by my own mother—and I certainly didn’t remember the early years of that. But—also at 25—I was pregnant with my first baby.

Though I was young by modern standards, this isn’t an uncommon story, even for women getting pregnant later in life. Our lives are fragmented between childhood and adulthood, those with babies and those without. Work that makes money doesn’t involve babies, so babies go to daycare away from adult society. Or they stay with their moms, also away from most non-mom adult society, because taking tiny children to places other than playgrounds, libraries, and churches isn’t always the most enjoyable or friendly experience.

So most women without kids have not spent a meaningful amount of time with young children, and even those who may argue otherwise for themselves likely aren’t spending time with babies the way that any given childless woman prior to industrialization spent time with babies (truly helping to raise them). This means that we’re all stepping into motherhood with little to no embodied knowledge.

Yet, women and girls grow up hearing about “maternal instinct” and “maternal intuition,” as though when a baby comes, we’ll immediately understand every need and desire that baby has. But these two phenomena (instinct and intuition) are actually quite different, and because of our fragmented lives, only one remains functional for most women entering motherhood at all.

Maternal instinct, or any instinct really, is biological and automatic. You do not need to learn it. It’s the flinch at a sense of danger, a baby’s rooting for milk, that feeling of needing to respond when a baby cries. Instinct, even in our wildly disembodied world, lives on, and while technologies like artificial wombs might change that fact someday, we have not yet reached the point of outsourcing motherhood to the extent of lost instinct.

Maternal intuition, on the other hand, is different. Intuition comes from experience, memory, and attention. It’s developed over time, and allows mothers to read and respond to a given situation without having to take the time to reason through options. It’s knowing the difference between cries, sensing whether comfort or discipline is necessary, or knowing when something is just off with a child.

New mothers used to step into motherhood with a large measure of this intuition. They were often raised around young children in tight-knit communities. Pregnancy and the first years of motherhood were not spent reading books to interpret data or learning how to do basic (even if difficult) tasks. The wisdom of generations endured, and each new mother picked up the torch where her own mother and other women in her community left off. I have to imagine that the transition from maiden to mother was a much more peaceful experience for these women.

But at some point in history, in conjunction with industrialization, advances in childhood technologies, and the institutionalization of childhood, intuition in large part ceased to be passed down. When the home was no longer the economic and cultural center of society, it became more difficult for separate families to raise children alongside one another. As societies became richer, generational living was discontinued. Thus, as scientific progress marched on, and mothers mothered in isolation, it slowly became easier for them to distrust their intuition and replace it with expert frameworks and data.

We are now more than a few generations removed from a true passing on of intuition, and it’s become even harder to trust the advice from the mothers who came before us, given what we know about the experts they were told to trust. Gone are the days of formula feeding as the golden standard of nutrition. Sleep training? It’s still around, but far more modest than the society-wide encouragement to let 3-month-olds cry it out. The once popular idea that you can spoil a baby with too much affection? Debunked. Independence at the youngest age possible? Wrong—attachment parenting is now on the rise. The list goes on and on, and none of this is to mention the insane number of technologies that our mothers and grandmothers didn’t have to (or get to, depending on how you view it) deal with.

I’m not arguing that the data we have today isn’t much more trustworthy than the information prior generations of moms were given—much of their trust was placed in developing theories, and we do have more reliable forms of inquiry today (at least in some cases). I care more about illustrating the idea that, for many situations mothers face today, they face it with no personal experience, and those they’d be most likely to turn to often went through those experiences based on faulty advice. Some family and maternal lines of passed down intuition from ages long past still exist, but I know very few of them, and while there are of course topics where mothers who went before us can still serve to advise and help, the number of those topics dwindles with every generation.

So where do new moms turn? To the new and improved data, of course. To the most updated version of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” and “Expecting Better.” To apps like “Moms on Call” that tell us when to feed our babies and let them sleep. To special “socks” that track heart rate, oxygen levels, and sleep patterns. To baby and child development influencers who tell us how often to do tummy time and what the latest and greatest toys are to ensure your child achieves their highest intellectual potential at the ripe age of 7 months.

The problem? Overreliance on data, expert authority, and algorithms takes the potential to re-develop intuition and suppresses it. Even when a mother feels something is right—and deeply so—she also feels she must check what the latest data and research says. And even when that data validates her feeling, she will not be inspired with confidence in herself, but in the data. Take, for example, the relatively common scenario of an older woman telling a new mom that she’s spoiling her child by holding him or her too much. Very few new moms will respond by pointing to their confidence in their desire to nurture, but instead with a signaling to research that validates that intuition. The research, these moms think, and not their maternal feelings, will prove the older woman wrong. But ought this be so?

When asked why we as mothers make certain decisions, even if we have rightfully consulted data to help, the answer should not be, “because the research says…” Such a response is a tell-tale sign that you’re likely missing something important about motherhood and raising babies. Your answers to these questions must relate to some broader good than optimization and expertise, and we shouldn’t be so afraid to convey feelings and beliefs. Why aren’t I concerned with spoiling my child with physical affection? Because nurturing my small children is good to do, it’s my job to love my children, and I believe I’m loving them best by hugging them every single time I feel like it as long as they’ll let me. That’s actually a much better answer than vaguely pointing to a group of scientists at a university you likely cannot name telling you to do so. It’s unfortunate that that’s controversial (but thanks Francis Bacon).

The reality is, because cultivated practical wisdom passed down from mother to mother is growing rarer by the year, those of us who long for a restoration of intuitive and communal motherhood must turn somewhere for knowledge to start. Data and research can help us here, but it cannot replace time, attention, and experience. That means moms who want to restore intuition for their daughters and younger women in general must work diligently to build families and communities that allow their children to grow up with younger children, and also practice discernment to decide when external data is truly needed, and when it’s become a crutch for a lack of internal trust. That doesn’t mean we can’t look up our child’s symptoms to figure out if we need to take them to the emergency room. It does mean that perhaps all of our tracking, algorithms, and optimization have more profound consequences than we often like to think.

Motherhood, after all, is not about streamlining schedules to fit our kids into our lives more easily, perfecting developmental routines to maximize our kids’ chances at external success, or even ensuring we’re up to date on all the latest and greatest health and nutrition science. It’s about love, pursuing the good for your child, allowing yourself to grow and be stretched in selfless and oftentimes painful nurture, and ultimately learning how to partake well in a practice more core to humanity than perhaps anything else.

This is a strange generation of mothers—one that senses how off things have become and longs for embodiment again, but doesn’t know where to turn. The lines between trusting data and building trust in yourself aren’t always clear, but we must, in good faith, draw them with thoughtfulness, diligently pondering where they will lead.