Mother of My Children received a score of 81 out of 100 on review aggregator Metacritic based on six critics' reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[2] Q called it "one of 2018's gems",[4] and Mojo stated that "in 'Just Lie Down', grief gives way to wrath and post-hardcore freakery. While 'Soft Stud' and 'Sam, a Dream' have more blissful guitar codas that signify a resolution to her woes".[3] Tiny Mix Tapes' Frank Falisi wrote that the album "measures unknowable moments against a single identity. The crunch is intimate, the crux universal" but that it "isn't despondent. It's not desperate enough to reconfigure loss into despairing elegy".[6]
Reviewing the album for Pitchfork's Maggie Lange stated, "transparent but weathered, her sound has a beach-glass blurriness befitting an album devoted to many forms of loss and mourning that unfolds in moving, hazy episodes".[1] Tony Inglis of The Skinny remarked that "ideas of Native American identity are channelled through spiky guitar and showers of feedback" and takes "the lessons learned from a musical education built on Hole and Nirvana, to give voice to a range of universal emotions, magnified by her unique place in the world".[5] Under the Radar's Max Freedman found that its "magic lies in how she details her life without explicitly naming the oppression she experiences on a daily basis" as "what shines [...] is the notion that, although the struggles of marginalized folks are fully real and in deep need of fixing, oppressed people work through the same personal, emotional, and romantic turmoil as all people do".[7]
