But the way parents respond to them has, she says, especially over the last couple of years.
She’s noticed it most in parent-teacher conferences. Often, nothing is actually wrong: A young child struggles at drop-off; they are still learning how to share; they sometimes have tantrums. But increasingly, she finds that parents are more likely to respond to even benign reports about their child with concern, reflexively grasping for a solution: What should I do when this happens? What words should I say? Is there a book or a resource you’d recommend?
“They began approaching us the way you’d approach a parenting expert,” Carrig says. “They’re looking outside themselves for the answer. And that is heightened in a way that it is new. And it isn’t settling down.”
She knows why this is happening, because the parents tell her: They are drowning in parenting advice. It comes from everywhere, but especially through social media — a cacophony of voices offering microbursts of guidance through endless feeds of scripted videos.
“It starts to shrink down their world to where parents truly believe there is one right thing to say for every situation, there is one right way to approach every scenario,” Carrig says.
Overwhelmed parents aren’t new, and neither is parenting advice — nearly 80 years after Dr. Spock published “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care,” it remains one of the best-selling books of the 20th century. It’s been 20 years since “mommy blogs” took over the internet in the early aughts. There has never been a shortage of parental worry, nor of people who build careers assuaging it. But now the digital realm follows us everywhere in our palm — and if you’re a parent (especially a mother) on social media, the myriad instructions and expectations online can coalesce into an inescapable, ambient drone.
Carrig, who is also a mother of four kids under the age of 12, worries about what this means for parents, and others echo her concern for the generation raising children in an age of perpetually accessible advice. Therapists and psychologists are concerned that the barrage of external voices can silence a parent’s intuition, erode their ability to tolerate uncertainty, and amplify the mythology of “perfect parenting.” Parents say they are depleted, struggling to balance the demands of their own circumstances with the idealized scripts they are trying to retain and recite.
And there are a lot of them. A quick scroll might turn up a video explaining how to make your kid feel empowered and cooperative while you’re applying sunscreen (Becky Kennedy, a.k.a. Dr. Becky, who has nearly 3 million followers on Instagram); telling you how to gentle-parent your child when they have poured your coffee everywhere (Laura Love, nearly 8 million followers on TikTok); or showing you how to talk to a toddler who is pushing back on potty time (Big Little Feelings, 3.5 million followers on Instagram). There are videos for every conceivable situation in between, shared by hundreds of parenting-focused accounts representing a slew of different philosophies.
The problem isn’t necessarily the quality of the advice itself (though that can certainly be a concern), but the sheer volume of it, and the relentlessness of its algorithmic accumulation: Click on one parenting reel, and you’ve guaranteed that more will find their way into your feed. What does the resulting onslaught mean for parents on the receiving end?
“It ultimately has really made me feel like I fail as a parent almost every day,” says Skye Klosterman, a mom of two in Maryland with a baby due in September. Her social media feed is filled with accounts like Mr. Chazz, Big Little Feelings, Peace and Parenting — and they can be excellent, she says, but sometimes difficult to put into practice. “I try really hard. But it is so paralyzing in the moment when your child is not behaving or you’re having a hard moment. Instead of naturally responding to my kid, I have to stop and be like, ‘Well, was there a scenario that I just saw on Facebook that could help me guide my kid?’ And then it almost makes me more reactive than responsive, because I get really overwhelmed, and I don’t know which way to turn.”
Natasha Goykhberg, a parent of two in New York City, noticed a growing sense of dissonance between her own instincts and the guidance she had seen in gentle-parenting videos. When her then-2-year-old son sprawled on a sidewalk because he didn’t want to leave a playground, she thought of the parenting expert who had advised sitting silently beside the child in moments like this, to pat his back and not make eye contact, to never forcibly move him. “And internally, I knew at the time, ‘This doesn’t feel right. I’m the parent in this situation, I’m the one that needs to create a boundary for this child, whether he likes it or not,’” Goykhberg says. “But I was so unsure of myself that I didn’t quite know how to just do that, so I relied on this script.”
For Alyssa Rosen, a mother of four in Maryland, the inundation led her to finally quit TikTok after her husband gently suggested she step away. “It was just too much,” she says. “I used to watch all the parenting videos obsessively, like if I watched enough I would have all the answers to parenting.”
But the advice she was finding “wasn’t tailored to my own kids, my own life, or me.” The more she started hearing other people’s voices in her head, she says, the more lost she felt.
At the end of March 2020, Becky Kennedy — a clinical psychologist and founder of the “Good Inside” parenting empire, widely known as “the millennial parenting whisperer” — shared her first Instagram post, offering parents tips to anchor their families during a time of extraordinary stress and uncertainty. The post went viral, and her following soared from the hundreds to the hundreds of thousands.
A few months later, Instagram introduced reels to its platform, allowing users to create video clips up to 90 seconds long. That same year, TikTok became the most downloaded app in the world. Kennedy was soon accompanied by the masses, a proliferation of parenting experts and influencers populating the newest corners of the digital ecosystem, reaching an audience of pandemic-era parents desperate for help.
From Carrig’s vantage point, the impulse imprinted on parents in that time of isolation and emergency — to seek external instructions, to look online — has not subsided. And she worries that the scripted guidance they’re finding often eclipses the needs, intuition and circumstances of the parent in the equation, even as they’re promised a solution.
“You’re selling parents the idea that their path to parental ease is found through centering the child and the child alone. But fundamentally, there are so many other things going on in the lives of parents these days, and they are so lacking in support, that to say ‘your way out of this is just to learn this approach’ — it’s misleading. It’s just putting one more thing on their plate,” she says. “You’re asking parents to pull from a nearly empty well when you’re asking them to just continually co-regulate with the child and to use all of these scripts.”
Melanie Rainbow, a psychotherapist and mother of two in Iowa City, says she has worked with millennial moms who have become so focused on those scripted videos that they wind up robotically parroting them; they are driven “to leave their humanity at the door in order to be a perfect parent.” This ultimately doesn’t help their parenting, she adds: “Children sense inauthenticity a mile away, and it is confusing and uncomfortable for them. I’d much prefer an authentic, human response from a parent that is a bit messy and requires some apologizing and relationship repair later.”
Like Rainbow, many of Caroline Dunlop’s clients at her psychology practice in New York are mothers seeking a road map for successful parenting. She has seen how a wrong turn on social media can push them deeper into anxiety instead: “Going online to see ‘what should I be doing now,’ that’s a form of reassurance-seeking that is likely unhelpful to a lot of parents,” she says. “The nuance that gets lost, the complexity that gets lost around individual human beings through these short clips is kind of the big problem… These social media clips introduce this idea of achievement and success with regards to parenting, and then, innately, that leads to a sense of ‘success’ versus ‘failure.’”
Goykhberg, the parent of two in New York City, says the reels she found herself watching often made it seem like the ambiguous threat of failure was lurking in nearly every interaction with her child. “Gentle parenting in particular is so prescriptive,” she says. “There were a lot of times where I felt like, ‘What did so-and-so say yesterday in that Instagram post that I have to say in this moment, so I don’t break my child?’… There is so much pressure to say it correctly, with the right tone, with the right volume, making direct eye contact.”
The stakes can feel especially high for parents dealing with more complex challenges. Raquel Gonçalves Lubbers has four children, all of whom were diagnosed with ADHD during the pandemic. Her social media feeds were full of conflicting guidance; she would scroll past one influencer arguing for a more permissive stance, followed by another emphasizing a more stern, authoritarian approach. “It feels more detrimental when you fall into the bad advice, if you’re parenting a neurodivergent kid,” she says.
She decided to find her own answers and went back to school to study the neuroscience of ADHD. Last year, she became certified as an ADHD-focused family coach. Now, when parents ask her for the kind of specific instructions social media has taught them to seek, she reminds them that there is no one correct answer. “I can’t teach them what the solution to the problem is,” she says, “But I can teach them how to figure it out for themselves.”
How to dig out from the avalanche? Some parents choose to log off. Others decide to more carefully curate their feed, retrain the algorithm and winnow down to a few trusted voices. Some opt to stick with their real-life communities for support.
These days, Skye Klosterman is less likely to gravitate toward the social media accounts she once felt compelled to scour. A bombardment of scenario-specific reels doesn’t work for her, she realizes, but more comprehensive resources do; she found meaningful insights in Kennedy’s book, especially the concept that emotional repair with a child after a difficult moment or a parenting misstep is the most important thing — more important than not making a mistake in the first place.
“In a lot of ways I do feel like a failure as a parent, but that is one way that I have always, always, always been consistent: I apologize to my kids when I mess up,” Klosterman says. “Bigger ideas like that — that is truly helpful.”
With her clients, Dunlop says one of her biggest aims is to strengthen their trust in themselves, which also means building their tolerance for the uncertainty that comes with parenting. A 90-second video might offer one means to troubleshoot a meltdown — but the rush of new challenges won’t stop, and there is no way to ‘master’ a human relationship.
“Parenting is all about ambiguity and unpredictability, and we have to have the stamina and endurance to ride this roller coaster for a long time,” Dunlop says. “There’s no finish line.”
