An Instagram trend reminded me of a grim fact about motherhood

I have noticed a worrying trend when it comes to new parenting techniques (Picture: Rose Stokes)

My partner is not a social media person. 

He doesn’t have Instagram or X (formerly Twitter), and only occasionally checks in on Facebook to keep in touch with old friends. 

For him, the answers to any parenting conundrum we may come across lie in one or two books on the shelf, or our old friend, Dr Google.

But, like many parents existing in an age of social media, I tend to spend a fair chunk of my time scrolling through content aimed at helping me to navigate the task of raising a child.

Whether it’s tips on how to get my son to wake up later in the morning, easy recipes to try to encourage him to eat more vegetables or posts from psychologists detailing how to deal with the toddler meltdowns – I find a lot of this content useful. 

And despite the inevitable disapproval I’ve experienced from the older generation for how much advice millennial parents consume when it comes to parenting, all of this, when balanced with actual experience and critical thinking, works pretty well for us.

But one subset of the social parenting community that has really grabbed my attention is the ‘gentle parenting movement,’ which dominates a lot of the content I consume.

For the uninitiated, gentle parenting refers to a style of interacting with our children popularised by psychologist and parenting expert, Sarah Ockwell-Smith, that has been growing in popularity over the past decade. 

It promotes the idea that children from a young age deserve to be treated with respect and that, rather than acting as figures of authority and discipline, our role as their parents is to help them to understand and manage their feelings by validating them and supporting them within boundaries.

It’s less about ‘because I said so!’ and more about ‘I can see you’re feeling upset about having to share, and that’s okay. But it’s not okay to hurt people. I’m going to move you over here to stop you from hurting your brother.’

I believe these pieces of advice can have a real impact on our children’s emotional health as they grow (Picture: Rose Stokes)

The aim of this approach is to try to help children to understand their emotions and develop healthy coping mechanisms for when they experience negative feelings.

Gentle parenting is not, as I’ve seen claimed, a method that seeks to remove boundaries and let children be wild. 

Rather, the idea is to help children to understand why they can and cannot behave in certain ways, how they impact other people and how they can cope with challenging situations. 

I really appreciate that a core principle of this style of parenting is to apologise to our children if we have reacted in a way we don’t feel is fair, showing them that as humans we cannot avoid making mistakes, but there is always an opportunity to repair.

It’s tantalising, isn’t it? The idea that we might be able to help our children to avoid some of the difficulties that we have ourselves faced in our lives. 

But I truly believe that — taken with a pinch of salt and scrutinised rather than adopted wholesale — these pieces of advice can have a real impact on our children’s emotional health as they grow.

That being said, I have noticed a worrying trend when it comes to gentle parenting and other new techniques.

As any parent knows, parenting styles work best when the primary caregivers are synchronised and, as far as I can see, most of the content on this topic is aimed squarely at one person: the mother.

This is reinforced by the fact that, from what I’ve seen, so much of this content is made by women, for women: content created by ‘mum-fluencers’, posts that conclude with a heartfelt ‘You got this, Mama’.

It begs the question: has educating yourself on parenting theory or thinking about how you want to raise a child become just another area where the mother is expected to both do the work and educate her partner, too?

I’d love to see creators and ‘mum-fluencers’ inviting men into the conversation

The idea that the responsibility for the emotional health of our children, and the way that we approach it, is generally a task that is left to the women of the family, isn’t a new one.

But the way we manage that emotional health is changing – and family dynamics need to change with it.

According to research published in September, British parents place less value on obedience as a quality to be valued in their children than they did in the 1990s. 

Now, more emphasis is placed on encouraging qualities such as independence, determination and imagination. 

That takes work. And as far as I can see in my Instagram feed and among the parents I know, the majority of this work is still being initiated by women and mothers.

To a certain extent, looking for ways to care for our children and our families is hard-wired in mothers through our socialisation in our youth. But what I would love to see is more and more accounts trying to target fathers in their offerings.

To see those creators and ‘mum-fluencers’ inviting men into the conversation, opening up the dialogue in a way that somehow makes men feel included.

If we want to change this culture of mums picking up all of the hidden labour when it comes to parenting techniques, we need to first accept that we may not be wholly inclusive in our approach. 

Wouldn’t it be great to see more ‘dad-fluencers’ picking up this mantle?

I don’t even know if such a thing is possible; but from where I’m standing the emotional burden placed on mothers is as unsustainable as it ever was.

And that needs to change.

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Wouldn’t it be great to see more ‘dad-fluencers’ picking up this mantle?