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VOICES
Parenting When we were growing up, our parents weren't bombarded by images of perfection
Margaret Lynch looks at the effects influencers are having on her personally and her style of parenting.
I CAN’T PINPOINT when or why exactly it started, but Instagram and the current trend of people we might follow running a highlight reel at the end of each month are stealing any ounce of joy left in my life.
The posts always start around the first of each month and do a recap of the previous weeks. They usually have some holiday pics, glamorous evenings, expensive new purchases and endless captions about how amazing and fulfilling the month was, the targets they smashed and how excited they are for the next month.
At the other end of the scale, I barely register the end of the month and need four or five days to adjust to the new one, mentally calculating each time how far away Christmas is.
I might be feeling fairly proud that I didn’t forget a bin collection last week, or I have found a sandwich filler that my kids will actually eat at lunch, and then I scroll past something which upends me.
Epic fail?
What am I doing wrong? What kind of jobs do these people have? Where can I apply? Social media is supposed to be an easy way to pass five minutes with some empty mindlessly scrolling. It’s not supposed to make me feel terrible about where I am in life. I actively go out of my way to avoid anything that makes me feel terrible.
I Marie Kondo’d my feed last year and removed almost every influencer. I unfollowed and muted anyone who was intent on only showing perfection. I don’t need that in my life. It doesn’t bring any joy. It only brings misery. I mean, good for them, but also, no thank you.
I don’t want to compare myself to someone whose job is to look perfect.
Since social comparison theory first emerged in 1954, it has been argued that humans have an innate drive to make evaluations about themselves based on comparison with others. It makes sense that we would need to know who has the most resources, or who might pose a significant threat.
And for previous generations, this might not have meant much. My grandparents might have snuck a look over their neighbour’s fence to see how the other half lived, but I can see inside wardrobes, fridges and cupboards. I see people prepare breakfasts decorated with colourful fruits and flowers, while I sit bleary-eyed over a bowl of Rice Krispies. I get to watch the family vacations, but only the small snippets of everyone smiling and laughing. We share so much more with each other through social media, and it’s only ever the good stuff.
A scare at Halloween
When our parents were parenting, they had no idea about how other people were living and they also had much more realistic standards. They might have seen the odd glimpse of the ideal and ‘perfect’ family life through TV shows but it was always very clear that this was scripted, and filmed on a set, and that no one actually was expected to live like this. No one was hot glueing their own Halloween decorations.
In fact, I don’t remember a single Halloween decoration! All the kids were black bin bag witches with sooty noses, all of the sweets came from the local shop, and everyone used the white plastic bags to carry their sweets.
I am usually good at spotting things that have been filtered or designed to make me feel inadequate so that I buy something. But we have to remember that there is a sneaky little algorithm at work behind it all, and it knows how to draw me back in, every single time.
Parenting. More specifically, if I am doing enough for my kids.
I just want them to have a happy childhood, with lovely memories to think back. But no matter how much I do, everyone else seems to do so much more. And they have the nerve to make it look so effortless.
My feeds are filled with ‘spooky snack ideas’ and ‘how to create a Halloween balloon arch for your front door’. Who has this the time, in all honesty? And the worst part, the absolute very worst part, is that it works. Every single time.
I spent my Saturday sticking 70-something Halloween bats up along our stairs (if our landlord is reading this, no I didn’t). All because I saw a video of an influencer from The States, and her staircase was like something from a movie set. Before I was even aware of what was happening, I had bought the items on Amazon.
Parents under pressure
The chain of misery reminds me of when I was first using the internet, back in the early 2000s using dial-up on a monstrous device in the kitchen. Inboxes were filled with chain mail. You remember them, forward to 15 people or something terrible will happen. It’s like we have come full circle back to these.
Someone makes a post, I feel like a terrible parent and worry my kids will have a brutal childhood if I don’t follow suit, I stick bats around the house till my fingers bleed, post the picture on my story where it targets other unsuspecting parents, and the cycle continues. I have forwarded the chain mail.
I always forwarded them back in the day too, just in case. So I really don’t know why I have all of this adult anxiety.
Sometimes I feel like the only person who isn’t waking up at 5 am to run 5K, blend a smoothie, make the kids a fresh organic breakfast and sing like the von Trapps as we head out the door. I feel like the only parent struggling to explain a housing crisis to my kids. I feel like the overwhelming thoughts of climate change and the kind of world we are leaving to our kids are mine alone.
World Mental Health Day is coming up on Tuesday 10 October, and I am going to use this one as an NCT. Obviously not the kind of NCT that ruins my mental and financial health, but one to just check in on how I am doing. Because if I’m not aware of my own weaknesses, then the algorithm will get me every time. And while panic buying 764 bats with express delivery might not appear on any list of symptoms, it’s probably something I should explore.
I don’t compare myself to influencers in an everyday sense, and I shouldn’t compare my parenting either.
I don’t want to make decisions from a place of feeling inferior. I don’t want to live a life of consumerism in a time of climate crisis (and I promise to reuse every single bat, each year, for as long as the planet will have me). I don’t have the answers for how we manage the impact of social media, or how to move towards portraying more authentic lives, and maybe we never will.
I know it’s easy to say ‘shut the phone down, delete the apps’ and that’s a fair point. Believe me, I’ve done it and held on for some time until the FOMO creeps in or there’s some reason to check in on something. I’m working on it, but for now, I can pay more attention to what I am looking at and the impact it has on me. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to lose my credit card for a few weeks, at least until Halloween and dare I say, Christmas madness passes.
Margaret Lynch is a busy, working mum of two, living in Kildare and wondering if Adulthood is really for her.
