"Welcome to parenthood! Here's a bunch of uninspired memes"
Why new parents fall victim to bad content at the first whiff of prenatal vitamins
The mommy content creator space is begging for disruption.
Between tacky, unoriginal, sometimes insensitive letter board Instagram poses to complaining about the same three things (aka needing more coffee, lazy partners, and being constantly tired), it’s just not it.
I’m not alone, according to the women who had similar thoughts on my tweet:
Don’t know what I’m talking about?
Exhibit A:
Ok, not all of them are this bad. But I’ve seen a few of these during the pandemic.
As the millennial parent of a young toddler, these types of posts and videos have infiltrated my social feeds for nearly three years. I swear social media smells your prenatal vitamin and starts luring you into the grasp of bottom-tier mommy accounts.
(Yes, some of the pregnancy and parenting accounts are incredibly helpful. We’ll be sure to appreciate those heroes who get us through with original content and helpful resources later.)
Cheap support during pregnancy
One way that expecting parents can fall into a cycle of crappy content consumption is because the first trimester is lonely AF.
Your first time as a parent, you don’t know what’s going on with your body. You probably haven’t even told three other humans about your biggest milestone ever.
Why are you crying over this piece of bagel that dropped? Why are you up at 3 a.m. every night? What the hell are you going to wear to the office to hide that belly, because God forbid you are “family planning” and won’t get that promotion?
Enter: content creators focused on pregnancy and childbirth. They swoop in to make you feel seen with their pickle-cravings stories and “It’s going to be ok, mama,” captions. You’re already so emotional that even the most cheugy and basic of memes can bring you to tears.
Congratulations, you are officially on the mama-content hook.
One of my survey respondents articulated this feeling nicely:
“I was very into it when pregnant with my first and just after because I felt like I was just awakened to the ‘mommy community,’ but now I dread the mom blogs that people send me. I find a lot of it redundant and reductive to the complexity of parenthood. That being said, when a piece is good, honest, relatable and not gimmicky, I do connect with it.”
So, mom creators, this is really the bare minimum of what we’re looking for:
Good
Honest
Relatable
Not gimmicky
Spotting the crap
Let’s practice — is it crap or does it slap?
Here’s a post from a popular mommy blog, Pregnant Chicken (I actually do like some of their newsletter content). Let’s use these criteria to rank this post as crap or slap.
alt text: cartoon-y poop with arms and legs. Text that says, “You’re probably going to poop while you push out your baby.” @pregnantchicken + @mommy.labornurse
Is it good? No. It’s the dumbest graphic that apparently, two different accounts had to collab on. It’s blurry. Their two-year-old made it on a Cheeto-crusted iPad, probably.
Is it honest? Yes. You probably will poop. I did, and my nurses told me. We all celebrated. These are real mom things.
Is it relatable? Yes. As I said, you’ll definitely poop. If you don’t, they’re lying.
Is it not gimmicky? No, it’s definitely gimmicky.
This topic is used to scare pregnant moms all the time. They get so freaked out about pOoPiNg that they forget for a minute that they have literally pooped daily for their whole lives. Add in 397 pounds of pressure per square foot during labor and yeah, sweetie — you’re going to poop.
*Steps off labor and delivery bed soapbox*
We’re just getting started
Why is the mommy creator space so… cringey? What does it take to get to “good?”
This series of Shh… Mommy’s Disrupting will dig deeper into the toxicity, crap, and just plain uninspired to make content consumption a little more bearable for parents.
Join me along this ride. We have large cup holders.