Internet Parenting “Tips” Used to Make Me Feel Horrible! Here’s How I Broke the Cycle.

Let’s be honest, there’s a lot of garbage parenting advice out there. It exists on every social media platform. I know this because I’m a mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old child. Not too long ago I was a first-time mom, who didn’t know about a lot of things. So I did what we all do and turned to the internet.

I started with Facebook groups that my fellow mom friends swore by. I searched for tips on cloth diapering and found some moderately helpful guides. I searched for tips on babywearing and got some useful perspectives.

I searched for support groups on all-natural parenting and ways to help my son sleep without letting him cry it out. That’s when things took a deep dive into the mommy-shaming universe.

If you’ve ever made the mistake of googling for help with a child’s skin rash, you’ll know the type of faces I made while reading the ferocious attacks on nearly every post. Forget vaccines and sleep training, it seemed that no matter your approach to anything, someone was out there with a diametrically opposed opinion and the overwhelming drive to let you know about it.

There were respites of funny kid pictures and the occasional rallying support cry for moms in need. Advice for kid-friendly restaurants or medical service providers I suppose were useful.

I recognize there is a strong need for connection and groups like this fill a certain void. For the most part though, I found Facebook parenting groups were more emotionally draining than they were ever helpful.

I wanted to find parent mentors who were excited to be parents and generally satisfied with the trajectory of their families. They’re not nearly so prevalent on Facebook.

At that point, I turned back to Pinterest, my old and true companion filled with my beautiful wedding design boards and pins of my imaginary, fabulous, internationally-inspired kitchen. I naively believed that investigating parenting in this medium of blogs and tip sheets would give me more helpful results and allow me to explore my questions more in-depth without the personal attacks.

I was both right and wrong. The sense of angry righteousness disappeared from my search results. The tsunami of irrelevant responses did not. If you’re an experienced “pinner” you likely know that the sheer volume of opinions and “foolproof tips” and “parenting hacks,” can quickly become overwhelming and painfully time consuming.

The Pinterest Rabbit Hole is a real thing. It’s fairly benign when you’re looking for paint colors for the laundry room, but it can become a soul-sucking cavern of ways you’re failing to be the ideal parent you always dreamt of being.

As my son got older and I learned to trust my own opinion on what was good and healthy for our family, I eventually realized my fundamental mistake in using Pinterest for parenting support. When starting to look for proactive growth-minded approaches to parenting, I had to stop looking in the parenting section at all.

Parenting is deeply personal. Our fears around raising children, our tolerance levels for their behavior, and especially the expectations we have of ourselves and our partners are massively influenced by the way we were raised. Our individual frames of reference often make it very difficult to appropriately filter the advice from every other self-proclaimed parenting expert in the world.

What isn’t so deeply personal, as the saying goes, is business. I started searching more business-related terms like “team leadership” to get ideas of ways groups of people learn to organize themselves, build trust, build strong communication, and succeed individually and as a unit.

On a new Pinterest mission, I found things like this team building exercise called Team Analysis Questionnaire from the Center for Work Life. Part of the instructions say: “Having the expertise of a psychologist, we [use this exercise to] get your team to view the ‘whole’ individual and create the desire to grow together and instill the passion to make real and greater contributions.”

Whether already struggling with child behavioral issues or not, what parent would read that line and genuinely say, “No, that doesn’t apply to my family. I don’t want us to grow together or make real and greater contributions”? So while reading through the questionnaire, I changed the term “team member” to “family member” and that made all the difference.