A few months ago, my husband and I schlepped our kids to a phone store in a large outdoor mall. Eyeing a few large concrete balls like the ones you see outside Target, my daughters asked if they could stay outside and play while my husband and I ran our errand inside the shop. I said yes; the area is pedestrianized, so traffic wasn’t a concern. My husband said no; the benches in that particular part of the mall tend to attract people without anywhere else to go. The few disheveled characters loafing about seemed mostly harmless to me, but my husband wasn’t willing to take the chance.
One topic I keep returning to as a journalist is the way that various social pressures can lead parents to go against their instincts, often for the worse. Plenty of parents want to give their kids more independence, for example, but they struggle to do so in a society in which seeing a child out and about on their own is considered strange. “A lot of what we consider helicopter parenting is really performative parenting, giving a performance of what a good parent is supposed to do, even when it circumvents our own instincts or beliefs,” Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, recently told me. “It’s a weird inversion of alloparenting or cooperative breeding; the community still shapes our parenting, but through judgement rather than support.”
This, I believe, is a genuine problem. I unapologetically parent with my gut. I also tend to be highly deferential to other parents’ gut feelings, even when their decisions don’t make immediate sense to me. And yet, to quibble slightly with myself, I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with a parents’ instincts being challenged by other members of their society. In fact, I suspect that some amount of pushback on parental instincts is probably good.
For one thing, having your instincts challenged by others isn’t actually new. When I spoke with anthropologist David Lancy about the communal approach to childrearing that is universal in indigenous societies, he told me that “Mothers who can’t “let go,” [who] take too long to wean and such, are teased and ostracized.” So while it may be true that modern society offers parents far more judgement than support, the support that parents received from alloparents in traditional societies always came with a bit of judgment.
My hunch is that this is how things ought to be. Instincts are fallible. I can certainly personally attest to the fact that my own intuitions have led me astray. They also vary tremendously. People often speak about maternal intuition as if it is a single unified thing, but I am often struck by how differently moms can feel about things like, say, when it’s appropriate to send a child to nursery or leave a child at home alone while you run to the grocery store. Perhaps most importantly, though, we were never meant to parent in isolation. Parents play a crucial role in the life of a child, but not the only one.
I once read an essay written by a mother who moved to an indigenous village in the Ecuadorian Amazon when her son was just four months old. Mystified by how close she kept her infant, the villagers quietly rebelled, taking the rare opportunities when she wasn’t with him to abscond with her baby for hours on end. One woman went so far as to climb into a canoe as if to take him with her to her own home seven hours away. “To this day I am not sure whether she would have really taken him or whether she was just teasing me,” the author wrote. I am going beyond my expertise here, but as agonizing as that must have felt for the mother, I imagine that there were meant to be social forces pushing against whatever wiring in the maternal brain causes mothers’ to want to keep our children close. Parental—and specifically maternal—instincts are really powerful, but perhaps part of the point of “the village” is to keep them in check.
All of which is to say: at least to some extent, the problem with our current culture is not that parents are having their instincts challenged, but who is doing the challenging. Whereas parents of the past would get pushback from an assortment of friends and relations and neighbors, modern parents receive a steady stream of unsolicited advice from strangers, often online.
No one enjoys being told off by a nosy in-law or side-eyeing neighbor, but it’s worth dwelling on how strange, and perhaps misguided, it is that most of us get the bulk of guidance on parenting from people we’ve never met. Parenting advice doesn’t scale terribly well, because no one parents a generic child. The decisions parents routinely make are highly complex, incorporating a lot of factors and an expertise in their own particular kids. I am sometimes accused of being wishy-washy when I say parents ought to trust their intuition over whatever they are hearing or reading online. To some, it sounds like I am saying that there is no such thing as bad parenting. In reality, I am just acknowledging that you need a lot of information to figure out what the optimal decision is for a kid in a given situation—information that parenting influencers or rage bait artists typically lack.
To draw on a recent example, someone on X gave a sort of tough love lecture to moms with “a gaggle of children, none taller than your belly button” who are “quite literally drowning in dirty dishes and laundry.” Her stern advice was not to wallow in self pity but to “admit you need to grow up and work harder” because “either God’s grace is sufficient for the good works he’s prepared for you (including cooking 24/7) or it isn’t.” Many mothers jumped in to defend the struggling moms, pointing out that oftentimes, digging in and pushing through the difficulty, rather than finding ways to get more help, can backfire. Others chimed in to say that there are probably situations in which a mother genuinely needs to be told to change her attitude. The underlying absurdity of the entire debate is that sorting out which mother needs a little tough love, and which one just needs help with childcare, would require you to actually know them. This applies to the parenting influencer ecosystem generally. It may very well be that you are in need of someone to challenge your assessment of your kids needs. Strangers far removed from your situation are in the worst position to do so.
When I reached out to Saxbe to pick her brain about all this, she pointed out that in-person socializing allows for indirect feedback that can help put our own parenting into context. “That’s one thing I always got from playdates when my kids were little—a sense of what the kid behavior range looked like so I knew when my own kids’ reactions were normal or not normal,” Saxbe told me. “But the online parenting spaces are pretty overwhelming given the sheer number of perspectives and the heightened, catastrophic tone that is incentivized by attentional-capture social media.” Ultimately, this sort of commentary can wind up “undermining our confidence rather than making us feel supported,” Saxbe said.
Of course, you can, if you’d like, seek out pockets online of those who share your parenting values, style, or goals—but the ease of sorting into groups of like-minded people online poses its own challenges. In an echo chamber of individuals primed by personality or ideology to support your decisions, you run the risk of having instincts that really ought to be checked supercharged instead. A healthy desire for the best ways to keep your child safe while driving or sleeping can become a runaway obsession with risk reduction. The desire for a natural birth can be whipped into a reckless disregard for the real risks of childbirth. An intuition that you ought to take your kids’ feelings seriously can leave you overthinking everything you say to them. Surrounding yourself with a digital village of people predisposed to validate your intuitions is often a recipe for letting even your best, most natural instincts as a mom lead you astray.
For all the real problems with the scrutiny modern parents face, a culture in which parents faced no threat of disapproval would likely leave most of us feeling unmoored rather than empowered. “We naturally crave feedback and perspectives from the community because that’s how we’ve always parented: collectively, in groups,” Saxbe told me. The downside of the digital village is that it both challenges and validates a parents’ instincts in overly facile ways. Too often, it leaves us with a choice between unhelpfully oversimplified criticism and cloying single track validation. The feedback we receive from friends and family feels personal. That might make it harder for us to stomach—but it’s also what makes it worth hearing.
