“I just saw everyone around me having kids, and I knew I had to have one.”
That’s how my mother explained her decision to have a child. She was not in a relationship and was never besieged by maternal instincts. She just had an intrinsic radar for fitting in. So she made it happen, giving birth to me at age 26.
Although I knew that the incentives for fitting in were acute in communist-era Romania, my mother’s peer-induced decision still surprised me. Since I shared in the not-very-maternal gene that seems to haunt my family, peer pressure seemed like a flimsy reason to reorganize a life so profoundly, especially once the ripe old age of 26 came and went for me without the slightest pang of baby fever.
Admittedly, my cohort wasn’t having kids. They were off to faraway places, in the trenches of building careers, getting grueling PhDs, or just “enjoying their youth.” My peer group was also not made up of the people I had grown up with. I had subtracted and added friends by going to school abroad, working in non-profits, and not staying in the same place for long. In any case, except for a few curious outliers, nobody I knew felt compelled to procreate any time soon. I had no actual proximity to families. It seemed that once they had kids, my friends ascended—or descended—into another realm, where they were not only inaccessible but also different people altogether. I held a baby for the first time when I was already in my thirties.
The stark contrast between what my mother experienced in 1980s Romania and what women of my generation experience represents a fundamental shift in how peer pressure operates in the realm of family formation. For my mother’s generation, the pressure was straightforward: have children by a certain age or face social scrutiny. The question was primarily when, not how.
While the age-based timeline pressure has relaxed, it has been replaced by something potentially more daunting: the pressure of parental performance. Where peer pressure once nudged previous generations toward clear-cut milestones, today’s version has mutated into a relentless quest for perfection, reshaping decisions around family, parenting, and identity. Understanding this shift reveals deeper truths about our evolving culture—and why navigating adulthood now feels less like fitting in and more like keeping up.
A Different Kind of Peer Pressure
Like many of my fellow millennials, I took an intellectually convoluted journey into motherhood. I wrestled throughout my twenties with questions about the meaning of my existence. I then passed through the standard gauntlet of taking up meditation, retreats, and talk therapy. I read a wide variety of books on psychology and philosophy, many of which left me more confused than when I started. Moving up in my career seemed to have limited rewards. Everything I worked at eventually turned into a more responsibility-laden form of meh.
Though children were still an alien life form to me, starting a family—one better than the one I grew up in—seemed like a meaningful thing to do. The idea of family gradually presented itself as a response to deeper questions about connection, purpose, and legacy—a tangible answer to my abstract anxieties and existential uncertainties. Ultimately, the desire to start a family wasn’t something I discovered pre-existing within me; rather, it was a decision consciously constructed as I sought to anchor my life to something both meaningful and enduring.
Still, I had conditions. Our family had to be solid. In contrast to my mother, who explicitly wanted a child, this wasn’t my initial goal. I wanted a relationship with a man who would make a good husband and father first. Only once that was solved could I move on to the producing children part. Did I have a future in mind? Yes. Did my peers inspire it? In no way. Was it convoluted and overoptimized to get there? Maybe.
Since having become a mother, though, I’ve entered a different space. Once you’ve stepped through the fiery gates of birth, you have instant peers. Some are physically and emotionally close, such as the women I’ve met through the various local mommy and baby groups and the tiny smattering of mothers I reconnected with among my existing circles. Others are more remote. For a generation that is as likely to go to Google as to ask a parent for advice, the momfluencer has become an important guiding light. Modern mothers like me have instant “peers” at the touch of a screen. The Instagram-ready nursery, the artfully arranged lunchbox, the perfectly coordinated family photos: these visual markers of “successful” parenting create constant pressure to perform not just good parenting but photogenic parenting.
The Professionalization of Parenthood
The digital transformation of parenting has coincided with the credentialization of parenthood—the idea that good parenting requires specialized knowledge, techniques, and almost professional-level expertise. This professionalization has created an ever-expanding universe of “shoulds” for parents, particularly mothers. We assess the quality of our parenting in reference to “best practices” and structures that were not even on the table a few years ago. From sleep training methodologies to organic food preparation techniques, from sensory development activities to early literacy approaches, motherhood has morphed from a relationship into a curriculum, from an art to a science.
Making a private domain public created a whole new category of things that are now subject to evaluation and optimization. Your mom’s parenting choices were based on tradition and instinct, but there’s no need for that anymore. Experts on social media can not only tell you exactly how your current issues stem from your mother’s spontaneous, artistic approach to childrearing; they can also tell you exactly what to do to “break the cycle.” From developing the right morning routine, to monitoring the ingredients in your child’s food, to checking for developmental gaps, to diagnosing your child with a host of spectrum disorders, there is a right way of doing things, and you are probably doing them wrong.
The psychological toll of this transition from intuitive to instructed parenting is significant. Without the embedded wisdom of multi-generational communities, new parents are more susceptible to expert culture and more likely to feel inadequate when they inevitably fall short of idealized standards. The modern parent operates in what sociologists call a “high-information, low-support” environment. They are bombarded with advice but lacking the practical assistance that previous generations of parents took for granted, leading to increased isolation, anxiety, and depression.
Tim Carney’s work on community breakdown helps explain why this shift has been particularly acute for millennials and Gen Z, and Stephanie Murray has highlighted the ways that such strict control of children’s lives makes it difficult for parents to accept the help of whatever vestiges of a “village” they have left.
The Cost of Keeping Up
In traditional circles, there’s a lot of talk about the fact that “babies are cheap,” but babies that correspond to your class affiliation can actually be quite expensive. Raising them with the dream of upward mobility is even more costly. As much as people yearn to move up in the world, the threat that they will need to move down is more frightening. Strollers, swings, nursery decor, separate rooms, school fees, adorable clothes that inevitably get caked in baked beans, the infinity of cognitively enhancing activities, and classes that one should participate in both cost time and money.
This is compounded when the kids go to school and become conversant in the language of their own status competitions. My reference point might be slightly skewed by the more ostentatious dress codes and attitudes to wealth in Eastern Europe, but among local parents of older kids, their primary foe is the “bling cartel.” Wealthy parents who shower their kids with expensive clothing and gadgets drive up the cost of parenting for everyone at the school. Kids asking for $1,000 sneakers is a common occurrence. Class trips that in my generation used to focus on local castles or shabby seaside towns now feature exotic locations like Cancún and a built-in day dedicated exclusively to shopping. This rising pressure has pushed schools to institute a practice that has been abolished since Communist times: uniforms. But even when schools tried to crack down on wealth competition by instituting this policy, the kids still compete with everything that is outside of that domain: sneakers, jewelry, makeup, travel, and, of course, gadgets. None of these things are necessary for growing up, but they are increasingly necessary for keeping up.
Pressures for academic achievement start early now as well. Compared with my childhood, where the TV was a full-time babysitter, I skipped kindergarten entirely and learned to read and write like everybody else in first grade at seven years old, things have changed drastically. Now, my toddler has to apply for a good preschool. He only got in by the skin of his teeth. His lack of drawing skills and penchant for wiggles were almost disqualifying. In a year or so, it will be his brother’s turn to get on the bottom rung of the ladder and have his squiggles and wiggles scrutinized. There are other, less fussy preschools, but this is the one our friends go to, the one where he knows other kids and can speak to them in his native English. The kids are also already registered for a good middle school, and I’m, of course, thinking about how I’ll pay for college in a decade and a half. With the current state of graduate education creep and the cheapening of Bachelor’s degrees, I’ll probably have to think about how I’ll pay for a Master’s degree or more in two decades.
Maybe I shouldn’t. Perhaps I am overoptimizing, but it’s hard to resist the parental peer pressure when everybody else I know is thinking along the same lines. This educational arms race reflects a broader societal shift that Jonathan Haidt has termed “the great risk aversion”: a collective paranoia about children’s futures that transforms parenting from guidance into a high-stakes competition. The more rules and standards about how to raise a child, the more ways to do it poorly.
Another Way
From the outside, intensive motherhood looks aesthetically pleasing, ambitious, and fulfilling. Yet it also looks like an all-consuming full-time job, accessible only to people with the time and money to treat it like one. It’s easy to admire someone who climbs Everest from the comfort of your couch, knowing you’ll never be crazy enough to do it yourself.
In life, as in childrearing, the perfectionism paradox holds: when standards can only be fulfilled by perfection, participation declines. And as participation declines, so does the peer pressure to participate in the first place. Fewer peers, less pressure.
When parenting is perceived as an all-or-nothing proposition requiring perfect execution, many potential parents opt out entirely. Although the causes of falling fertility are complex, it’s reasonable to suspect that today’s exhausting escalation in parenting standards isn’t helping matters.
But perhaps there’s another way. The current crisis of parenting expectations presents an opportunity to reimagine what healthy family formation might look like in the twenty-first century. What if, instead of oscillating between the rigid timeline pressures of previous generations and the paralyzing performance standards of today, we created a cultural space for “good enough” parenting? Research consistently shows that children thrive not when they have perfect parents, but when they have present, loving, and “good enough” parents who model resilience and authenticity. The work of developmental psychologists, as documented in Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, suggests that children benefit more from witnessing adults navigate imperfection gracefully than from experiencing a sanitized, optimized childhood.
This more sustainable vision of parenthood would acknowledge both the joys and the inevitable messiness of family life. It would recognize that raising children is neither a performance to be perfected nor a status marker to be achieved by a predetermined age but rather a deeply human experience of growth, connection, and, yes, sometimes beautiful chaos.
For my mother’s generation, the question was, “When will you have children?” For mine, it’s “How will you perfect the raising of them?” Perhaps for the next generation, we might cultivate a healthier question: “How might we create families where both parents and children can thrive in their beautiful imperfection?”
That’s a peer culture worth building.
