If people in our lives don’t share our values, visions, or feelings, it can be lonely. Social media can be a great opportunity to connect with people whose values align with our own. I love that there is often an online community to turn to around any subject. However, it can also leave you open to an influx of information about what the “right” ways to do things are. If we aren’t careful or are unsure of our values and intentions for using social media this can result in us questioning ourselves. “Why aren’t these baby sleeping tips (or toddler picking eating) tips working for me? What am I doing wrong?!” Enter mom-guilt.
How can we navigate social media with intention?
We tend to start following certain things we want to see more of, learn more about, or get ideas from. Before we know it, we have collected quite a few of these pages. But none of us are immune to comparison. Pay attention to when that comparison starts turning into guilt or shame.
- Are you following a mom who shares updates to her home, who has a pristine kitchen and a beautiful farmhouse aesthetic? Is it making you feel bad about your home? Then it’s no longer about “getting more design ideas.” It’s time to unfollow.
- Are you following Montessori parent pages whose play spaces are minimal and with toddlers that get minimal screen time, and turning on another episode of Bluey is making you feel guilty that you can’t be more like “that” mom? Unfollow.
- Are you following sleep training experts who push content that your toddler should still be napping or your newborn should be in the crib? Not working for your children? If it’s creating more stress and making you wonder if you are doing something wrong, unfollow.
- Try and curate your feed for things that make you feel good, validate your experiences, and most importantly don’t induce a stress response in your body. Motherhood can be overwhelming enough.
- Pay close attention to how the content you are scrolling through feels in your body. A lot of us unconsciously scroll, read comments, and before you know it that can spiral into a rabbit hole of what things “should” look like. Especially when it comes to the parenting content.
- Take any information or content that serves you, and leave the rest. That means you can agree and disagree with an account or a single post at the same time. You don’t need to take the way someone else feels personally as an attack on you doing it differently.
If you’re a new mama who is navigating what feels right for you, it will take time, trial, and error to ultimately learn what feels right.
My hope is that there is someone in your life (or that you will find someone) who tells you that you are doing nothing wrong if…
- Your baby only contact naps or doesn’t sleep through the night
- Doesn’t take a pacifier or bottle
- At the end of the day, you feel like all you did was take care of tiny humans
- There are dishes in the sink or you didn’t get the dinner prepped you had planned and are ordering out instead
- If your baby isn’t on a sleeping schedule or feeding schedule
- If your toddler isn’t napping anymore
- Or If they are a picky eater.
All of these things may have nothing to do with right or wrong and everything to do with your family circumstances, your experiences, and your baby’s temperament and preferences. If you are determined to change those things, then welcome to social media, where you can find hundreds of thousands of people who dedicate their careers to helping parents change things.
But please don’t let one person or community’s ideas of “ideal” or “right” create added stress or guilt for you if it doesn’t work for your baby or kids. There is no one “RIGHT” way. There is no one list of “ESSENTIAL” items or one ideal schedule to follow. I want you to know that the sleeping, feeding, and parenting experts don’t get to define what YOUR values are or how you mother your children. That is entirely up to you.
