It was about twenty minutes into our visit to the pumpkin patch that I realised something was amiss. It wasn’t the surroundings – though admittedly, the hay bales were a bit too perfectly dishevelled, the wheelbarrows propped at slightly too jaunty an angle.
It wasn’t my two daughters – aged two and five - running around, climbing on bales, getting hay in their hair. Nor was it my long-suffering husband, who was making a decent stab at being upbeat.
What was wrong was me, and the way I was behaving.
“Right, get in the wheelbarrow with your sister. Hold the pumpkin. No, not up like that, I can’t see your face. Now push your hair behind your ear. Look at me! Look happy! Smile!
The irony is, I didn’t think I was “that mother”. I have relatively few followers on Instagram and rarely share photos of my children. When I do, I avoid showing their faces, and ask family members to do the same, even if they think I’m being overprotective. But despite all this, I wanted a shot of my cute daughters in the wheelbarrow, damn it. Even though it needed to show only the back of their heads, so I could maintain my moral high ground over those other mothers who post endless pictures of their kids. Yes, I wanted to have my Insta-cake and eat it, too.
It was only after I’d posted that I realised what a fraud I had become, projecting an image of my wholesome pumpkin-patch parenting, when I hadn’t actually been there at all - not mentally, at least. What exactly had I been doing, then, by posting that photograph? Who did I imagine I was talking to - and why was I more bothered about them than being present with my family? What exactly was Instagram doing to my mothering?
Like most millennials, I have only known parenthood in the age of social media. We are the generation who became hooked on Instagram during night feeds, scrolling for something to amuse (or just keep us awake) without demanding any intellectual input. We listen to podcasts about motherhood, send “Hurrah for Gin” cartoons to our friends with knowing emojis, frequently succumb to buying the many parenting gadgets marketed to us on Instagram (not to mention concealers and tummy creams that play on motherhood-induced insecurities).
What I realised at the pumpkin patch, though, was that social media is now shaping – even distorting – our real, lived experience as parents. The whole place was set up to be “instagrammable”, from the Farrow and Ball wheelbarrows to the hot chocolates bobbing with photo-friendly marshmallow adornments. In fact, the marketing for the event had explicitly promised “lots of different photo opportunities in the field, so you can capture the best pumpkin photos!” They’d seen me and my iPhone coming a mile off.
“Instagrammability” is now essential criteria for almost any paid-for activity, family events included. Forget boring old paintings on walls – it’s all about Insta-friendly “immersive” projections at art exhibitions now, including the recent Hockney and Van Gogh shows in London. The Twist Museum in Oxford Circus is ridiculously Instagram friendly – just insert any child into the tunnel of mirrors, et viola, content! Even the Natural History Museum has fallen victim. At its recent Titanosaur exhibit, I watched three separate parents take three separate photos of toddlers with their heads comedically positioned in the jaws of the same dinosaur skull.
These days when I see an image of picture-perfect motherhood on Instagram, I try and remind myself that a person's online presence is usually more performance than reality
But what about those of us consuming all this this content? People like Tash, the flawed parent protagonist in my new novel, The Other Mothers, who is addicted to scrolling the picture-perfect lives of other women, wondering why their parenting experience seems so much smoother, more joyful and aesthetically pleasing than her own? What impact is all that having on our mental health?
“The act of scrolling is something I can’t find much of an argument in favour of,” says journalist Sara Petersen, who wrote the book Momfluenced about the culture and impact of “mommy influencers” – the women who have made motherhood into a profitable performance on social media. Petersen started consuming Instagram when her children were babies, “hooked up to a breast-pump in the dark of 5.30am.” Looking at her influencer of choice, she writes, “made me want things…. Anthropologie mirrors, eyelash extensions… an Upper West Side Apartment. Freckles. Sometimes she even made me want to get pregnant again.”
This influencer also, Petersen says, “made motherhood look way better and more rewarding than my own experience.” Watching her became addictive: “the more I consumed, the more I wanted.” As she consumed more, Petersen would compare herself more. The message she was receiving, Petersen says, was: “that person seems more patient than me, that person has a cleaner house. This person is doing motherhood better than I am.”
Research would suggest this sort of online comparison via social media can be particularly toxic to those already vulnerable to poor mental health. One study, which looked at more than 200 mothers of young children aged 22-45, found Instagram use by mothers who already had low self-esteem, or who already tended to compare themselves to other people, was linked to increased levels of anxiety.
Some have been quick to censure the sort of “Mumfluencers” Petersen writes about - the growing tribe of women who have monetised their “motherhood” online and used their sometimes huge following to sell us a seductive, idealised – and most importantly, shoppable - aesthetic of motherhood to which we just can’t help aspiring. If social media is infecting our parenting, these women, some say, are to blame: exploiting their children for clicks and addictive content, preying on the vulnerable, exploiting our postnatal insecurities to make cash.
Others, though, feel the issue is more complicated than that – and that “insta mums” are too easy a target. To their defenders, their only crime is daring to celebrate child-rearing - a practice which is mostly unpaid, undervalued, and the subject of widespread intellectual and social snobbery – and to find a new way to make money unconstrained by the patriarchal workplace structures which render it near-impossible for most mothers to grow their careers and their income while being the sort of parents they want to be to their young children.
Among their defenders is journalist Jo Piazza, who studied the relationship between motherhood and influencers for her podcast Under The Influence. What she found was “a multi-billion dollar industry that is created by women and consumed by women which is largely ignored by the mainstream media” – despite the fact that “these influencers are controlling more eyeballs these days than most major cable networks or major newspapers.” She found mum-fluencers earning six-figure salaries, their husbands quitting jobs to support their business. Some had become millionaires.
Women are used to hearing the things that appeal uniquely to them – from fashion to so-called “chick lit” fiction – being sneered at. But what “mumfluencers” are doing is anything but frivolous, argues Piazza. “They are entrepreneurs. They are creators. They have formed their own businesses that they can run and make so much money at – all while raising their children in a world that is not kind to women who just want that flexibility. They are doing what a lot of [mothers] wish we could do.”
For others, though, worrying questions about social media and parenthood remain. Author Colette Lyons became intrigued by the relationship between motherhood and social media when she found herself tumbling down Instagram rabbit holes during night-feeds for her unsleeping baby daughter. “I had never really looked at Instagram on a personal level before having her,” Colette remembers. “But then my daughter was the worst sleeper in the world, and I had a lot of time on my hands with no brainpower to read and ended up scrolling Instagram a lot. Of course, the algorithm knew me. It fed me mumfluencers.”
After a year or so of sleeplessly consuming what she calls “the junk food” of mumfluencer content, she decided to use it for writing inspiration – partly “so I felt less bad about consuming it.” The result was the dark and unputdownable thriller, People Like Her, which tells the story of influencer Emmy Jackson – aka Mamabare – whose online success as an insta-mum starts to threaten her marriage, her morals and her family’s safety. Lyons was fascinated by the idea that mothers like the fictional Emmy share things without having “any control over who consumes the content and how they feel about you… You don’t know what place they’re in and what the effects could be. I found that chilling.” In Emmy’s case, the results are hair-raising indeed.
Lyons makes the point that many mumfluencers rely on cute images of their children to build their brands. For child actors and models, “there are labour laws, the money has to be held in trust for the actor if there earning” – yet “nothing like that exists for these Instagram kids” – a point which was noted by the recent Department for Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee report on influencers.
She is reluctant to “come down too hard” on mothers who have been attracted to making money on Instagram “as a means of making a living flexibly and on their own terms.” If you can navigate the pitfalls, “then maybe it’s OK,” she says. But she is uneasy about the way in which images of children are shared online. “I think you’re on much shakier ground teaching [your child] they have the right to consent to their image to be used if you have been monetising their image online.”
These days, when I see an image of picture perfect motherhood on Instagram, I try and remind myself that, just like my own silly wheelbarrow shot, a person’s online presence is usually more performance than reality. I don’t judge other parents for performing “for the ‘gram”, though. After all, aren’t most of us parents just performing in a role we don’t really know how to do, at least in the early days? “I think maybe that’s why new mothers are drawn to Insta-mums,” agrees Lyons. “They seem to give us some sort of template for what it should all look like. If you’re not geographically close to your own family, and you maybe don’t have friends who are at the same life stage, that can feel quite reassuring.”
Despite my moment of clarity at the pumpkin patch, I won’t be ditching social media any time soon. For me, it’s a brilliant tool for connecting with readers who’ve enjoyed my books, and I love nothing more than getting messages from all over the world from people who have been up all night with my novels Greenwich Park or The Other Mothers, unable to put them down. Petersen, though, has taken a different approach. Since publishing her book, she no longer consumes much social media at all. “I have very little appetite for that sort of content on Instagram now,” she says. “I’m happier not consuming it. I feel so much better.”
The Other Mothers by Katherine Faulkner is published on June 8, 2023.