Social Media is Ruining Parenthood Too

When the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, went viral in 2020 it wasn’t because it said anything all that surprising. It was the opposite, actually — the documentary threw open the door to something that had been knocking for a long time. 

Most of us felt something was off about the effect of social media, but we didn’t really have proof. Five years later, the proof is out there in the open. U.S. Surgeon General warnings, Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book, and lawsuit after lawsuit based on a growing body of research have amplified, clarified, and sustained worldwide concern about the negative impact of social media.

Much of that conversation — and most of the research — is focused on how social media has negatively transformed childhood for kids today. In Haidt’s book, mentioned above, it sums it up pretty nicely this way: “By designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, [Big Tech] companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.”

Protecting kids was the right place to start — and there’s plenty of work left to do. As lawsuits wind their way through the courts, Big Tech makes minor changes to quell public opinion, and companies like Gabb provide safe tech alternatives for kids, it’s also time to start asking serious questions about how other social media users are being impacted, specifically parents.

One lesson I hope we’re all learning from the growing body of evidence on social media’s harm to kids is that we should trust our gut. The data connecting social media to parenting struggles might be sparse, but data showing parents are generally struggling today is not. If you have a nagging sense that your own time spent on social media is a major contributor to these struggles, trust me, you’re not alone.

Social Media and Stress

In 2024, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents. The full advisory is worth reading but the gist is this: when it comes to psychological health, we’re not doing so hot.

The advisory identifies seven specific stressors confronting parents in unique ways today. 

• Financial Strain, Economic Instability, and Poverty
• Time Demands
• Children’s Health
• Children’s Safety
• Parental Isolation
• Tech and Social Media
• Cultural Pressures and Children’s Future

Let me give you a quick summary of each.

Financial Strain, Economic Instability, and Poverty

The report calls financial worry, “a major stressor among parents compared to other adults.” 

Here are some data points cited in the advisory that back that up:

• 66% of parents report feeling consumed by worries regarding money compared to 39% of other adults.
• 25% of U.S. parents said there have been times in the past year when they did not have enough money for basic needs (i.e., food for their family or to pay their rent or mortgage)
• 24% have struggled to pay for health care 
• 20% have struggled to pay for child care their family needed

Time Demands

Parents today are spending more time on both work and childcare. The advisory cites data showing that from 1985 to 2022:

• the amount of time mothers spent working increased 28% — from 20.9 to 26.7 hours per week.
• the amount of time mothers spent on primary child care increased 40% — from 8.4 to 11.8 hours per week.
• the amount of time fathers spent working increased 4% from 39.8 to 41.2 hours per week.
• the amount of time fathers spent on primary child care increased 154% — from 2.6 to 6.6 hours per week.

And it’s important to note that “primary childcare” only represents a fraction of the time parents are spending with children. So where are those extra hours coming from? 

The advisory explains, “demands from both work and child caregiving have come at the cost of quality time with one’s partner, sleep, and parental leisure time.” You don’t need a PhD to see how fewer hours for each of those three things would contribute to feeling overburdened and stressed out.

Children’s Health

Apparently I’m not alone in my belief that few parenting situations are more stressful than a sick or suffering child. The current adolescent mental health crisis is making this even worse. Almost 3-in-4 parents say they are “extremely or somewhat worried that their child will struggle with anxiety or depression.”

Children’s Safety

While mental health tops the list of things parents are “extremely/very” worried about when it comes to their children, physical safety follows closely behind. The specific concerns include worries about bullying, kidnapping, getting beaten up or attacked, having problems with drugs or alcohol, and getting shot.

Parental Isolation and Loneliness

Loneliness is a growing problem generally, of course, but as at least one study suggests, it’s a larger problem for parents than other adults: 

• 55% of non-parents report experiencing loneliness
• 65% of parents report experiencing loneliness
• 77% of single parents report experiencing loneliness

Plus, 42% of parents who experienced loneliness always felt left out compared to just 24% of the non-parents surveyed who said they experienced loneliness.

Technology and Social Media

Almost 70% of parents say parenting is harder today than it was 20 years ago. Of those that say that, 75% point to technology as the main reasons why. So in addition to directly impacting parental mental health (which will get to in a second), our kids’ social media use also stresses us out.

Cultural Pressures and Children’s Future

The advisory points to a 2019 study involving 3,600 parents that concluded: “that cultural norms of child-centered, time-intensive mothering and fathering are now pervasive, pointing to high contemporary standards for parental investments in children.”

In other words, there has been a broad cultural shift toward parenting styles that put a ton of extra pressure on mom and dad.

“73% of fathers believed they were more involved with their children than their own father had been with them.”

Amin Ghaleiha et al

It’s not hard to see a relationship between social media and each of these major stressors. You may have already been drawing some lines in your own head. Still, it’s worth exploring how social media has exacerbated these problems for parents today — compared to past generations, and compared to non-parent adults.

Social Media, the Conformity Machine

The pressure to “keep up with the Joneses” is nothing new, and the gap it creates between what we have and what we think we ought to have can be a source of a lot of negative emotion. 

So what does social media bring to the situation that is unique to parenting today? In short: way more potency and volume than we’ve ever seen before. 

For previous generations of parents, the signals that others had more were relatively localized and infrequent. Maybe they’d feel it when someone down the street remodeled their home, or the neighbor’s kid got a scholarship to an Ivy League school, or a co-worker showed up to the office yet again wearing expensive new shoes. 

Adults from past generations surely felt pressure to keep up in response to those types of signals. But the signals just didn’t show up all that often. Maybe once a day? Once a week?

In today’s world, where the average person spends 2.5 hours a day on social media, these signals hit us thousands of times per day and they pour in from every corner of the globe. Just in terms of volume, it’s a whole different ballgame.

Plus, the nature of digital media makes it incredibly easy for people to manipulate their posts and project a lifestyle and version of themselves they aren’t even living. Today we’re comparing ourselves to far more idealized versions of people’s lives than even the most irrational projections put on in-the-flesh neighbors and co-workers. The gap between ourselves and all that we think we ought to be today is vast. 

Of course we all know much of what we see online is too good to be true, but it turns out that actually doesn’t help the situation all that much. The part of our brains we use to process social comparison is completely different from the part we use to comprehend that things online are manipulated to appear better than they are.

Think of it like a dream where your best friend does something awful to you — you wake up the next day feeling hurt and resentful, even though you’re perfectly aware it was just a dream. Times that phenomenon by 2.5 hours a day, then by 7 days a week, then 52 weeks a year, then however many years you’ve been on social media and you start to get a sense of what we’re up against emotionally.

That’s the nature of social media, at least as it stands now. As Jonathan Haidt put it in The Anxious Generation, “Social media platforms are the most efficient conformity engines ever invented.” Even the most careful, thoughtful, and emotionally resilient of us are likely to feel inferior while spending time on these platforms. 

This conformity engine is having an outsized impact on kids because their brains are undergoing an intense phase of development. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t having a profound impact on adults.

Financial dysmorphia is a prime example. There are many reasons parents feel more financial stress than other adults, or compared to parents from past generations, but social media is pouring new fuel on this timeless parenting fire. 

Similar to body dysmorphia, financial dysmorphia is the phenomenon of feeling like our financial situation is worse than it actually is because of what we see filling our social media feeds. 

Lifestyle inflation is a similar concept. The idea of cultivating a specific way of living has been studied since the early 1960s, but lifestyle influencers are new, courtesy of social media, and it’s undeniable they’re impacting us today. A 2025 report found 79% of people purchased a product after seeing an influencer use it.

So yes, our own parents worried about keeping up with the Joneses. But not like this. This is new territory.

Social Media, the Fear Monger

I’ve never met a parent who didn’t worry about their kid. The world has its dangers and our most basic responsibility as parents is to protect our children from them. But parental fear is on the rise and its trajectory doesn’t correlate with a rise in danger. In fact, when it comes to physical danger, it’s actually the opposite.

Pew Research data shows that high on the list of things parents worry about most are kidnappings, a child being beaten up, and shootings. These things happen, sadly, so we’re not crazy for acknowledging the possibility. But what’s the actual likelihood?

In 2022, there were roughly 72 million kids under age 17 in the United States. The FBI reported 546,568 missing persons cases that same year, which sounds like a lot. But here’s the thing: only .1% (296) were classified as abductions by strangers. 

When it comes to actual kidnappings, the odds of this happening in 2022 (a typical year) were 296 in 72,000,000 — or roughly 1 in 250,000. 

Murder is also very unlikely. And getting less likely as the years pass. The U.S. murder rate peaked in the 1980s at about 10 murders per 100,000 people (sad but, statistically speaking, still pretty rare). Other than a small COVID bump, it has steadily declined in the decades since. Experts put the 2023 murder rate at 5.3 per 100,000.

And it’s not just murder. Jeff Asher, an FBI crime analyst, cites dropping crime rates in violent crime, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, and more to describe, “a large, potentially historic, decrease in crime occurring nationwide.”

In summary, your child is 4 times more likely to be struck by lightning this year than kidnapped, and half as likely to be murdered (or the victim of any kind of violent crime) as you were if you grew up in the 80s or 90s. 

So why do we worry so much about stuff like this?

The news. Blame the news. Also, the heart is not always a data-driven decision-maker and our kids have our hearts.

Negative headlines grab our attention better than positive ones. Especially horrific stories about children being harmed. There are whole sets of biological/evolutionary considerations as to why that we don’t need to get into here.  The trend toward fearing everything can be linked to the explosion of news media, which really took off by the time TVs were common in American homes by the mid-1950s. 

Obviously that means we’re not the first generation of parents to be subject to this problem. Our parents watched the news too. But they had to seek it out. They watched on big, stationary TVs or listened to talk radio while driving in a car. 

Today, more and more people get their news via social media and social media is rarely farther than arm’s reach, 24/7. We’re inundated with it. The nature of social media channels has also pushed content to be shorter, bolder, and flashier so news cycles are quicker, intensified, more sensational. The perception of danger has heightened, even if the reality is our kids are growing up in a safer world than we did.

Social Media, the Loneliness Engine

The grand irony of social media is that many of its outcomes are proving to be decidedly anti-social. I’m sure I’m not the first to point this out to you.

The social devastation wrought has been awful in both width and depth: millions are feeling it and the suffering is more than just feeling “a little bummed out.”

How is this specifically problematic for parents? In another bit of irony, adding more people to your home doesn’t guarantee you won’t feel isolated and lonely. In some ways, it could contribute to those feelings. Social interaction with toddlers is not the same as it is with adults. Even interacting with teens often falls well short of meeting our social needs because teens are infamously disinterested in hanging with old people.

The rewards of parenting are unmatched. But so too are the demands and day-after-day-after-day tedium and monotony that can come with parenting. Anyone who has done a full-time parenting shift longer than a few days knows exactly what I’m talking about. The difference between babysitting and parenting is kind of like the difference between paddling your kayak across the local river and paddling it across the Atlantic Ocean. Similar, but not really.

I’m sure this is a challenge common to every generation of parents but now we’ve added social media to the equation. It should be a solution because the promise from the beginning has been connection that transcends time and space. It’s supposed to help, but it does the opposite. As with conformity and fear, social media hasn’t introduced a new type of loneliness and isolation, just pushed those things to new degrees.

Consider the below excerpt from David Foster Wallace on the impact of TV watching on American adults. Written over thirty years ago, it reads almost like prophecy when applied to today. Simply swap words like  “TV” and “Bud Bundy” with “social media” and “influencer” and Wallace nails the social media era to the wall in ways he probably couldn’t have even imagined:

“[T]he more time spent watching TV, the less time spent in the real human world, and the less time spent in the real human world, the harder it becomes not to feel alienated from real humans, solipsistic, lonely. It’s also true that to the extent one begins to view pseudo-relationships with Bud Bundy or Jane Pauley as acceptable alternatives to relationships with real humans, one has commensurately less conscious incentive even to try to connect with real 3D persons, connections that are pretty important for mental health.”

Wallace frames his argument in terms of addiction, which he subdivides into two types: benign addiction and malignant addiction. Most parents I know will admit to their social media use as a benign addiction — acknowledging they spend too much time on their phones but always in a haha-eye-roll kind of way. Most of us don’t want to believe it’s more than that. But it’s worth considering.

Here’s the core of Wallace’s description of a malignant addiction: “(1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as relief from the very problems it causes.” That second part is what should really hit home when it comes to social media and parental isolation.

Consider the lonely mom, stressed and exhausted from yet another day playing parental whack-a-mole. She finally gets a brief moment of calm while waiting for her 13-year-old to finish basketball practice. What does that little glass rectangle sitting in the cupholder promise to this mom? Escape. A lifeline. A portal to a place where interesting, beautiful, exciting things are shared freely between interesting, beautiful, exciting adults. 

It feels like it’s scratching the itch but what does it actually deliver?

Another dose of the vague, heavy feeling that somewhere else there are people leading extraordinary lives free of packed lunches, crumb-filled minivans, teenage hormonal outbursts, and a million thankless chores stacked end-to-end so far forward they disappear over the horizon. Plus, even more impactfully, it delivers another reminder for this lonely mom that she is on the outside looking in via a pathetically small screen in the palm of her hand.

Think of it like the castaway stranded at sea for days and days — eventually he becomes so thirsty and desperate that he’ll reach over the side of the life raft, dip a cupped hand into the cool ocean water, and bring it to his lips. Immediate relief. Thirst temporarily quenched. But even in a state of delirium he knows, at some level, that saltwater accelerates dehydration and whatever quick relief he’s feeling now will fall well short of the damage he’s done by drinking it.

Is that a little too dark and melodramatic? Yeah, maybe. But the outlook for parental mental health is bleak so a little hyperbole might be justified if it prompts the kinds of questions that could turn things around.

Now What/What Can We Do About It?

If the net effect of everything above feels like I’m arguing that social media is evil then I’ve missed my mark. That’s not the point.

If you’re like me, you’ve had a hundred conversations over the years with friends, siblings, or neighbors about the impact of social media. Most of these conversations start with complaining about some aspect of social media, then reluctantly acknowledging some of the positives, then concluding with a kind of vague shoulder shrug, like “well, it’s here to stay so what can we do?”

If there’s one takeaway you get from all my rambling I hope it’s this: you don’t have to take social media’s presence in your parenthood as unavoidable and irreversible. 

Yes, most of the people you know use social media. Yes, your kids will want it and probably beg for it and argue that they’ll get it eventually anyway so why not let them now. But the truth is that there are plenty of fully functional, successful, personable, socially connected people who don’t use social media at all. It is not a human requirement in 2025, and hasn’t been in any year leading up to it. 

Deleting social media entirely really is an option. It might not be the right option for you, but accepting that it is at least a viable option puts you on firmer ground to decide what the right option for you actually is. Let me give you a personal example.

The Detox: Twitter as a Net Negative 

My guess is that many of you have at least thought about a detox, even if you haven’t tried one yet. Remember, there are lots of ways to do this. A detox doesn’t have to be as simple as going cold turkey for a set period of time. 

For example, if you suspect social media could be inviting extra stress into your life, approach the problem like an elimination diet for someone who suspects a food allergy. Start one habit at a time — like not using social media right when you wake up — or even one platform at a time.

I tried this with Twitter (back when it was still Twitter, not X). One day I realized I felt bitter and angry way more than I had any excuse to. By that point I was using Twitter primarily to get news, specifically political news, and suspected maybe that this had something to do with all the resentment I was feeling toward the world. 

I did worry that without Twitter I would become uninformed and naive, but figured it was worth testing that assumption too. I was genuinely curious to see what the net effect would be. So I didn’t do anything else other than delete the Twitter app from my phone and decide to see how I felt in about a month. 

I found that it did both the things I thought it might: it removed a lot of emotional negativity from my life and left me feeling a little out of the loop. There were a couple times someone asked, “hey, did you hear about ____” and I was a little embarrassed to tell them I had no idea what they were talking about. But overall, it was so clearly a net positive in my life that I didn’t go back.

More importantly, it led me to discover something that changed my whole outlook on social media platforms: there are other ways to get the “pros” these platforms offer. 

In this case, I eventually discovered that email newsletters are far better at keeping me informed because (A) there are a lot of great ones out there (many are free), and (B) email is divorced from the algorithmically-driven feeds that generate conditions pretty antithetical to good information — sensationalism, impulsivity, lack of fact checking, pettiness, trolling, et cetera.

Social media didn’t create most of the positives it claims exclusive ownership over. It has offered some novel benefits and drawbacks, but mostly it has just repackaged and rearranged stuff that has been here as long as humans have. People have been connecting with friends and family as long as there have been people, friends, and families. You can get most of the pros elsewhere, and without all the cons.

Questions of pros/cons are highly personal so don’t take my story as a prescription. There are plenty of other ways you might approach this. 

Try using social media exclusively from your computer, rather than through an app on your phone. That alone adds a layer of intentionality that could adjust your relationship to social media in a positive way. Or take advantage of the wide range of apps and gadgets designed specifically to help adults manage their own screen time problems: Brick, Freedom (app), ScreenZen (app), and Lite Phone, to name a few.

The point is nothing about the digital world we live in is immutable. We got here pretty quickly. Even in the twenty years that social media has been around it itself has changed dramatically. If you don’t like what it’s doing to you, change what it’s doing to you. If you’re not sure what it’s doing to you, find out.

Kids themselves are a crucial part of the  movement to change social media in good ways but ultimate success depends on convincing one gatekeeper that change is needed, and it’s not the gatekeeper you might suspect. Not schools. Not legislators. Not Big Tech. It’s parents. 

One drawback to the mainstream nature of the conversation today is that it might suggest this is a global problem we as parents can’t influence. It’s true that it’s global, but only because it’s deeply deeply personal. Every single person born into the world as it is now will have to decide what role to allow social media to play in their life. 

The most crucial influence on how technology will shape your child is the decisions you make on how it will shape you. Because as any parent knows, “do what I say, not what I do” never works with our kids. If we want to make sure our kids learn how to navigate this highly digital existence safely, we need to master it ourselves.

What Do You Think?

• Is social media making parenting harder for you too? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

• And if you’re looking for a healthier digital path for your kids, check out Gabb’s safe tech for families — built to give them freedom without the feeds.