After seeing a mom by a poolside take selfies with her daughter and then proceeding to ignore the daughter’s request to spend time with her, Jen Flint wrote on Facebook about what she thought about parenting and social media:
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I sat there thinking about what I’d witnessed for awhile afterwards. I imagined the photos she took being perfectly edited and posted to social media with a caption like “Pool time with my girly!#Makingmemories“.
Somewhere another Mama is going to be at home with her children, the house a mess from their play, her hair unruly from a day of mothering and her clothes dirty with spit up or peanut butter. She’s going to be tired because she’s spent her day cooking, caring, cleaning and playing with her children. She’s going to look at that photo and she is going to compare herself to the perfect Mama at the pool. The Adversary is going to whisper into her ear “you aren’t good enough… You don’t look like that Mama at the pool… You don’t have money to buy expensive swimming suits like that and you don’t have time to make memories like she is” and that young Mama is going to believe it. She’s going to feel like a failure.
In addition to her viral Facebook post, she also elaborated more on the topic with Today:
“What struck me is that when somebody else sees her pictures, they are going to think in their heads, ‘This mom spent all of this time with her kid, she’s at the pool and looking gorgeous, why can’t I be like that?’” Flint told TODAY Parents. “They are going to compare their whole life to this one moment that looks perfect, but wasn’t.”
Many of Flint’s younger friends “are seriously depressed” and struggling with self-doubt because of what they see on Instagram. “They feel like they’re not good enough,” Flint explained to TODAY Parents. “It’s important to remember what we see in our feeds is just one tiny moment. You don’t know what happened before or after the picture was taken.”
image credit: Elliot825 via wikimedia commons
Source: neatorama