“Sharenting” on Social Media: Praise versus Criticism of Mothers and Fathers Online

• In Event: Insights about Parenting from Social Media and Other Online Platforms

Abstract

Mothers’ and fathers’ roles have changed dramatically in the US over the past 40 years, as mothers decreased and fathers increased their housework time and all parents increased time in child care (Bianchi et al., 2006). Today, mothers still spend nearly twice the time caring for children as fathers, however, despite working increasingly similar hours outside the home, creating a “second shift” that fathers do not shoulder (Baxter et al., 2008; Hochschild & Machung, 2009; Milkie et al., 2009). This “second shift” conflicts with the “intensive mothering” ideology that also took hold in the 1980s (Hays 1996), which defines motherhood as child-centered, emotionally absorbing, and labor intensive. According to a large qualitative literature, the intensive mothering ideal alongside the strains of second shifting produces far more cognitive and emotional stress for women about being a “good mother” than the ideal of “involved fatherhood” produces for men (Coltrain, 1996; Johnson & Swanson, 2006; 2007; Townsend, 2002; Wilton & Ross, 2017).

This study uses data from Twitter collected over a two-year period to test this hypothesis. Today, a majority of parents use some type of social media (75%), and the vast majority use it to receive social and emotional support (Duggan et al., 2015), an activity colloquially referred to as ‘sharenting’ (Lazard et al., 2019). It follows that social media, as a context for “discussing” parenting, can provide a unique insight into the nature of mother and father parenting ideals. Social media data also contain conversations about parenting generated by millions of users nationally, offering a powerful complement to small, non-representative qualitative studies on this topic.

We will analyze a subsample of tweets (over 1,000,000) containing the phrases “good mother” or “good father” (or synonyms) drawn from a larger sample of tweets (over 320 million) about “parenting” our team has gathered since 2017. Using a machine learning (ML) algorithm, we will code all tweets for content – does the tweet praise self, praise other, criticize self or criticize other – and emotion – positive, negative, or neutral. Given the documented cognitive and emotional conflict between ‘intensive mothering’ and ‘second shifting’, we hypothesize tweets about “good mothering” will contain more self-criticism and negative emotion than tweets about “good fathering.”

Preliminary results from our hand-coded training dataset (N = 500), indicate that tweets about “good mothering” are far more likely to contain self-criticism than tweets about “good fathering” (38% versus 2%) but are less likely to contain criticism of others than good fathering tweets (18% versus 26%). Tweets about good mothering are also more likely to be negative in emotion than good fathering tweets (57% vs. 31%). Tweets about good fathering, by contrast, are more likely to praise others than tweets about good mothering (50% vs. 28%) and more likely to be positive (53% vs. 42%). These results support the hypothesis that good mothering ideals evoke more self-criticism and negative emotion than good fathering ideals. Results from the full tweet sample will provide the first large-scale, naturalistic study of parenting ideals and how they impact parent wellbeing.

Authors

• Rebecca Ryan, Georgetown University
  Presenting Author

• Pamela Davis-Kean, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lisa Singh, Georgetown University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Samantha Steimle, Georgetown University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nicholas Waters, Michigan State University
  Non-Presenting Author