When "Mom to Mom" Advice on the Internet Turns Dangerous

As far back as we’ve been having babies, we’ve been helping each other. Women have always bared witness to each other’s pregnancies, births, and postpartum recovery periods. We’ve shared stories, given each other advice and passed on wisdom, and have even shared caregiving responsibilities. It’s true that “it takes a village” and for most of our history, humans have supplied this provided new parents with community as the default setting.

Part of this “village” that most of us crave, and have found via social media, is the sharing of information. “Mom to mom- what’s the best diaper brand really?” "Did your newly 3-year-old act possessed, too?” “How long did you breastfeed for?” “What should I do for teething because I think I’m losing my mind.” We ask these questions, into the anonymous void of the internet, not just to gather facts but to be witnessed. We want other moms to see us, and to validate what we’re going through. To say “you’re not alone- this happened to me too.”

In fact, new research says that a core reason humans developed language in the first place is because babies are too hard to care for alone. “The extreme energetic and physical demands of raising our large-brained babies forced early humans to rely on community cooperation, such as extended family and groups, to survive. The need to coordinate this communal childcare required complex, nuanced communication.”

Talking about parenting is in our innate nature. And perhaps we flock to Instagram, Reddit or Tiktok with questions when we could just as easily google the answers we’re after is because we aren’t simply information seeking. We’re connection seeking. We’re trying to build our village from an algorithm, brick by brick, searching for our “mom tribe” through a screen— whether the advice we find is sound or not.