Being a parent during the days following Halloween is an insane exercise in self-control. A bag or multiple bags of assorted candy is sitting dormant in your house at this very second. Surely, nobody would notice if you took one fun-sized Snickers bar , right? There's no way stealing some Dots would make you one of the worst parents in the world pertaining to the aftermath of Halloween. Parents out there make their kids give away all of their candy to the local dentist's office! There are paren…

Halloween is a difficult time to be a parent. One week, your kid wants to be a princess. The next week, they want to be a witch. By the time you get close to the 31st, they've come up with an idea for a costume so niche there is no way Spirit Halloween can provide it. Being a parent on Halloween is a difficult balance because you remember what it's like to be a kid on Halloween. You remember the struggle of your parents making you wear a winter coat over your costume, rendering the costume func…

One of the most interesting concepts I've learned about from being on the parenting side of social media is a little phenomenon called "mom shaming." Mom shaming occurs when someone criticizes a mom for how she chooses to raise her family. When I look at “mom shaming," I see it as a cyclical problem. We have moms posting

One of the things that uniquely strikes me about parenthood is the fact that you are wholly responsible for another human being. As it currently childless early 20s something, I can barely take care of myself let alone another living person. The thing that baffles me about parenthood is that you have to buy twice the amount of stuff then you would if you were just by yourself. If you’re going for a nice evening out at the Golden Corral, you have to buy a meal for yourself and for your child. To…

It's hard to be a parent; one of the hardest things about parenting is that your kid needs to be constantly supervised. If you can't afford fancy childcare, that means brining your child basically everywhere you go, which is stressful for everyone involved. Even without everything else that comes with a trip to the store or the doctors office, physically getting kids from point A to point B is a feat that I salute parents for being able to accomplish. But then there's the hostility that so many…

I've seen many wild takes from parents online, but none wilder than young moms bragging about having kids in their late teens and early twenties. I can't count the number of times I've seen someone say, "when you're 40, you'll be dropping your kids off at pre-school; When I'm 40, I'll be at the club partying." I feel like 22-year-old moms make that statement to rationalize why they can no longer party. These posts fail to recognize that parenting is a lifelong duty that you're never done with.…

Everyone's the perfect parent …until they have kids. That's the hot take a lot of parents express when they find people commenting on and criticizing their parenting techniques. I think there's some truth to this sentiment: I can't even imagine how difficult it is to raise a real human person. However, that doesn't mean that parents, especially those who make weirdly invasive social media posts documenting every part of their children's lives, are exempt from any criticism. Far from it, actuall…

They remember EVERYTHING.

The golden age of parents on Twitter lying about the esoteric things their young children say has long passed us. Back in the ancient time of 2016, parents were obsessed with tweeting things like, "My son came up to me and said ‘Papa, I have a childlike solution to great economic and social problems that will be incredibly easy to go viral through the retweets of easy to trick rubes.’"

Watching parents spill details about their kids on social media can make you feel a lot better about your family life. I saw a TikTok this morning where a mom openly admitted she took her able-bodied child on a family vacations without her disabled son. Like, how are you not embarrassed? Why are you openly admitting this horrible thing you did on social media without shame? Parents can share the most alarming things to complete, and if you question it at all, you get accused of “mom shaming.” L…

Back to school season is finally upon us! That means parents get the whole day to lay around and do nothing before their kids come home, right? If only. School is one of the main reasons people don't see parenting as a full time job. Nobody except parents know how much time it takes to drop kids off at school, go grocery shopping, clean the house, manage their kids affairs, pay the bills, pick kids up from school, drive them to their activities, make dinner, pick them up from their activities a…

Parents love to document every milestone their kid reaches. A child's first steps, first word, and the first day of school are all recorded carefully by their mom and dad so they can relive that memory for years to come. However, the most memorable moments of a kid's life usually happen when the cameras aren't around. When I was a kid, I somehow got my parents to give myself and my sister the s*x talk by asking endless questions about the biology of conjoined twins. There might not be a scrapbo…

At least we can laugh at them.

Today, August 11th is National Daughters and Sons Day. If you're a parent, you're probably thinking, “isn't EVERYDAY daughters and sons day?”

The only phase of life where being chubby is socially accepted as a positive thing is infancy . Once you stop being young enough to carry, being thin is societally enforced with an iron fist, with anyone who doesn't fit into that mold being endlessly criticized for their size. It makes sense that we make an exception for fat babies in such a fatphobic society. After all, nobody wants a skinny baby. Well, almost nobody. Mayci Neeley is a TikToker who makes family content, sharing cute videos of…

Parents' expression on social media has only grown in the past ten years. I remember when millennials started having kids and documented their entire parenting journeys via Facebook. The landscape of parenting social media has vastly expanded, with some of the most popular accounts being “gentle parenting” accounts. This content's conceit is to teach parents how to parent their kids without traumatizing them. They post videos of their kids doing something naughty and then show parents how they…