The first generation of women to be raised in the therapeutic culture that eventually gave us “gentle parenting” is now raising children of their own.
Judging by the reaction to the Lindsay Clancy trial, it’s not going well.
These mothers were taught to analyze every negative emotion they experience, turning even the least discomfort over in every direction to analyze and dissect it.
This mindset teaches that sadness isn’t something you shake off, and anxiety isn’t something you push through.
Instead of encouraging resilience, its adherents believe that every unpleasant experience requires extensive processing.
So these moms are attempting to raise their own children according to the same philosophy: endlessly validating feelings, negotiating arbitrary boundaries, and striving to regulate the emotions of tiny people who possess neither reason nor impulse control.
The outcome is being plastered across social media, as mothers throw their own tantrums on their feeds — apparently overwhelmed by the ordinary monotony and frustration that’s always accompanied raising small children.
And the Lindsay Clancy trial has become their unlikely lightning rod.
Hundreds of women have assembled outside the courthouse to support Clancy, donning pink shirts and throwing heart hand signals toward the defense team.
Moms across the country are tuning into the trial like women of previous generations followed their daily soap operas.
Instead of “Days of Our Lives” or “General Hospital,” they’re watching the real-life video feed from a courtroom.
Thousands of them are posting on social media about how deeply they identify with a woman accused of strangling her three small children, ages 5, 3 and 8 months.
What’s remarkable is how quickly the conversation surrounding her case has metastasized: Instead of calmly focusing on the hormonal fluctuations of postpartum depression and psychosis, ordinary mothers are presenting the everyday burdens of motherhood as evidence that they, too, understand being pushed to the brink.
Sales of tripods and ring lights must have spiked as countless mothers set up their phones, hit record and wept about the burdens of basic child care.
They hurl ice cubes into bathtubs to vent their frustration about their child’s tantrums, without a hint of irony.
They film themselves crying in rocking chairs, pantries and parked cars about exhaustion, clean-up and laundry.
One woman even set up a camera to film herself reacting to her child tripping over an iced coffee she set up in the middle of the playroom floor.
Then they spend even more precious minutes editing the footage into 30-second TikToks lamenting the crushing difficulty of their lives — instead of taking the walk around the block or catching that 15-minute nap that could have reset their brains and turned the day around.
This is therapy culture as performance art.
It’s every bit as melodramatic and overwrought as you’d imagine it to be — and it’s making women ever more miserable.
Nobody goes viral saying, “My toddler had a tantrum today, but I ignored it and made dinner.”
There are clicks, however, in announcing that you are “touched out,” “triggered,” “dysregulated” and drowning under the invisible emotional labor of motherhood.
Worse, the same social media feeding mothers this steady diet of negative validation is teaching them a parenting style guaranteed to produce more of the behavior that’s exhausting them.
A toddler who screams because he wants the blue cup instead of the red one doesn’t need a lengthy negotiation about his feelings.
Sometimes he needs to learn that the red cup is the cup and screaming until he’s blue in the face will not succeed in turning it blue.
But gentle parenting has transformed such mundane confrontations into elaborate diplomatic negotiations.
Mothers are instructed to get down on the child’s level, name the emotion, validate the frustration, explain the boundary, and remain serenely regulated — while a tiny person with limited self-control wages psychological warfare over a granola bar.
Do this dozens of times a day about every single decision, and you’ll understand why these women are exhausted.
But much of that exhaustion isn’t something motherhood has inflicted upon them.
It’s the consequence of parenting choices they have made that turn every transition into a negotiation.
Imagine the reaction our female ancestors might have at the “misery” of child care in a home with disposable diapers, dishwashers, grocery delivery, robot vacuums and an iPad capable of buying 30 minutes of silence.
TikTok can teach you how to keep your kids from losing their marker caps.
What it cannot teach is perspective.
And perspective might be the one parenting hack these women actually need.
Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
