Mom-Shaming Ourselves - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/parenting/mom-shaming-social-media.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
I am usually fairly immune to the social media performance of parenthood. I know that behind the curtain there is someone else watching the children as the crackers are being made, or that the compliant toddler ripped her mask off moments after the photo was taken.
But now, two months into staying at home, I find myself engaging in painful comparisons with other moms. I’m particularly disgusted with myself for the pettiness, considering how much death, fear and disruption I read about and report on every day.
And yet, I can’t help myself from getting sucked into the scroll and compare. I asked Amanda Hess, the host of The Times’s video series “Internetting with Amanda Hess” and an incisive cultural critic, about why it is so irresistible. “I have also been thinking about the insane explosion of low-level gossip,” Hess said. “We don’t have these in-person bonds, where if I saw you at a bar, we might gossip a little bit about a friend, and that might release something in us.” Because we’re deprived of those bonds right now, when you see some cracker-making jerk on your timeline, “it looms in your mind.”
Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a sociology Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University who researches the internet and motherhood and has written for NYT Parenting, said that part of the reason that comparing ourselves to others may feel irresistible right now is that we’re all under lockdown orders, and so our lives are superficially similar. “It flattens the playing field in a disturbing way,” she said.
There’s a body of research about what psychologists call “social comparison,” or the comparison of one’s self to others. Researchers have described social comparison as “a fundamental psychological mechanism influencing people’s judgments, experiences and behavior.” During health scares, the need for social comparison increases, because the future isn’t clear and there are “no objective standards of how to cope,” researchers have found. In other words, we look to our peers even more intensely to figure out how we’re supposed to behave and what we’re supposed to feel.
#psychologie_sociale #confinement #réseaux_sociaux #maternité #femmes #chez_soi
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/parenting/mommy-influencers.html
▻https://www.nytimes.com/video/arts/100000007120740/celebrity-bookshelves-coronavirus.html