Are we killing our kids?
Or are the parenting influencers just out to get us?
Hello!
We took last weekend off, assuming that many of you had hotdogs (or veggie burgers) to grill and thus, less time for our newsletter. Same. Happy (unofficial) summer!
Though, to be a bit of a downer: for many American parents, summer is… more stressful than happy. With school out but full time jobs very much still “in,” working parents often see their kids’ summer vacations as an eight week logistical nightmare. Eight weeks of scrambling to pick them up from pickleball camp at noon, or juggling calls from a crowded vacation rental, or beseeching grandparents to come visit your extremely hot city for some quality (childcare) time.
Parenting is a particular shitshow in summer, but, as our former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy proclaimed last year, parenting in the US can actually feel like a shitshow year round. Fun!
Obviously there are many systemic reasons for this (starting literally from birth, with our lack of guaranteed parental leave), but there are more insidious factors too. In his August ‘24 Surgeon General’s warning, Murthy wrote: “One response to a world in which success and fulfillment feel increasingly out of reach has been an intensifying culture of comparison—often propagated by influencers and online trends—with unrealistic expectations around the milestones, parenting strategies, achievements and status symbols that kids and parents must pursue. Chasing these unreasonable expectations has left many families feeling exhausted, burned out, and perpetually behind.” Essentially… #parenting in an age of social media has left many of us feeling anything but #blessed.
Prism friend/contributor Meghan Nesmith would agree. Read on for her take on parenting in an age of influencers, as well as some crowdsourced analog alternatives to parenting resources from us.
All this said, though, summer *does* still slap…
Jocelyn, veggie burger aficionado
Meghan is a writer and editor with work in the Boston Globe, Gossamer, and more. She writes about motherhood and its discontent in her Substack, Cry it Out, and her debut novel A World Apart is forthcoming in 2026.
One thing that makes Meghan feel well: Cooking a meal my kids actually consent to eat. Peak ‘90s Nigella Lawson, real domestic goddess vibes.
How am I killing my kids today?
A partial list of things I didn’t think about before I had kids:
Ultra-processed foods
Endocrine disruptors
Just endocrines generally
PFAS, phthalates, that cancerous red dye they apparently put in Cheetos
EMFs (where are they???)
Lead paint
It’s an obvious and absurd understatement to say “everything changes” when you have kids. Motherhood quite literally rewires your brain. There is joy, yes, joy that jams its fists inside your chest and cracks you so wide you think you might perish of it—only you can’t, because you’re too tired.
I was prepared for that, in the way that anyone can prepare to be altered on a molecular level. What I was not prepared for, what came for me despite all my best efforts, was the parenting wellness industrial complex.
In my 20s and early 30s, my commitment to health was mostly centered around “looking hot.” It’s not that I didn’t know the world was out to kill me—of course it was! But given the choice between smearing my armpits in aluminum and sweating through my Rachel Comey blouse—well, that’s easy. Something would get me one day, but the anxiety caused by worrying about it, or the stress of trying to defray its onrush, seemed like a waste of my one wild and precious life.
Then, suddenly, you have a baby, and one night you’re soothing them back to sleep, sweet moon-face gazing into yours, as you lazily wonder…
Oh god, is this swaddle crawling with microplastics?
You’re vulnerable, see. You’re hormone-addled, mystified by what your life has become, and that’s when the wellness influencers will get you. That’s when they’ll crook their (nearly always white, nearly always wealthy) fingers and beckon you to follow them into the bowels of modern parenting hell.
You’ll find them holding a box of innocent-looking cereal and citing “studies” that link its consumption to the rise in childhood cancers. They implore you to “do your own research.” They just want you to “think of your children.” And you’ll discover within yourself an entirely new facet of your personality: the ability to become preoccupied to a heretofore unknown degree about truly the most inconsequential shit.
These women have managed to capitalize on the dual vulnerabilities of modern parenthood: the seemingly unlimited wealth of choice in the products and care we give our children, and the informationally-rich environment in which we live. Taken together, these conditions should enable us to make the best, most informed decisions about how we parent.
Instead, we’re left staring at 47 different brands of teething crackers while a mom named Amy who lives in our phone smears beef tallow instead of sunscreen on her children.
The rational, reasonable part of my brain (it’s in there, I swear), knows that these influencers use alarmist tactics to generate views. Knows that anyone can google their way into a study showing correlation (not causation!) between applesauce pouches and autism. Knows that obsessing over PFAS is, in fact, a luxury, one these women enjoy only because their structural needs have already been met. If you’re not worrying about whether your kid has access to green space or if you can afford preventative care—when the actual determinants of health have already been secured for your children by virtue of privilege—well, surely there’s something you should be worrying about? We’re moms, after all! What are we if not our worries?
I know—truly, I do—that beyond vaccinating my kids and forcing them to eat a vegetable every now and then, there is very little I can control that will meaningfully move the needle on their lifelong health. But what if I am the only thing standing between my kids and certain death at the hand of a mattress I failed to properly off-gas? What if my decisions, formerly reasonable, now border on neglect?
If there is one salient fact about the collective health of our children today, it is this: For most of human history, global child mortality (the odds that a child would die before they reached the age of 15) hovered around 48%. These influencers may paint the 1950s as a halcyon time of rosy-cheeked, free-range kids fed on raw milk and traditional values, but in that same era, one in four children died before they reached adulthood.
Today, the child mortality rate in America is 0.8%.
This is staggering progress. While this is obviously not the only important metric, it is undeniable proof that the odds are in our favor.
But no one has ever gone viral for saying, “I dunno, guys, maybe things are actually okay?”
Maybe these influencers are also grappling with the fact that what makes modern parenting so gutting—the cost of childcare and education, the dispersion of support networks, climate change—is too monolithic to be addressed by any one mom with a smartphone and an Instagram account. Maybe they are also suffering from the absence of accessible, credentialed experts who can evaluate research and make recommendations devoid of financial incentives. Maybe they too are slaves to algorithms that reward extremism over thoughtful conversation.
Or maybe we all simply need something to fixate on that isn’t the extraordinary, impossible knowledge that no matter how many non-toxic wooden rattles we buy, our children’s safety is never guaranteed.
When my youngest daughter, Lily, was two months old, she spent five days in the ICU with RSV. She has since been in and out of hospital and uses a daily steroid inhaler. When I watch her round, perfect tummy gasp for breath, I think about a lot of things. I think about the SSRIs I took during pregnancy. The vaccines I received. That time in my 30s I got drunk and super-glued my fingers to my sandal which was probably coated in flame retardants. I think about all the stupid things I ever did that meant so little, when she means so much.
I’ll never know what made Lily sick, but you can bet I’ll spend the rest of my life torturing myself over it. And in the meantime, I’ll keep trying to be the best mom I can be—flawed, yes; afraid, always—and desperate for that one weird trick that will make them that bit happier, that bit healthier, that much more permanent. Forevermore.
FIND MEGHAN ON
An Instagram search surfaces 23.8M #parenting posts and 85.5M under #momlife (#protein boasts a meager 30.2M, for comparison). The volume of parenting tips, product recs, and (often pseudo) psychology trends is astounding. Compared to Boomer parents, who could read one or two books and plop their kids in front of the ubiquitous “screen” of Sesame Street on PBS, today’s new parents face a lot more noise.
So, taking a page out of the Boomer book, we asked our friends and readers for their favorite analog parenting resources that help them feel less anxious than, say, going down a dark (beef tallow greased) rabbithole of a random influencer. The vast majority said that they relied most on friends and family with hard-won advice, but here are some of the books that came up repeatedly, all written by bonafide experts who’ve made studying this stuff their life’s work (again, unlike an influencer who’s likely drawing from only their own specific experiences). Hopefully the analog experience of reading a book backed by data and experience can offer some respite to the endless scroll. Take your pick!
Emily Oster’s Cribsheet - Oster is famously into the data. In fact, while there’s some controversy around her work because she’s a data scientist and not an MD, drawing on analysis of troves of hard data and research can help take the anxiety out of parenting decisions.
Aliza Pressman’s The 5 Principles of Parenting - Pressman, a developmental psychologist with 20+ years of experience, offers a simple framework for parenting based on five science-backed principles that promote connection, resilience, and emotional intelligence in children.
Heidi Murkoff’s What to Expect the First Year - Bills itself as “the world's best-selling, best-loved guide to the instructions that babies don't come with, but should.” That pretty much sums up this month-by-month detailed guide to a baby’s first year.
The Wonder Weeks - This is the book that might make you realize we’re all just basically machines! Developed by a group of Dutch psychologists and anthropologists, this book charts the roadmap of predictable developmental “leaps” of babies’ first 20 months.
Caring for Your Baby and Young Child - A comprehensive index of health topics (from ADHD to eczema to RSV) for kids’ first five years, compiled and informed by recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
A few Boomer recs, just for fun: good old Dr. Spock, Penelope Leach’s Your Baby & Child, and Miss Manners’ Guide to Rearing Perfect Children (lol)
And if all else fails, as one reader offered, “Honestly they’re probably gonna be ok as long as you’re not a total narcissistic psychopath.” Noted!
Hope the rest of your Sunday is more play than tantrum.