Millie Mackintosh, the tweeification of mum guilt and lowering the bar.
In which I lament the twee emotional blackmail of social media parenting
One of the best things about me as a parent is that social media doesn’t realise I have kids. By being too afraid to Google anything during pregnancy, too desperate to get back to work after my daughter was born, and downloading dating apps when she was about six months, I’ve managed to fool the algorithm into thinking I’m more of a fun aunt than a mum.
But occasionally I need to do a bit of research into something like potty training or sleep regressions, and then Instagram gets a feeling that I might have spawned, and I get a whole slew of new content. Today it was a video from the very nice and very pretty Millie Mackintosh*, who I follow and generally feel warmly towards. She’s a few years older than me, her kids are a bit older than mine, and her house looks nice. I follow her for the same reason that I buy fresh flowers. Looks nice, bit aspirational.
She’s had a change of tone recently, and I assume perhaps under new managements. Lots of videos repeating the same nice, accessible jokes which have been doing the rounds for years. Again, perfectly fine. But something she shared today really struck a nerve.
It was a video of her playing with her kids, with a caption about how they’re only ‘little’ for such a short period of time, that we as mothers should make the time to play with them whenever they ask, because eventually they won’t want us anymore.
There’s a lot to unpack here. Firstly, I am trying to consciously remember to unfollow people who make content out of their kids. Everyone’s got their own comfort level with this, for me any account where the kids are featured as much as (or more than) the parents isn’t for me, for a long list of ethical reasons.
Next up, it’s the tweeification of mum guilt. No longer does anyone tell you that you’re a bad mother, now it’s dressed up in saccharine pseudo sympathy. There are scores of Instagram posts written from the point of view of a baby ‘Please Mama, hold me a little longer’ an adult writes, giving a logical human voice to a little blob of baby. Babies don’t think like this, and if they did it would be horrifying because they’d functionally have locked in syndrome. Of course your baby wants you to hold them all the time, they’re a baby, they don’t understand anything. They don’t realise that exhausted women who are holding their baby 24/7 to appease the internet are more likely to fall asleep holding and then smother said baby.
Even if you are capable of being all things to all your kids all the time during their childhood, I’m still not sure you’d be doing them a favour. Kids like to be independent. Boredom underpins creativity. This shit is a cliche for a very good reason. Of course you should play with your kids, but that doesn’t mean dropping everything to play with them all the time. It’s a bit like the advice everyone gives when you have a newborn, to ‘screw the housework, soak up those new baby cuddles.’ But if you actually follow that insane advice then your house becomes unsanitary very quickly. Playing alone is good for kids. Salmonella is not.
A very good piece of parenting advice I read recently is to make sure that each of your kids gets fifteen minutes of totally uninterrupted time with you, every day. No screens for either of you, no chores, nothing but playing together. I sneered at this initially, disbelieving that we could need to set a timer for something so obvious. But there are days when we rush from home to childcare to home again, and we need to do showers and tea time and tidying up, where it would be easy not to. By setting the bar at a very accessible 15 minutes, it’s become possible. At the weekends more, during the week occasionally less, but generally speaking, it works. Better to clear a low bar than smack your leg on a high one.
I should say that none of this is specific or exclusive to Millie Mackintosh*, she just happened to be a person who did it today.
Also, my beloved friend Miranda Larbi wrote this beautiful piece about her pregnancy loss. You should read it.