Hi everyone,
In what will come as a surprise to no one with kids, parenting in the U.S. can feel like a shit show.
Obviously there are many systemic reasons for this (starting literally at birth, with our lack of guaranteed parental leave), but there are more insidious factors at play, too. In his 2024 Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents, former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy named comparison culture as a major culprit:
“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.
Read on for contributor Meghan Nesmith’s take on parenting in an age of influencers, as well as some crowdsourced, analog parenting resources from us.
With you in the overwhelm,
The Prism Team
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 or 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?