Toxic Mom Culture
Avoiding the toxic culture and honing in on the support
In this newsletter, we provide you with notes on Momfluenced: Inside Mommy Influencer Culture with Sara Petersen, an episode of Modern Mom Probs.
Host Tara Clark is an author, content creator, mother, and the founder of Modern Mom Probs. She is joined by Sara Petersen, author of Momfluenced.
Read our notes below.
Topics Covered in this Summary
What is Motherhood Culture
Ways To Avoid Toxic Mom Cultures
What is Motherhood Culture
Mother culture is a term for an earlier people's culture that has a great and widespread influence on some later cultures and people.
Working on our own mother culture is a practice that is beneficial not only to ourselves but our whole family. While motherhood includes a lot of sacrifice we cannot ignore ourselves completely and expect to raise children that will thrive in this world. They are watching and modeling us.
In essence, mother culture is the intentional growth and education of a mother.
Ways To Avoid Toxic Mom Cultures
The amount of parenting content that mothers encounter in their daily lives has expanded dramatically as a result of social media. There is an excess of idealized portrayals of parenthood among this content, which may be putting more pressure on moms and harming their mental health.
Here are some ways to avoid toxic mom culture:
Be mindful of the online support groups you join. Considering that you will probably be consuming a lot from these online mom groups, you want to make sure that what you’re taking in is healthy and not harmful or discouraging. Test a few groups out. If you don’t like them, leave those groups and find more. Sometimes it helps to start narrow and find some online groups of moms that exist within your community.
Know when to step away. You have to be mindful of the energy that you give out, and also of the energy that you let in.
Make sure you have real life support. Mom support groups online are cool, but it’s still very important to have real life support—and to make sure that you’re not submerged in toxic mom culture online. Some moms may live away from their family and friends, be the first of their friends to have kids, be introverts and have no idea how to make new mom friends. But whatever your circumstances may be, making sure that you are surrounded by a dependable support system is essential—even if it’s only one or two people.
Online mom culture doesn’t have to be harmful or intimidating. It can be a safe space. But it takes all of us to break down the barriers of toxic mom culture. If we were all just a little more open, a little more honest, a little more vulnerable and a lot less judgmental—just imagine how many mamas wouldn’t continue suffering in silence.
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Listen to the original episode