Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - November 24, 2023


Let's Quit the Parenting Advice Influencers

Topics
parenting advice influencers
The Exquisite Joy of Quitting Instagram with Marlee Grace The Hatred of Women on the Internet with Taylor Lorenz

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

146.55

Word count

1,705

Sentence count

115

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 So this is this is one of our little little mini episodes that you know maybe you're listening to
00:00:06.800 this right now as you're you're doing your Black Friday shopping or you're hiding from your kids
00:00:13.860 in the bathroom which I plan on doing a lot this weekend. I just had something that I want to get
00:00:21.480 off my chest and I think that this is something we will explore in a lot of future episodes
00:00:27.520 of Under the Influence. I'm so over parenting influencers.
00:00:36.200 I'm really over people giving me parenting advice online. And there are a lot, a lot of them. And
00:00:44.520 they have hundreds of thousands and millions of followers. And they're also spending a lot of
00:00:49.600 money to boost their posts. So I see them. I see these people more than I see my actual friends
00:00:57.160 who is, that's who I want to see on the social medias. I want to see what my friends are up to.
00:01:04.580 I want to see pictures of their beautiful children and the hilarious things that are
00:01:10.100 happening in, say, my best friend in Nashville's life. And yet, I don't see, I don't see those
00:01:16.940 things, I see parenting advice. Parenting advice that is mostly bullshit. Okay? The big thing with 1.00
00:01:28.280 a lot of these parenting influencers is that we need to be the ones emotionally regulating
00:01:35.780 our children all of the time. We are essentially their therapists. We have to get down on their
00:01:44.880 level and talk to them quietly every time that they start screaming in our face or smacking
00:01:51.820 their brother or taking off all of their clothes in the grocery store. We have to have them name
00:01:58.840 their feelings. We have to work on meditation with them. I don't have time to meditate for myself,
00:02:07.080 much less my child, and I don't want to be their therapist. I have enough jobs. I want to be their
00:02:13.960 parent. I love my kids, and I love parenting them most of the time. But I cannot keep internalizing
00:02:25.300 all of this advice, which, to be honest, I truly believe is meant to give us shame. Why are these
00:02:33.960 parenting advice influencers trying to make you feel bad? Stop for a second and think about it.
00:02:39.400 They want to sell you shit. If you feel bad about how you parent, you will buy their course or their 1.00
00:02:47.800 book or subscribe to whatever network they're trying to get you to subscribe to. The majority
00:02:55.060 of parenting influencers out there, parenting advice influencers, are making you feel bad so
00:03:01.300 they can make money off of you. I truly believe this. I do. They are using what Instagram does
00:03:07.780 best, which is to make us feel like we are irrational and somehow not good enough. They are
00:03:14.360 using that to make you buy their stuff. And so I just, I've made this command decision.
00:03:22.420 I think I made it because I've been getting served a lot of parenting influencer Black Friday sales.
00:03:28.640 Get my course for 50% off. I don't want your fucking course. I don't. You know what? 1.00
00:03:36.640 Parenting my kids is wonderful and terrible and weird and bizarre and enlightening and hard.
00:03:45.060 And I also think that toddlers, I have three kids, six and under, they're going to be
00:03:52.940 dysregulated. They're going to lose it on a regular basis. They're going to take off their
00:03:58.920 clothes. They're going to chuck stuff at you. Sometimes that stuff will be poop. They will
00:04:03.380 call you names that will make you cry in the middle of the night. And I don't necessarily
00:04:12.160 think that any advice from these so-called parenting influencers is going to change that.
00:04:20.920 I think the majority of the time, your children will simply grow out of it. Now, of course,
00:04:27.880 of course there are more extreme cases. Obviously, I'm acknowledging that. But also,
00:04:35.720 small children are sometimes just assholes. And no amount of soft talking to them, 1.00
00:04:42.420 not yelling, setting proper emotional boundaries, no amount of that is going to stop it.
00:04:49.440 I think a lot about parenting in the 80s.
00:04:55.160 You remember what that was like if you're a person who's about my age.
00:05:00.520 We used to ride in the way, way back of the station wagon with no seatbelts.
00:05:06.160 No seatbelts. Ever.
00:05:08.120 We were left alone in the car to enjoy reading our Babysitter's Club and Sweet Valley Twins books
00:05:14.720 while our parents went grocery shopping.
00:05:18.040 The windows were not always down.
00:05:21.520 We didn't have water bottles all the time.
00:05:24.640 In fact, our only source of hydration was often one neighbor's hose,
00:05:29.820 which may or may not have been turned on.
00:05:32.920 And our parents acknowledged our feelings, at least some of the time.
00:05:38.320 But they were not the center of their universe.
00:05:43.200 We weren't always the center of their universe.
00:05:45.760 And now I'm being told to parent so hard, so often, so much, that it is just no wonder that so many of us are burnt out. 0.90
00:06:02.140 Or that so many women say, hey, I don't want to work and deal with a bunch of a-holes at work and then come home and also be responsible for all of my children's thoughts and feelings.
00:06:14.320 they have to learn some of that responsibility themselves what gets me the most about a lot of 0.62
00:06:19.960 parenting advice influencers and again i'm not going to name anyone because i do not believe 0.79
00:06:26.040 in shitting on anyone much less other women and this is a generalization okay just making a 1.00
00:06:32.340 generalization here but it's how they often portray themselves with no makeup and messy hair 1.00
00:06:42.400 they're just like kind of looking like a hot mess themselves as if to say I'm so relatable
00:06:49.620 I am I'm just like you how can't you tell that I'm just like you when in fact I I know that
00:06:57.620 a couple of these women are not just like me they're quite well off and in their regular lives 0.99
00:07:04.920 when I've I've seen them in the real life have very blown out hair and done makeup and things 1.00
00:07:11.060 but their shtick is that they're a hot mess and if only we followed their advice then
00:07:16.820 maybe we wouldn't feel like a hot mess either but here's the truth I don't really mind being
00:07:25.600 a hot mess at the end of the day I think I'm doing fine and I think you're doing fine too
00:07:33.280 and while I think it's always useful for us to hear how other people parent because it takes a
00:07:40.200 village. It takes a village to figure out these little alien creatures that are our children.
00:07:48.300 But I don't think that we should necessarily be paying people that we do not know for their
00:07:56.380 courses to tell us how to be a better mom or to allow Instagram to continue to trick us into
00:08:06.560 believing that we need to buy those things. And of course, I am no expert. I am not an expert
00:08:12.020 on anything. Seriously, I am not an expert on any one thing. And so I would never call myself
00:08:20.920 an expert. And you shouldn't listen to my advice. I'm not going to give you any. All I'm going to
00:08:24.900 say is what I'm doing, which is starting today, I'm just blocking a lot of these parenting
00:08:31.380 influencers. I don't want to see their advice. I don't want them to sell me anything anymore
00:08:37.740 and I don't want to be shamed. I want to enjoy my scroll and enjoy my scroll does not mean
00:08:44.800 being told that I'm parenting wrong. There are days when my kids have told me they hate me,
00:08:52.600 that I'm the worst mommy in the world, and that they never want to see my ugly face again. 0.92
00:09:01.380 Those are direct quotes. They're animals. Animals. And yet, if I were to believe some of the parenting 1.00
00:09:10.700 advice influencers out there, I would tread carefully. I would not, quote unquote, activate
00:09:19.260 them. But here's the thing. I don't really want to engage in negotiation tactics with my kids.
00:09:26.300 I don't. Nope. And I'm not going to tread carefully when someone says they hate me.
00:09:32.420 I'm not going to say I hate you too, because that would be bad. That might be bad parenting.
00:09:37.360 But I'm also not going to sit cross-legged on the floor and say, please put your hand on your heart
00:09:42.800 and one on your belly and take some breaths. No, no, that's not, that's not what I'm here to do.
00:09:50.140 And for the record, because there will inevitably, inevitably, I can't say the word inevitably,
00:09:54.780 inevitably be some psychos who tell me i'm a bad mom for all this most of the time i do talk to
00:10:04.400 the kids like this tell me how you're feeling can you name those emotions but the truth is it
00:10:12.580 doesn't work the majority of the time so in addition to talking like this there's also some
00:10:19.780 yelling in our house and there's a lot of bribery. I don't think that anyone talks openly enough
00:10:26.620 about the amount of bribing we do with our children. And you know what? If you're bribing
00:10:30.940 your kids too, like with a Jurassic World Lego set to eat Thanksgiving dinner, it's all right.
00:10:37.520 You're just, you're getting it done. You're getting it done your way. The only way that I would buy
00:10:43.400 one of these parenting influencers courses is if they show up at my house at seven in the morning
00:10:49.680 when my kids don't want to put on clothes. They don't want to go to school. They can't find their
00:10:55.800 shoes. And they're screaming at me like a bunch of drunk monkeys. And get them to do the things. 0.98
00:11:04.080 Get them to do the things that they don't want to do. Because a lot of kids don't want to do them.
00:11:09.120 And again, they grow out of it. So if you can come over and you can quietly and gently
00:11:17.160 convince my kids not to act like a pack of feral wolves in the morning, I'll buy your course.
00:11:27.600 I'll buy two of them. Happy beginning of the holidays, everyone. I love all of you very much.
00:11:33.660 You're doing great. You're doing good. You're doing all the things.