I will never forget the exact moment that I realized that we social media-era parents are headed down a slippery slope.
It was several years ago at an outdoor fall festival as my daughter and I waited in the petting zoo line for our turn to get up close and personal with a potbelly pig. When we were finally next in line, I watched as the young mother in front of us corralled her three young children, pushed each of them toward the snoozing pig, opened the camera on her iPhone, and began enthusiastically shouting out instructions: “Yay! OK, kids! Good job! Hurry up! Get closer! Closer! Awww! Great! Pet the pig! Make sure you’re all touching the pig! So cute! No, don’t look at the pig, look at me! Look here! Smile! Cuuuute! GOT IT! Great job, guys!”
No sooner had she finished snapping away on her camera and doing a quick scroll through the series of photos she’d just taken, than her megawatt smile twisted into a disgusted grimace. Her cheery, sing-song tone changed to one of militant order-barking.
“Blech, ew! OK, kids. Now get away from that thing! Gross. Don’t touch it anymore! Hands off! I said HANDS OFF! Everyone, come over here right NOW and get some hand sanitizer. No more pig,” she barked
It dawned on me that for that mom, in that moment, the petting zoo was not about her children, nor was it about the pig. It wasn’t about getting the cool opportunity to interact with a creature that I imagine they don’t encounter much in their everyday lives. It wasn’t about her engaging and experiencing it with them, or about learning something new.
It was about a photo-op — a chance to score a picture that I imagine ended up on her Instagram page with a caption like, “So cool for the kids to get to meet this adorable little piggy! We loved her!” She wasn’t happy that her three little people were petting a pig — she was happy that she was capturing a photo of it.
And for as much as I can ashamedly admit that I judged that woman that day at the petting zoo, I know that I’ve been guilty of the same thing lots of times since then and probably many times before.
In fact, just recently, as I scrolled through the on-this-day “memories” that faithfully populate on my Facebook feed each day, one post, made by me two years prior, gave me pause.
It was a picture I’d snapped of my then-7-year-old daughter just as she was about to leave for school. In the photo, she is smiling and flashing double “peace signs.” She looks adorable in her braided pigtails, school uniform skirt, and mismatched knee-high socks. I had given the photo a merry caption: “Kicking off Read Across America Week with Silly Sock Day!”
To anyone of my 1,300 Facebook “friends,” this would surely seem to be a picture taken by a patient, doting mother of a happy, compliant child, proudly donning her silly socks.
Not so.
As I zoomed in on that photo memory, I noticed that although my daughter is grinning in the picture, her eyes are puffy. Puffy because only ten minutes before, her frustrated mother had “or else’d” her into putting on her mismatched socks and posing for that photo in an all-out battle of the wills over those very socks. My daughter hadn’t wanted to wear them because they bunched up in her shoes and were “too babyish” for her liking.
I’d insisted that she WOULD wear the socks I’d selected and purchased for this special occasion. She’d sobbed and wailed and I’d stomped my foot and raised my voice. She’d gone to school with a tear-streaked face and miserably uncomfortable socks, but hey, at least I’d gotten my happy photo, and no one who saw it on my Facebook page would know any different.
But I do. When I look at that picture now, I know different, and it bothers me. It seems as though a lot of folks, myself absolutely included, have become increasingly focused on curating our lives in the way that we want them to be viewed: through the social media lens by hundreds of mere acquaintances rather than truly experiencing organic moments with the few people who really matter the most to us.
It’s easy to forget, as we all mindlessly scroll social media pages, that what we are seeing is merely a contrived highlight reel, not a complete, unfiltered representation of our “friends’” lives.
My social media feeds are chock-full of photos of families in color-coordinated, freshly laundered outfits worn while posing sweetly in front of sand dunes; well-balanced homemade meals ready to be eaten around beautifully set dining room tables; smiling, tanned couples enjoying tropical getaways; friends stopping mid-workout to flex in the gym mirror; flawlessly decorated, spotless homes; and happy children coloring, baking, or reading without a screen in sight. And yes, those are surely moments worth documenting. Life happenings of which we should be proud and want to share.
But, I think that we are so inundated with all of this curated perfection that it leaves many of us feeling like the imperfect things are not good enough. The mismatched, grass-stained hand-me-downs; the suppers eaten out of a paper bag in the car between piano and soccer; the mundane weekends spent shuttling kids to birthday parties and caulking the bathtub; the overflowing laundry hampers in the dusty corners of every room; and the children glued to iPads on rainy afternoons. The seemingly not “post worthy” parts of life that make us feel like we are falling short in some imaginary quest for social media perfection if our pages aren’t updated with something fabulous and interesting often enough.
I try to remind myself every day to scroll less and engage more. To remember that perfection is not real and things are not always as they seem. I hope that my daughter will remember all the times we were too busy having fun to stop to take a bunch of photos instead of the one time I made her genuinely miserable because I wanted so badly for her to seem happy on social media.
I hope we never lose touch with the fact that real life centers around kindness, faith, and joy — not “likes,” hashtags, and filters.
