From postpartum photographs to ‘golden hour’, it’s hard to remember that the perfect lives on Instagram are heavily curated
I recently overheard a conversation between some older women about photographs taken early in motherhood. Several expressed regret that they didn’t have more pictures from that time, even though they weren’t, they said, looking “their best”. One woman lamented how she destroyed the photographs of her holding her new baby because she hated her appearance, and said she profoundly regrets this now. It made me sad, speaking as it did to the fact that women feel subject to the external, scrutinising gaze of others, even at such momentous events in our lives.
At least these photos were usually only shared with friends and family; now images like these have a potential audience of millions. I can’t imagine anything more exposing than putting such intimate photographs online, but the perfect postpartum photo has become as fetishised on social media as the perfect “golden hour” between mother and baby (meaning skin to skin contact immediately after the birth) is idealised.
Social media has transformed the way my generation views parenthood, just as women’s magazines and TV advertising did for older generations. “Momfluencer” Instagram accounts – most of them run by white, slim, attractive women with immaculate houses and perfectly dressed children – are in your feed even if you don’t follow them. In many ways they hark back to the 1950s, projecting an image of domestic contentment, where mothers and daughters dress the same (called “twinning”) and, having dispensed with work outside the home, embody a “trad wife” aesthetic (internet trend speak for “traditional wife”).
Other posts instruct you to breastfeed at all cost, promise you the secret to postpartum weight loss, or tell you they can solve your babies’ sleep problems. (I set my age to 112, so for a long time the ads I got were for wills and hair dye, but the algorithm seems to have sussed it, either believing me to be a miracle of modern science, or an unusually engaged great-grandparent.)
Other mothers tell me that Instagram has been incredibly destructive to their mental health, and in some cases their physical health. Some hypnobirthing influencers scaremonger about medical intervention to the point where women are refusing the care they need (the same influencers were cited again and again as examples of irresponsible, unscientific, unmedicated birth lobbying). One woman tells me she became obsessed with “wake windows”, an unscientific, rigid approach to baby sleep that is popular on social media, and spent hundreds of pounds on sleep courses. Another tells me “milestones” became a preoccupation, and she would lie in bed at night comparing her child’s motor skills with others’. Fitness is another area rife with toxicity, from babies being used as dumbbells during couples’ workouts ( “I feel guilty, ashamed of the fourth biscuit and ultimately flick Instagram off in a huff – resolved to be a spherical unfit mess for the foreseeable,” one mother, Jen Mitchell, tells me), to “bleak” captions about strengthening babies’ abdominal muscles.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author
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