“These fuckers!”

This was my immediate reaction upon watching yet another short video from the parenting influencers who pop up on my timeline. These videos urge fellow parents such as you and me to cherish all moments with our children, as they are both limited and fleeting. These influencers, with nostalgic music in the background, proclaim in soft tones that “by the time your child is twelve, you’ve spent about 75% of all the time you’ll ever spend with them”. They also claim that by the time your child turns eighteen, you will have spent about 90% of the time you’ll ever spend with them. Similarly, others pompously state that “93% of your in-person time with your children is over by the time they leave home”.

Such statements evoke a strong negative emotional reaction in me. They are emotional blackmail from people who are detached, in their privilege, from the average person’s experience of parenthood. The people typically making these statements are “parenting influencers” who utilise guilt-based emotional language with a bucketful of nostalgia-bait to generate engagement through sadness. I do not respect these people and little of what they say should be taken at face value.

Manipulating people for views and clicks is objectionable in itself. It is made worse when we consider who these people are. These are people who generate parenthood content for a living, and who have established the identity of the parent not merely as their primary identity, but as their only identity; one they subsequently commercialised.

These people live and exist through their children. The only way they derive meaning from their lives is through their children. This, in itself, should suffice to dismiss most of what these parenting gurus have to say.

But it’s not just that. What truly infuriates me is their position of privilege, which they ignore or hide when passing on guilt to others through their seemingly innocent advice. Unlike most of us, these individuals do not have to negotiate multiple identities—the only one that matters to them is being a father or a mother. They do not have to strike a balance between being the parent who is strict enough to set boundaries, but loving enough for their children to share their innermost thoughts with them; the professional who is both hyper-productive and understanding of co-workers’ feelings; the spouse who is loving (and shows it) while refraining from proclaiming their evolving levels of exhaustion; the friend who is supportive, a good sport, and willing to stay out beyond 10pm without complaining; the son or daughter who spends time with their ageing parents while retaining a poker face in response to their unwarranted commentary; the brother or sister; the political animal; the person who has interests and hobbies; and the list goes on and on.

These single-issue individuals, sad as they may be, are nevertheless able to infiltrate our timelines and, consequently, our subconscious. Their job is to make us feel sad and guilty, fuelling a feeling of inadequacy that makes us engage more with their content. They are dangerous. Most of us are already trying hard enough to navigate all of our different identities, to maintain a balance, and to be overall decent human beings, including towards our children. Guilt-inducing emotional manipulators should have no influence over how, or for how long, we interact with our children.

At the end of the day, we are all complicated in our own way. Reducing the complexity of our being to a single identity—that of the father or mother—can only happen at the expense of everything else, which will diminish our overall well-being, and that negative impact will also manifest in the way we interact with our children.

I do not have much more to say. I just wanted to express my frustration and to urge caution against internalising toxic messaging perpetuated by professional parents who make money by fuelling our sense of inadequacy.

This is part of a series of entries titled Fatherhood Diaries where I record thoughts on life as a new dad. Click here for all the Fatherhood Diaries.