If You Didn't Have Postpartum Anxiety, Mom Groups Will Change That

Never before have we been this aware of every danger to our children

One of the interactions on my mom groups that stuck out to me was on a safety-oriented group that has a tendency to cater to more neurotic types. I follow it primarily for toy recalls and other safety notices and tips. A mom posted asking if it was safe to buy second-hand playground equipment for her son. It was 2022, and her concern was that her son had never played at a playground, despite being born in 2020. Because of COVID, she hadn’t felt comfortable bringing him anywhere, including parks, so she planned to make one in her own back yard. Her concern, however, wasn’t about the integrity of the playground structures but about the fact that whoever she bought it from might have touched it, and it could be contaminated not only with COVID, but with monkeypox, which she was convinced was about to kill hundreds of thousands of children. Despite this group typically being sensitive to anxious parents, multiple users told her that this level of paranoia wasn’t healthy, and that it would be good for her toddler to go to playgrounds and see other kids. She responded that she wasn’t willing to risk her child’s life in the middle of a triple pandemic.

This was interesting to me because this woman managed to cross some unspoken thresshold. This particular group regularly alerted moms to safety concerns that seemed farfetched, technically possible but extremely unlikely. To me, this woman’s concerns didn’t seem that far off from what was regularly approved in the group. It got me wondering about mom groups in general, and how often the content posted there is actually (and I say this without a mocking tone) true mental illness.

I had pretty bad OCD before I had kids. It usually centered around my husband’s safety (the prospect of him traveling terrified me, mostly because I was afraid of him perishing in a car accident.) When we started trying to conceive and wound up with a severe infertility diagnosis, my anxiety transferred to the fear of never having children. When I got pregnant, I was terrified of miscarriage (I not only avoided sushi, deli meats and alcohol, but all raw fruits and vegetables, because listeria can live on anything raw.) For some reason, I thought that once I gave birth, I wouldn’t be anxious about the baby anymore. But of course, my anxiety just transferred to the health and safety of my kids. I managed to get it to a somewhat manageable level with exposure response therapy, and I’m still working on it, but it’s never going away completely.

One thing that came up in therapy was that it seemed like every minor issue with my kids- an off-color poop, a rash, any kind of bizarre behavior—felt like an ER-worthy incident. The reason I felt this way was because every time I asked about these things in my mom groups, the comments told me to go to the ER. To this day, on my mom groups, moms are told to rush their babies to the ER because they “made a strange movement,” which other moms tell them are stealth seizures. To me, the fact that other moms were just as anxious as I was—if not more—was proof that my fears were completely reasonable. But my therapist had an interesting take: “Almost all of those moms probably also have OCD. You should not listen to them.”

The problem is, mom groups have become the main community for a lot of moms since COVID, in the absence of in-person communities like religious institutions or a neighborhood, and it’s all part of the low-trust society we unfortunately live in. Modern day moms could ask their own mothers for advice, but a lot of our own moms did things that would be considered unsafe even by very conventional, reasonable standards. For example, my own mom said it was the standard in the nineties to put your baby to sleep on their stomach, surrounded by blankets and toys. Today, babies are placed on their backs in completely empty cribs because of suffocation and overheating risks. And that’s not a crazy rule! It’s one thing to say “we all did just fine without this safety stuff” but that’s not true, because infant mortality in the United States has dropped even since the nineties. (To be clear: my mom is completely on board with the new rules.)

Mom groups also informed me of some other things that I don’t think I would have known about otherwise—button batteries, for example. Every mom on a mom group is terrified of button batteries—tiny, easily swallowable batteries that can erode a child’s esophagus and kill them without much warning. Mom groups also wisened me up to the fact that kids are safer in pools if they are wearing bright yellow or orange swimsuits, because other colors might not be clearly visible in the event of drowning. Oh, and mom groups also clued me into the fact that drowning can happen quickly and silently. Now my older child is taking swim lessons! So- before I get into the crazy stuff, let me just say that these groups aren’t necessarily bad. A lot of moms might not have access to the latest safety guidelines, and these groups keep them informed.

However, if you’ve been on these groups for a while you’d have to notice that sometimes their interpretation of “evidence based” (a popular term on mom groups for advice grounded only in official medical documentation- for example, CDC guidelines) gets a bit loose. Basically, the burden of proof is on whether or not something is safe, not whether or not something is dangerous. Take for example, a mom on my “evidence based” mom group who asked if it was safe to bed-share on vacation with her four-year-old. Most comments said they weren’t sure. A moderator told her that this was not safe. The mom seemed confused. She said something to the effect of “Surely there has to be some age where it becomes safe…is it unsafe to bed-share with a ten-year-old? What about bed-sharing with my own husband?” At this point, she was shut down. “There’s no medical proof that this is safe, period,” the moderator responded. “In fact, I almost suffocated in my own bed the other night.”

Another similar incident happened when a mom asked about letting her two-year-old (who was still in a crib) sleep with a blanket. The mom group told her that it was not safe, because blankets shouldn’t be used until kids are in toddler beds. She asked why. “I’m not trying to be difficult, but what would the danger be exactly?” She was told that the toddler could suffocate if his face got stuck against a blanket. She asked if any children that age had ever actually died that way, in an otherwise safe environment. “How many dead children is enough for you?” she was asked, before being banned for “trolling.”

Unfortunately, the backlash to some groups is to say that all of the guidelines are stupid, and to immediately connect them with the current favorite Villain of Cringe: the “liberal, white millennial woman.” (Move over, Boomer Karen!) But safe sleep is very much a real thing. There have been deaths from unsafe sleep, despite the insistence of pro-bed sharing communities. There have been moms who attempted to “safely” bed-share and something still went wrong. These groups are hardly as damaging as anti-vaccine communities, or groups that insist dodgy homeopathic remedies will cure autism. They do more good than harm, and I would never advocate for them to be shut down. But as a mom with anxiety, I find it fascinating how so much of modern-day anxiety from moms can ultimately be traced back to mom groups.

I asked my Twitter followers what the most fear-mongering thing they ever saw on a parenting group was, an I got the following answers: