Shifting toward intensive parenting culture? A comparative analysis of top mommy blogs and dad blogs

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to compare gendered framings of family issues in popular mommy blogs and dad blogs to assess what they reveal about parenting ideologies. Background: Blogs are cultural arenas where parents navigate what it means to be a "good" mother or father. Despite a growing body of work on parents' use of social media, the content and framing of parenting blogs by gender is understudied. Method: Through a comparative analysis of 400 written posts from the top 20 mommy bloggers and dad bloggers in the United States and Canada, we examine the scope and construction of family issues in blogs and how they are framed by mothers versus fathers. Results: Mothers frame parenting in ways that highlight their investment in safeguarding children's futures, often through consumer solutions. Both mothers and fathers extend similar concerns around protecting family health and create a counter-frame against intensive parenting by admitting and accepting imperfection. Fathers' posts emphasize how work and gender norms constrain men's ability to be involved parents. Conclusion: Our comparative analysis illustrates gendered nuance in blog framings of family life and presents slight indications of shifting toward a shared culture of intensive parenting. Implications: This study elucidates the potentials and pitfalls of parenting blogs as platforms for family knowledge mobilization and social advocacy around parenting problems in a consumerist digital society.

Doing family online: (In)formal knowledge circulation, information‐seeking practices, and support communities

“…In fact, information‐seeking practices are still greatly affected by gender inequalities and gendered cliches about the sexual division of labor. In this special issue, in their analysis of “the content and framing of parenting blogs by gender” in the United States and Canada, Scheibling and Milkie (2023) illustrate the prevalence and reproduction of gendered norms around parenting. By highlighting the presence of commercial sponsors in mommy blogs, the authors force us to reflect on the ways that capitalism intersects with patenting practices and ideologies online and contribute to shaping the institution of the family more broadly.…”

“…Gender, social pressure, and social control Online groups may also produce forms of social pressure and social control on their members that push them to conform to normative ideologies. As several articles in this special issue show, parenting is deeply affected by these new vectors of normative ideologies (see Lavoie & Côté, 2023;Lee, 2023;Longo, 2023;Scheibling & Milkie, 2023;Vivion & Malo, 2023). Online blogs addressed to fathers, mothers, or both parents reproduce and spread certain ideologies around "good" ways to behave as parents (Das, 2017), which are gendered and tied to "intensive mothering" (Hays, 1996).…”

Parenting Information on Social Media: Systematic Literature Review (Preprint)

“…Given the scare academic attention to dad bloggers, dadflueners and fathers in general as a target audience, it is recommended for future research to explore modern family dynamics in an inclusive manner. For example, while some content analyses suggest that social media information has the potential to shift discourses and to challenge mainstream traditional parental norms 117,118 , audience research is needed to explore the impact of these counternarratives on the perceptions of the audience of these messages.…”