Parent Trapped

Yes, Parenting is Hard, But Is Social Media Making It Feel...Impossible?

The numbers don't lie, even when we wish they would. South Korea's fertility rate has cratered to 0.72 children per woman, which is not just the lowest in the world but it's barely a third of what's needed to maintain a stable population, which means South Korea is essentially choosing extinction over reproduction. This would be fascinating if it weren't so depressing.

The New Yorker recently dove deep into this crisis with a super chill article subtlety titled The End of Children (and no, I’m not kidding), and while the reasons are predictably complex, one observation from sociologist Hwang Sun-jae cuts through the academic jargon like a knife through an umbilical cord.

"People once had only local comparisons," Sun-jae explains. "Now they see other people's lives—in New York City, England, and France—and they have a sense of relative deprivation: my life is not good enough."

Let me translate this from sociologist speak: according to Sun-jae, Instagram has convinced an entire generation that their actual lives are inferior to everyone else's carefully curated highlight reels. So much so, that people are literally choosing not to reproduce because someone in Vail posted a really good après-ski photo.

This isn't just a South Korean problem, by the way. It's the logical endpoint of a culture that has made comparison its primary hobby, grievance its favorite emotion, and victimhood its most valuable cryptocurrency.

The fertility crisis gets even more interesting when you add another layer of modern absurdity: what journalist Michal Leibowitz calls "therapy culture" in a recent New York Times op-ed titled There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture & Childlessness that should be required reading for anyone who’s ever shared mental health advice from an influencer in a story with a caption reading “it me.”

Leibowitz argues that our obsession with excavating childhood trauma has made the prospect of becoming parents feel about as appealing as volunteering to be the villain in someone else’s memoir. We’re so convinced our own parents damaged us that the idea of damaging someone else feels unconscionable.

Head over to TikTok—which I don't recommend unless you enjoy sharing your weird predilections with Xi Jinping—and you'll find millions of videos tagged with #innerchildhealing or #childhoodwounds. These feature twenty-somethings performing archaeological digs on their upbringings with the intensity of people searching for dinosaur bones.

"Childhood trauma isn't just being in an abusive household," declares one content creator in a reel with 1.2 million likes, apparently addressing an audience that needs this clarification, "but feeling unseen, [or] unheard." By this expansive definition, every childhood becomes a disaster zone, every parent a war criminal, every moment of less-than-perfect validation a psychological injury requiring immediate therapy. Like, I tuned out my kids last night during bedtime. Now, bring me to the Hague.

The math here is simple but devastating: if feeling "unheard" counts as trauma, then literally everyone is traumatized. And if everyone is traumatized, then having children becomes an act of premeditated psychological assault.

But here's the thing that these TikTok grief archaeologists miss entirely: maybe not every imperfection in parenting creates lasting damage. Maybe children are more resilient than our collective anxiety gives them credit for. And maybe parents don't actually need to be perfect.

I tell my kids "I don't know" constantly. When they ask me questions I can't answer, I resist the cultural pressure to immediately consult the Oracle of Google. Instead, I let them marinate in uncertainty. I let them see that parents aren't walking Wikipedia entries, that intellectual limitations aren't moral failings, that some questions don't have tidy answers you can find on your phone.

According to the therapy culture police, this probably counts as emotional neglect. I prefer to think of it as modeling intellectual humility and demonstrating that uncertainty won't kill them. Revolutionary stuff, I know. Call me George Washington.

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Nine years ago, I took my at-the-time five-year-old son Steven to see Rogue One in the theater, which everyone knows is Star Wars' most emotionally brutal installment. If you've seen it, you know why. If you haven't, just know that Disney now treats it like how people refer to their 'experimental phase' in college—something that definitely happened but we don't really talk about it at family dinners.

As the credits rolled and I processed the film's unprecedented body count and genuinely tragic ending, I experienced what I can only describe as parental panic. I'd obviously made a terrible mistake. I spent the entire car ride home cataloging potential psychological damage, wondering if I'd just traumatized my child into needing decades of therapy. And if I did, could I forward the therapy bill to Bob Iger?

But thinking about this made me wonder: how much of our terror about having children stems from this kind of catastrophic overthinking? How much mental energy are we burning by treating every parenting decision like it's being adjudicated by the International Court of Childhood Justice? And should I have let my youngest nine-year-old daughter watch all thirty-six Marvel movies?

The therapy culture that dominates social media has convinced us that every choice carries the weight of potential trauma, that every imperfect moment becomes a psychological scar requiring professional intervention. Meanwhile, actual children are out there demonstrating remarkable resilience, processing difficult experiences, and generally refusing to collapse into the fragile beings we've imagined them to be.

After finishing Parks and Recreation (which some of you may know about), my kids have moved on to binge-watching Modern Family, the sitcom that somehow managed eleven cutesy seasons of showing us that families are complicated, messy, and capable of forgiveness.

Every episode follows the same basic template: someone screws up, there are consequences, people get genuinely hurt or angry, and then—this is the crucial part—they forgive each other and figure out how to move forward. There's always a sweet, slightly sentimental resolution that acknowledges both the pain of the screw-up and the possibility of repair.

We've largely abandoned this narrative structure in both our entertainment and our actual lives. When was the last time you saw a traditional family sitcom that didn't require animation? The only family shows that work anymore are The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Bob's Burgers, families that function precisely because they're either completely dysfunctional or literally couldn't exist in real life because, well, someone drew them.

This feels significant: the fact that functional families are now so culturally unbelievable that they can only exist as cartoons probably tells us something important about how we view the possibility of functional families.

What it tells us, I think, is that we've lost faith in the basic mechanics of forgiveness and moving forward together. We've created a culture where every slight becomes permanent and every wound stays fresh forever.

My kids sometimes get angry and say genuinely hurtful things to me. The old version of parenting wisdom might suggest I need to address this immediately, make them apologize, and ensure they understand the impact of their words. But I don't take it personally. I know they're trying to get a reaction, trying to hurt me because they feel some sense of injustice or mistreatment.

By not internalizing their hurtful words, I hope I'm showing them that our relationship is more substantive than a momentary outburst, that a slight can't actually damage what we have. Maybe the fact that my father died when I was young and he was only 58 plays into my capacity to overlook and forgive. When you know how quickly relationships can end, you're less inclined to let small wounds fester (I’m sure there’s an army of parenting influencers that would disagree with me). But I think I'm planting seeds for something bigger: the understanding that our bond is fundamentally unbreakable, that love can survive imperfection.

This is exactly the opposite of what social media teaches us about relationships—that wounds should be preserved like museum artifacts, that forgiveness is weakness, and that the best response to being hurt is to screenshot it for evidence.

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I deleted Instagram two days ago, not because I'm philosophically opposed to social media (I'm not that evolved), but because I noticed something unsettling about how I felt after using it. Even brief scrolling sessions left me feeling like garbage, like I was somehow failing at existence.

The app had essentially trained me to view my own life as a rough draft, a disappointing first attempt at living that paled in comparison to everyone else's seemingly finished masterpieces.

This is the psychological ecosystem in which people are now making decisions about having children. We're asking them to choose the chaotic, unglamorous, profoundly ordinary reality of raising kids while simultaneously bombarding them with endless evidence that other people are living more exciting, more photogenic, more enviable lives.

Social media doesn't just encourage comparison. It weaponizes it. The platforms have built what amounts to a narcissism machine, one that profits from keeping us perpetually dissatisfied, constantly scrolling, always convinced that we're missing out on something better.

At the intersection of narcissism and an inability to forgive imperfection, we've created conditions that make it nearly impossible to move past whatever injustices we've decided our parents committed. Every family gathering becomes an opportunity to relitigate old grievances. Every holiday becomes a chance to compile new evidence for the prosecution.

The Modern Family model—where people hurt each other and then find ways to repair the damage—has been replaced by a culture of permanent grievance, where every slight gets preserved in digital amber and every wound becomes a precious part of our identity.

But maybe the problem isn't that life is harder with children, but that we've made life without children seem easier than it actually is. Maybe the curated existences we see online aren't just misleading but actively poisonous to our ability to find satisfaction in regular life.

Having children forces you to confront some uncomfortable truths: you can't control everything, or even anything, some of the most important things can't be optimized, and love often looks less like peak experiences and more like showing up consistently for mundane moments.

This might be exactly the reality check our culture needs. In a world that has convinced us we're all victims of our circumstances, that our parents' inevitable imperfections have fundamentally broken us, that we deserve constant validation and perfect conditions, choosing to have children becomes almost countercultural.

It's an admission that you'll never be perfect, that you'll definitely screw up, that you'll probably traumatize your kids in ways you can't predict or prevent. And you're choosing to do it anyway, because the alternative—a world where people are too afraid of imperfection to create new life—seems infinitely more depressing than any individual parenting failure.

Maybe the real crisis isn't economic or environmental. Maybe it's that we've forgotten how to forgive each other for being human. Maybe it's time to log off, turn off the comparison machine, and remember that love isn't about being perfect, it's about persistence.

And if that's not profound enough for TikTok, well, I don't know what to tell you. Which, as I've mentioned before, is something I'm perfectly comfortable saying to my children.