My son was two years old when he was learning to potty train. When we'd put him down for a nap was when he decided that was the best time to go numero dos.
The thing is, we'd been teaching him that the correct place to do that was in the potty, not in his pull-up. His little brain got the message, but not in the way we intended. On a couple of occasions, he did his business, then — and I'm trying to put this in a way that won't be graphic — decorated the room with it. Many of you reading this article are parents or grandparents, so I'm pretty sure this scenario isn't at all alien to you.
The second time it happened, I was in a bad place to begin with. I was having some issues in several sectors of my life, with one of those issues causing increasingly nasty effects on my brain. To my great regret, I was very hard on him. My voice was sharp and slightly raised; I kept reacting quickly when he'd go to touch me with his very dirty hands, and I was practically shaming him - a 2-year-old - for a mistake he had no fault for making.
Looking back, if today me walked into the room while past me was in that moment, I probably would've socked myself in the ear for the way I was acting toward my son. I still feel intense regret when I think about it.
The reason I'm telling you this story is that I can sympathize with parents when they've reached a point where parenting is too much. The stress of everything crashes in on you, and you react in ways toward your children that they don't deserve. I know I'm not the only one. I've heard stories from moms and dads I know. I've experienced it myself as a kid, too.
While these are moments the vast majority of us have, they are still very private moments. You have them, you cuddle and love on your child to reassure them that everything is okay and you love them very much; then you move on. The reward is a reinforced bond and learning experience for the parent.
However, in the age of social media, the reward doesn't come from something as substantial and long-lasting; it comes from something cheap, quick, and hollow.
I've been writing about the Lindsay Clancy trial; moms, in particular, have been coming out of the woodwork to post their grief and stresses of parenthood online for people to see. Some have gone so far as to say they sympathize and even identify with Clancy.
Just to remind you of what's going on with that, Clancy systematically murdered her three children of 5, 3, and 8 months to death by strangling them each in turn.
Read: Why They Need to Believe Lindsay Clancy's Husband Killed Her Children Despite Her Confession
The number of people now setting up cameras to post themselves crying and throwing temper tantrums has been nothing short of disgusting.
Yeah, I'm a father, not a mom, so I'm going to let Brittany Hughes, who posted quite a few of the videos I'm talking about, say it from a mom's perspective.
I have sympathy for new moms dealing with temporary postpartum stress. I have sympathy for people who get thrown handfuls of SSRIs and wind up worse off than before.
— Brittany Hughes (@RealBrittHughes) August 21, 2026
But I don’t have sympathy for a mom fake-crying into a camera while throwing ice into her shower and talking… pic.twitter.com/T9khV0P79m
I have sympathy for new moms dealing with temporary postpartum stress. I have sympathy for people who get thrown handfuls of SSRIs and wind up worse off than before.
But I don’t have sympathy for a mom fake-crying into a camera while throwing ice into her shower and talking about how she understands why someone might want to strangle their kids. That is attention seeking, narcissistic, and PSYCHOTIC. And it is NOT what normal moms do.
Now, the idea of putting up a ring light to make sure your good side is being captured just right is a stupid thing to do by itself. Someone posted an AI recreation of a living room where someone was doing that very thing, and it really does highlight how embarrassing the trend of capturing yourself crying really is.
POV you come home and wifey's filming one of her "crying at the phone" videos again https://t.co/x0nJoZehZe pic.twitter.com/U67QzYVEG8
— _s.a.m.e.m.e.m.e_ (@st_louis_stan) August 19, 2026
But I've got two additional things I need to bring up about this.
For starters, this is performative grief for attention and approval from others. Your tears aren't for your kid, your family, or even yourself. They're tears meant to garner likes and sympathetic messages, which spike dopamine, which in turn only makes you want to do similar things. Think about that. They're willing to position the phone just right, pull up the video function, get situated, hit play, and start crying, then spend time editing it, adding music, adding hashtags and copy, then hit post.
And some of these women are going so far for the dopamine hit that they're actually posting "Same, Lindsay," to put themselves at the same distress level as a woman who killed three of her babies in cold blood.
That's not healthy. In fact, that exacerbates the issue because now you've told your brain that posting yourself in distress about something as important and tender as motherhood leads to rewards. Your brain will want you to go back and do something similar again because, eventually, the likes and comments will dry up, and you'll need to do more to keep the dopamine flow going.
That's bad enough as it is, but what if your kid ever sees that? What are they supposed to think of themselves, to know their mom felt like that? What would they think of their mother? What's a child of any age supposed to do with that kind of knowledge?
To be clear, I could fully understand my mother being overwhelmed to the point of tears. Parenting is hard, but to use the grief I apparently give her to parade in front of other women as if I'm some sort of villain, even if she's not expressly calling me one? That's horrific.
This performative nonsense has to stop, if not for the mother, then for the kid.
