Is Social Media Making You A More Stressed Out Parent?
Kiran Manral was a journalist before she moved out to set up a content supply company during the first dot com boom. An erstwhile blogger, both her blogs were considered amongst India’s top blogs and she was a Tehelka blogger columnist on gender issues.
Kiran Manral
Right off the bat, let me confess that I used to blog about my son. And I did so for over ten years, and that the above mentioned blog went on to become terribly popular, got listed among the leading parenting blogs in India and is now a book. Having got that disclaimer, and therefore any pretence of having a moral right to speak against social media from any soapbox out of the way, I can now talk about parenting in the age of social media.
When I got onto social media over a decade ago, it wasn’t as all pervasive as it is today. Sure there was Facebook, and there were blogs, and Twitter was but a gleam in its inventor’s eyes. Of Instagram and Pinterest and such like, we couldn’t even imagine, because we still had to click pictures via a camera, although we had morphed from film to digital, and could transfer pics via complicated processes of hooking up the camera to the computer via wires that were put on earth to tangle up into a knot of Gordian levels of complicatedness.
The easier things have become, the tougher it has become to keep up. Competitive parenting, I am told, is a real term today. I see it all around me. I see it at the school gate, at the pool side when my son was training competitively as a swimmer, I see it on social media. And it is not a phenomenon that is exclusive to India. In fact, competitive parenting is on the rise across the world, and social media has exacerbated the situation.
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Kiran Manral 