Mom Groups Are Full Of People Who Shouldn’t Be Parents And These 50 Posts Prove It

The simple fact is that following every single piece of advice you stumble across online, especially on social media, can be very harmful for you and your children.

You wouldn’t suddenly change your child’s diet or your entire parenting style just because you saw someone boast about how their approach is amazing and super trendy online. Similarly, you wouldn’t risk your kids’ health because you read someone’s unhinged tirade on social media.

You need to know how to filter out fact from fiction, recognize what bias looks like, and be very careful about who you listen to. What doesn’t help is that there are a lot of overly confident parents out there who have very loud opinions about, well, pretty much everything: from childcare and education to nutrition, health, and beyond.

Media literacy fundamentally revolves around looking at a source’s reliability and the information they share to determine whether the claims they make are trustworthy.

In short, it’s a way to critically evaluate any information you come across, whether you hear it on TV, read about it in the news, find it on your social media feed, or stumble across it in the online groups you’re part of.

You can take a two-pronged approach to evaluating someone’s claims. First, you can double-check and cross-reference the ideas they share with other sources online. You want to see whether there’s any scientific logic or factual basis behind what someone’s writing or if they’re presenting their subjective opinion as objective fact.

The drawback is that many people are busy with work, studies, parenting, hobbies, fitness, chores, and (sometimes even) a social life, so it’s very time-consuming to check every little bit of info. To save time, you should evaluate a source’s reliability.

The second thing you should consider before following parenting (or any other) tips you find online is to consider who is making these claims. Naturally, there are no ‘perfect’ sources as everyone makes mistakes from time to time. But that’s not to say that all sources are equal. Some will be far more objective and trustworthy than others.

You can look at a source’s track record to get a feel for them. What info have they shared before? Do they have a reputation for sharing reliable and factual information? Are they experts in the fields they’re talking about? Do they have a clear political or other agenda they’re trying to push? Do they make obvious grammar and style mistakes?