"He gets to be the fun parent": Understanding and Supporting Burnt-Out Mothers in Online Communities

TL;DR

This study analyzes how burnt-out mothers use Reddit to share experiences, seek support, and discuss co-parenting issues, revealing community responses and social dynamics affecting maternal burnout.

Contribution

It introduces a machine learning approach to identify burnt-out mothers on Reddit and analyzes their posts and community responses to understand support mechanisms and social challenges.

Findings

Commenters share personal experiences and emotional support.

Burnt-out mothers face lack of support and unequal expectations in co-parenting.

Reddit serves as a vital platform for maternal peer support.

Abstract

Maternal burnout is a psychological phenomena with documented harms to both mother and child, requiring prompt attention. Mothers experiencing burnout might choose to turn to online anonymous platforms, such as Reddit, to share their experience, due to feelings of shame and stigmatization of mental health issues. In this work, we study how mothers use Reddit to discuss their experiences of burnout. We first identify posts written by burnt out mothers by manually annotating Reddit posts and training machine learning models on them. Focusing on posts made by this population (N = 3,244), we then investigate the issues brought up by mothers, such as the need for help, career advice, and co-parenting issues. Additionally, we investigate how the Reddit community responds to these posts through the analysis of comments. We find that commenters frequently share personal lived experiences with the poster, and provide emotional support. Finally, considering co-parenting could be a mitigating factor for parental burnout, we explore co-pareting patterns experienced by burnt out mothers, finding evidence of lack of support for and unequal expectations from mothers.