Reply to Instagram posts of huge families

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[quote=Anonymous]I watch these and then feel horribly guilty about it.

I watch because I love the romantic idea of large families.  I was the youngest of three and my family was kind of distainful of babysitting (not thinking it’s not hard/not a real job but more like “why on earth would you do that if you had literally any other options”) so I never really got to interact with younger kids growing up and I really wanted to.  I idealized the idea of being parentified.  While I intellectually realize that this is a curated story, I’m really drawn to the idea of a crowd of people of all ages living peacefully and happily together.  Maybe I’m envisioning it as a the built in community I’m sad I don’t have in the real world?  Also I adore being pregnant and parenting and homemaking so I like shows focused on all of that and large families feel like there’s always babies around which I love.  So that’s the draw for me as to why I want to watch “look at my big family!” social media content.

I feel guilty about it and try to avoid watching it because I worry about the children being exploited on social media and how my watching it contributes to that problem.  I also worry about the realities of big families; a lot of them are religious in ways that can be harmful to many people (including but not limited to the children) and even when they aren’t I’ve read enough books by children who had 10+ siblings to realize that the experience is at least sometimes way more traumatic that these types of storylines or the parents’ perceptions implies.

Anyway, I don’t know why social media is sending this stuff your way, OP, but I do understand why there’s an audience for it — some people romanticize big families and things people romanticize are great proto-influencer lifestyles.[/quote]

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