20

Yesterday's most active thread was titled, "What I’m noticing from millennial high achieving moms" and posted in the "General Parenting Discussion" forum. The original poster describes herself as "mid age millennial born in 1990" and notes several characteristics of high-achieving, elite-educated women as they start to have children. Essentially, few of the women stay at home, they commonly have three kids, they travel a lot, and post on social media about their great lives. I am very confused about the purpose of this thread. Clearly, the original poster's observations don't apply to all millennials and or even to all high-achieving millennial women. Basically, this is a list of observations of the original poster's circle of acquaintances and has little significance outside that group. So what is the point? My confusion was apparently shared by others because the responses in this thread were disjointed, fairly random, and often gave the impression of artificial intelligence bots attempting to converse with each other. Rather than a discussion, this thread is more like posters simply typing out whatever thought immediately entered their minds and hitting "submit". Based on these responses, the only thing that you can say for sure about high-achieving millennial moms is that you can't say anything for sure. Despite the sparcity of stay at home moms in the original poster's circle, other posters say such moms are more the rule than the exception among their acquaintances. Whereas the original poster sees three or more children as popular, others say that one or even no children are common. Posters can't even agree on whether or not high-achieving millennial moms run marathons. Depending on the poster, that is either common or rare. In some cases, posters appear to be attempting to create stereotypes where none exists. Instead of stereotypes, what results are a series of archetypes. There is the doctor or lawyer married to another doctor or lawyer with three kids whose social media is filled with photos of their latest skiing trip to the Swiss Alps such as the original poster might have described. But there is also the Ivy League grad who put her investment banking career on hold to start a family and has no interest in returning to work. Then there is the hard-charging careerist who is at the top of her game professionally, has a single child, and wouldn't stay home if you held a gun to her head. True that all three are high-achieving millennial women, but that is about all that they have in common. Many of the observations in this thread are derived from social media. As such, it is likely that what these posters are seeing about others is not actual reality, but simply what those individuals want others to see about them. They are, therefore, creating stereotypes based on carefully curated images rather than what really exits. So again I ask, what's the point?