The Problem With Following Instagram for Inspiration

It seems that no one — not even the chic Blake Lively — is immune to the pressures of social-media perfection. During a Wednesday evening appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers, The Shallows star and pregnant mom of one went on a hilarious tear about how Instagram can make parenting look soul-crushingly simple.

“There’s this lady on Instagram I used to love to watch; her name is Old Joy, and she just made having a baby look lovely — everything is white, and she always has a fresh blueberry pie that’s steaming, and scones and clotted cream, and she’s reading Old Man and the Sea and her little boy is roll-y, with bonnets, just like sleeping while knitting…” she told Meyers (video below, starting at :58) regarding the gorgeous Insta feed of Kristen Mittler, a homeschooling mom of three in Ohio. “I mean it’s amazing, and I thought, this is lovely. And her toddler is, like, giving her reflexology massage. What? My kid is, like, playing with explosive devices!”

She continued, “I went from loving her to wanting to kidnap her so that she won’t post any more torture for me.”

Meyers, who is the dad of an infant, sympathized. “None of that’s real!” he told Lively. “My wife looks at a lot of Instagram accounts that are that perfect new mother world and it’s cruel. It’s cruel and unusual for people.”

The extreme and self-judgmental reaction they joked about is totally real, of course, and probably familiar to anyone who has ever before logged on to a social account. Science has even justified the feeling, through a pair of 2015 studies published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, linking Facebook use to depression because of the harsh impact of “social comparison to peers.” Both studies, the abstract notes, “provide evidence that people feel depressed after spending a great deal of time on Facebook because they feel badly when comparing themselves to others.” Um yeah, no kidding. And clearly the same goes for Instagram.

But here’s something helpful to remember: Not even the posters making you miserable have perfect lives of their own. And that goes for Mittler, the “greatest parent ever,” as Lively has dubbed her, behind those idyllic Instagram snaps (and her 129,000 followers).

“This is tough, because I too compare myself to other moms on social media, and often times feel like I am failing — especially when I am having a rather trying day and I open up Instagram to see that another mom is killing it!” Mittler tells Yahoo Beauty when asked to comment on Lively’s rant. “Like, her kids will be dressed in clothes that don’t come from Target, and her house will be shining, and maybe she’ll take a selfie of her perfect bod and suddenly I feel so fat. It’s so tough! And I try really hard to share my struggles through my captions, because making a fellow mom feel crummy is like my worst fear in social media. Because those are absolutely not my intentions.”

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