Can a $200 Instagram Parenting Class Really Make You a Better Mom?

When Crystal, a new mom, was pregnant, she knew she had to prepare. But instead of buying stacks of books, she turned to Instagram parenting classes. “I bought the course that it seemed like everyone was buying and taking,” Crystal, who lives in Brooklyn, says.

She purchased the sleep course from a woman named Cara Dumaplin, known online as Taking Cara Babies, who charges $249 for a guide on how to get your baby to sleep from birth to 24 months. Dumaplin, a neonatal nurse who has more than 2 million Instagram followers, also offers a first-five-months collection ($99) and, for those who want to continue past the initial offering, a toddler sleep course ($199).

But if you aren’t a fan of Dumaplin’s approach, you have options: Rachel Shepard-Ohta, of Hey Sleepy Baby has a $149 course, and Aubrie DeBear of the Baby Sleep Doctor offers a 0-to-18 month class is $129. If you choose to buck the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics and co-sleep with your infant, Tiffany Belanger of @cosleepy can teach you how to do so for $69.

It’s not just sleep. For modern mothers it seems the answer to every pain point can be answered by following an expert on Instagram and signing up for their brand of parenting classes. Where our grandmothers and mothers may have relied on the “It takes a village” philosophy and the teachings of Dr. Spock when raising children, women today have come to rely on following the right Instagram accounts and paying for and downloading PDFs.

From introducing your baby to solids, getting a picky toddler to eat vegetables, teaching them to sit, crawl, and walk, learning to deal with meltdowns, curbing screen time, and, ultimately, making sure they turn into a happy, functional human, there’s an Instagram account for that. And while some parenting advice on social media is free, there’s always more to learn—waiting for you behind a paywall, of course.

You’ve probably heard of some of these heavy hitters if you’ve interacted whatsoever with the parenting internet. Take Big Little Feelings, an Instagram account run by two moms that offers a $99 course aimed at “Winning the Toddler Stage,” and has more than 3 million followers seeking hacks for ending tantrums and reducing “embarrassing” toddler behavior. For $65 you can purchase a “Reverse Picky Eating” course from Solid Starts, whose Instagram account regularly features videos of babies gnawing happily on a stalk of broccoli or scooping up a bowl of quinoa with their tiny hands. Worried you didn’t install your newborn’s car seat correctly? Safe in the Seat (755,000 followers) offers a $79 course for infants and another $79 once they’ve transitioned into a convertible seat for toddlers. Assuming you paid for parenting classes every time you needed advice, the bill could easily run over $1,000 by the time your kid enters preschool.

While these parenting experts cover a wide range of topics, they share many of the same attributes. A large majority of the women—and they are nearly universally women—started these accounts very recently, most during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some are professionals in recognized fields, like pediatric physical therapy, who use Instagram to get their expertise out to the masses. Others are self-proclaimed experts in topics that offer no formal training.

The great unifier: They all offer a brand of informal, relatable, accessible, and easy advice that many parents struggle to find through the traditional medical system.

“The reason that people like me are allowed to exist is because parents want this information and they need this information,” Shepard-Ohta of Hey Sleepy Baby tells me. “Maybe they used to get it in a book, but now we're all on our phone all day, every day. It's the easiest way to take in information.”

Jenny Best, the founder of Solid Starts, says that the opposite is also true. In the internet age parents have so much information to sift through that they “try to find an affinity group that matches their values or their approach” when it comes to key parenting decisions.

“This has a really big shift happening in parenting,” she says. “They want the facts; they want to cut through the noise.”

Cutting through that noise is profitable, and also genuinely useful. But as this industry grows larger and larger, some of its experts are starting to wish it had some guardrails to prevent bad actors, and others are examining its impact. Like, how do we know everyone claiming to be an “expert” on Instagram is legit? And even if they are an expert, is following a handful of these accounts to optimize every detail of your child’s upbringing a good thing? Or is it just feeding into a never-ending monster of anxiety, that can only be fed by buying more and more courses?

“I feel like the information is great,” KC Rickerd, a pediatric physical therapist who runs an online business called Milestones and Motherhood, tells me, “but I also feel like it can be really overwhelming and anxiety-inducing for anyone, really, but especially for people that are already feeling a little bit like you're dropping the ball or you're not doing enough, or you should be doing more. So I feel like I've struggled with this a lot…. Am I actually helping or is this making it so much worse? Am I creating anxiety for people?”

I myself fell into the world of Instagram parenting courses when I was still on maternity leave, making food for my then five-month-old. I had stumbled onto Solid Starts as a resource to help me make sure I was preparing things safely for her, dutifully inputting each food into their (free) app in order to learn how to serve it. One day I was struck by a realization: I had absolutely no idea whether these people were legit. Yet there I'd gone, blindly following their instructions, hoping they knew enough that my baby wouldn’t choke.

Therein lies the first problem with getting all your parenting advice from Instagram: There are very few, if any, checks and balances in place. We believe many of these gurus because we are desperate, but not all of them are certified by a governing body that is recognized by an established medical board—a fact many of the women who run these accounts openly admit.

Take the art of teaching a child to sleep. Nearly all Instagram sleep experts are certified in something, but as DeBear of Baby Sleep Doctor tells me, “Being a sleep consultant is a made-up job.” Most certification processes are courses developed by a person who then teaches their methods to others as part of a certification process. But there’s no official governing board or formal training.

“So to call yourself one is a made-up thing. I mean, it really is,” she says with a laugh.

That doesn’t mean, though, that teaching a child to sleep isn’t an incredibly important skill. And DeBear does have a doctorate in clinical and forensic psychology, which, combined with her own experience as a mother, made her interested in the science behind baby sleep. After realizing there were very few resources for parents out there, she trained her professional lens on studying the science behind sleep and developed her own methods, which she began offering to clients as a private sleep coach (she also took one of those sleep courses, to become certified). Once she took her methods to Instagram with the help of a social-media-savvy sister, it exploded into a nearly-800,000 follower account.

DeBear finds the work—both on- and offline—fulfilling as a mental health professional, but she’s as aware as anyone that there’s no one regulating accounts like hers. And while she follows the American Academy of Pediatrics’s best practices for safe sleep, plenty of Instagram pages do not. As with everything on the internet, it is easy to fall into a potentially dangerous echo chamber.

“That's the problem with social media as a whole,” she says. “If you have an opinion, there's always someone who will tell you that you're right, 100%. But with sleep, it could be really scary.”

That’s the first and most alarming potential pitfall of the industrial Instagram parenting complex: that a random person could convince parents to practice dangerous techniques because they have enough followers to appear legit. But it’s the second pitfall that I found most common among the moms I surveyed: that these courses may just be creating more anxiety, rather than quelling it.

While many moms enthused about the courses they had purchased (one told me Solid Starts’ course guide was their favorite cookbook), others told me that they worried following all these accounts were feeding into their worries, convincing them that they’re failing in some way because their child doesn’t look like this or that baby online. For one mom of a toddler living in Brooklyn, it all started to just feel like a way to keep up with the Joneses.

“It almost feels like everyone flocks to one thing and then mega-over-optimizes for whatever developmental milestone is being met,” she tells me. “Personally, I chose the route to not do research on these things because if there’s something I should know, I figure my community will tell me. And also feel like there’s such a frenzy of things to spend money on and I just plain don’t want to.”

Other moms also wonder if, in the end, buying these materials just became a way to self-soothe. Like, if I buy enough things, will it help me deal with the reality that I'm hurtling into a massive life change, and there’s nothing I can do to truly prepare? Toddler mom Maddy, who has bought both sleep and feeding courses, tells me she now thinks they probably weren’t worth it.

“As a new mom who had no idea what I was doing, it made me think there was a plan in place,” she says. “But in reality every kid is so different and I realized that very quickly.”

It’s a cold dose of reality: Parenting isn’t something we can optimize into perfection by studying the hardest or preparing the best. And that’s why, according to genuine medical professionals, there’s no governing body for things like teaching a baby to sleep. In many ways it’s an art according to the needs of your individual child, not a one-size-fits-all formula.

“In the past [parenting advice] came from generations of knowledge being handed down,” Jennifer Shu, an Atlanta-based pediatrician and author, says. “There's not a certifying body because it's not an exact science. There's so many correct ways and appropriate and safe ways to do certain things.”

In that way, the best practices for engaging with Instagram parenting accounts are largely the same as engaging with the internet at large. Do you have to buy every course that crosses your feed to be good mother? Obviously not. Do your research; don’t get carried away. And before you break out your credit card, Jennifer Anderson, a registered dietitian who runs the account Kids Eat in Color, recommends asking yourself whether the advice you're gravitating toward feels like common sense or complete nonsense that you tell yourself is just wild enough to work.

“If it doesn't make any sense to you, you probably don't have to do it,” she says.

Anderson's second piece of advice: Check in with yourself. How do you feel when you consume their content? “Are you feeling afraid and worried and scared, or are you feeling empowered?” she says. “Just because someone has credentials doesn't mean that you should be taking advice from them…. If they're constantly making you feel like you're failing as a parent or you have to worry about your child or you're not doing it perfectly, gosh, we have that enough. We shouldn't do it to ourselves more.”

And if you do find that the methods of certain parenting experts are stressing you out more than providing realistic, safe, and tactical advice? Disengage, a directive even many women behind parenting accounts advise.

“If you’re on my page because you’re in an anxious spiral or you're worried that something is seriously wrong with your child, talk to their provider,” says Rickerd, the therapist who runs Milestones and Motherhood. “Get off Instagram.” But as long as you engage responsibly, these courses can be a tool to help, even if it just makes you feel like you aren’t completely alone. As one mom of two told me, it's natural to want to do your best at what’s probably the most important—and longest—job you’ll ever have. Is it a surprise that we want someone to hold our hand?

“New parents are both insecure and so full of love—they get sucked in because they can’t help but do whatever they can to avoid getting it wrong,” she mused. “I think the courses are worthwhile so far as giving new parents the confidence they need to do what probably already comes naturally to them.”

Stephanie McNeal is a senior editor at Glamour and the author of Swipe Up for More! Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers.

Originally Appeared on Glamour