Millennial Mom Wars | Psychology Today United Kingdom

The pile-on…we have all seen it. A mom makes a comment online:

“Ugh, I can’t wait for the kids to go back to school.” Seems innocent enough, but then the feedback rolls in. Some validate and gripe along. But others find the need to insult this parent. “Why have kids then?” “Does this mom even like her children?” “I don’t understand how mothers these days are towards their children.” “I was a stay-at-home mom and felt so sad when school started again.”

Why moms can’t just support other moms?

Misogyny might be central to online maternal criticism. Plenty of online rhetoric is rooted in sexist belief systems, but I think there is more to the story.

These days, polarization exists in most crevices of our day-to-day life. This feels especially true in parenting. Opinions are really strong when it comes to one’s children—they are also strong when it comes to other people’s kids. The unfortunate consequence of lots of opinions about how to parent is that mothers are inevitably judged. And the perfect venue for sharing said opinions is online, in a very public manner.

And boy, do people not hold back in their judgments of mothers.

Continued criticism of moms is no longer easily explained by the “mommy war” mentality, and while misogyny certainly plays a role—it is also worth understanding our collective struggles with empathy and distress tolerance and how these factor into the harshness moms can face.

It is often surprising just how invested people are in others’ choices. Many judgments aimed at moms convey an underlying tone that there are right ways and wrong ways to mother. There are judgments that are rooted in concern for the community, as with vaccinating, but there is also divisiveness around women who openly discuss the challenges they face as mothers. Perhaps this divide can be distilled down to the factions we so know and love: working mothers and stay-at-home mothers.

The best-selling book Mommy Wars first came out in 2006. It was very stereotypical, pitting stay-at-home moms pushing strollers against the briefcase-carrying working moms. The book was both popular and a product of the times, but despite 20 years having passed, mothers still experience tremendous judgments for either choice (and for every other choice they make, too). But somehow, that judgment seems louder, perhaps largely because, in 2025, they are also able to share more about their choices and how they pan out. Today, women are much more able to discuss their mothering trials and tribulations—and to weigh in on each others’, too. Perhaps this is a reason for the intensified war of mothers.

Of course, misogyny plays a role in the discord that involves dissing mothers. But what other factors are possible culprits in the trend of disparaging mothers? Anna North described the lack of community American women face and how this creates and maintains animosity. When we are struggling and we feel alone, we want to take down others, too. Misery does love company.

And yet, the sheer lack of community might not totally capture what happens for people online when they see a mother sharing her experiences. Alas, the mommy war rages on.

It’s also the impact lack of community has had on the way we relate to one another. This sense of isolation has made people less interested in one another—at least, as fellow human beings and not as online punching bags. Research has suggested that empathy has been declining in the U.S. Many of these statistics coincide with the boom in social media use. Perhaps the connection between social media and a lack of empathy is not that everyone is just narcissistic these days, but that we don’t invite curiosity or have space for nuance. There is less genuine interest in trying to understand why someone is doing something a certain way. Less room for gray areas, less desire to connect, less distress tolerance. There is also less desire to slow down. Everything is so fast-paced.

So, how does a lack of distress intolerance connect to mommy war rhetoric? Our inability to simply try to understand where people are coming from—that requires empathy, and empathy does require us to put our beliefs aside and tolerate a possible difference of opinion. Often our knee-jerk response to someone doing something vastly different from us is judgment and not curiosity. This, again, would require slowing down and leaning on some distress tolerance skills.

Mothers are not one-dimensional. They can give voice to the difficulties they face in parenting; concepts like, “emotional labor” and “mental load” are commonplace online. Women might have more permission these days to share the burdens of their experiences, but they are also met with judgment and harshness. It takes a lot more energy to pause and share a supportive comment, or offer a note that “that hasn’t been my experience, and it sounds hard!” Understanding the whole picture—one’s individual circumstances, continued gender roles, systemic failures, etc. — requires tremendous curiosity.

There is reason to be hopeful. Compassion is on the rise, and people do seem to be moving closer to one another. Perhaps we can work toward meeting certain posts, people, or belief systems with curiosity (internally). Then maybe the harshness (externally) will soften.