The prominence of social media in contemporary life has led more mothers to search for parenting information through various Internet and social media channels. The following study examines the impact that Instagram mommy blog content has on the perceived parenting skill of the typical American mother. In this experiment, participants were exposed to one of two types of Instagram motherhood blogger content. The first type of content did not address the struggles of motherhood (referred to as an “alpha-mom” blogger content), while the second type of content (referred to as a “realistic” blogger content) did. After reviewing the content, participants will be asked a series of Likert-type scale questions to gauge their perceived parenting skill. We hypothesized that participants who were exposed to the “alpha-mom” content would have a lower belief in their own parenting skill than those who were exposed to content from the “realistic” blogger. The hypothesis was not supported. However, we did find that participants who received some of their parenting information from Internet sources had a lower belief in their parenting skill than participants who did not receive their parenting information from online sources, regardless of the content to which they were exposed.

社交媒体在当代生活中的突出地位导致更多的母亲通过各种互联网和社交媒体渠道搜索育儿信息。以下研究考察了 Instagram 妈妈博客内容对典型美国妈妈的育儿技巧的影响。在这个实验中，参与者接触了两种类型的 Instagram 母性博主内容之一。第一种类型的内容没有解决母性的挣扎（称为“alpha-mom”博主内容），而第二种类型的内容（称为“现实”博主内容）确实如此。在查看内容后，参与者将被问到一系列李克特式量表问题，以衡量他们感知的育儿技巧。我们假设，与接触“现实”博主内容的参与者相比，接触“阿尔法妈妈”内容的参与者对自己的育儿技能的信心较低。该假设没有得到支持。然而，我们确实发现，与未从网络来源获得育儿信息的参与者相比，无论他们接触到哪些内容，从互联网来源获得部分育儿信息的参与者对育儿技能的信心都较低。