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"He gets to be the fun parent": Understanding and Supporting Burnt-Out Mothers in Online Communities

Nazanin Sabri, Ananya Malik, Bangzhao Shu, Jason Snyder, Laurie Kramer, Mai Elsherief

TL;DR

This work interrogates maternal burnout as disclosed in online spaces, using Reddit to study self-disclosure, support dynamics, and co-parenting. It develops a transformer-based detector to identify posts authored by burnt-out mothers, enabling analysis of 3,244 posts and 50,674 comments. Through mixed-methods analyses, it reveals mothers’ needs (advice, being heard, success stories, and diagnosis), the predominance of emotional support in responses, and varied co-parenting challenges such as unequal expectations and weaponized incompetence. The findings inform design implications, including family-centered dashboards, lightweight reciprocity nudges, and reflective tools to support mothers while mitigating stigma and privacy concerns in digital environments.

Abstract

Maternal burnout is a psychological phenomena with documented harms to both mother and child, requiring prompt attention. Mothers experiencing burnout might choose to turn to online anonymous platforms, such as Reddit, to share their experience, due to feelings of shame and stigmatization of mental health issues. In this work, we study how mothers use Reddit to discuss their experiences of burnout. We first identify posts written by burnt out mothers by manually annotating Reddit posts and training machine learning models on them. Focusing on posts made by this population (N = 3,244), we then investigate the issues brought up by mothers, such as the need for help, career advice, and co-parenting issues. Additionally, we investigate how the Reddit community responds to these posts through the analysis of comments. We find that commenters frequently share personal lived experiences with the poster, and provide emotional support. Finally, considering co-parenting could be a mitigating factor for parental burnout, we explore co-pareting patterns experienced by burnt out mothers, finding evidence of lack of support for and unequal expectations from mothers.

"He gets to be the fun parent": Understanding and Supporting Burnt-Out Mothers in Online Communities

TL;DR

This work interrogates maternal burnout as disclosed in online spaces, using Reddit to study self-disclosure, support dynamics, and co-parenting. It develops a transformer-based detector to identify posts authored by burnt-out mothers, enabling analysis of 3,244 posts and 50,674 comments. Through mixed-methods analyses, it reveals mothers’ needs (advice, being heard, success stories, and diagnosis), the predominance of emotional support in responses, and varied co-parenting challenges such as unequal expectations and weaponized incompetence. The findings inform design implications, including family-centered dashboards, lightweight reciprocity nudges, and reflective tools to support mothers while mitigating stigma and privacy concerns in digital environments.

Abstract

Maternal burnout is a psychological phenomena with documented harms to both mother and child, requiring prompt attention. Mothers experiencing burnout might choose to turn to online anonymous platforms, such as Reddit, to share their experience, due to feelings of shame and stigmatization of mental health issues. In this work, we study how mothers use Reddit to discuss their experiences of burnout. We first identify posts written by burnt out mothers by manually annotating Reddit posts and training machine learning models on them. Focusing on posts made by this population (N = 3,244), we then investigate the issues brought up by mothers, such as the need for help, career advice, and co-parenting issues. Additionally, we investigate how the Reddit community responds to these posts through the analysis of comments. We find that commenters frequently share personal lived experiences with the poster, and provide emotional support. Finally, considering co-parenting could be a mitigating factor for parental burnout, we explore co-pareting patterns experienced by burnt out mothers, finding evidence of lack of support for and unequal expectations from mothers.
Paper Structure (51 sections, 1 figure, 13 tables)

This paper contains 51 sections, 1 figure, 13 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Parental Burnout
  4. Online Disclosure of Mental Health
  5. Study 1: Detecting Self-disclosure of Motherhood
  6. Method
  7. Data Collection & Cleaning
  8. Ethical Considerations for Researching Public Online Data
  9. Qualitative Annotation of Motherhood
  10. Detection of Authorship by a Mother
  11. Findings
  12. Model Generalizability Testing
  13. Study 2: Exploring Self-Disclosure of Maternal Burnout and Social Support Dynamics
  14. Method
  15. Understanding Mothers' Needs
  16. ...and 36 more sections

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: The motivations, research questions, methods, and data used in this work.