This might sound like a bit of an odd title, but let me explain. I am now 29 year’s old (sigh) and of a peak child bearing age. Whilst researching this article I found out the average age of mothers in the UK is 30.2 years, which gives me 1.2 years exactly. FFS.
My body is telling me lady you better hurry up and use what ya got to make lotsa babies before it’s too late. My mind is saying woah hold on a minute, that’s definitely not on the cards for me just yet. I got a few more bits and bobs to do and loose ends to tie up before I pop out a baby. However, I am pretty darn sure the endless baby pictures and updates on Facebook and Instagram aren’t slowing my hormonal urges down. No sir.
As a sociologist (I have a degree in sociology so can I call myself that? I think so), I am intrigued by this social phenomenon. What impact is all this baby lovin and sharing on Facebook amongst friends having on the number of people getting preggers?
In the wild, female animals might spot other pregnant females and think perhaps I should get knocked up too?! Us humans are now seeing endless adorable pictures of our friend’s babies and ‘I have just given birth’ selfies and thinking the world and his wife are having kiddiwinkles.
Newborn children have their image uploaded to social media within an average of 57.9 minutes, according to a survey. These newborn babies are exposed to the world of social media within an hour of their life. Geez. In the USA, 92% of children have an online presence before they are two year’s old.
There’s the obvious pressure, where you think, uh oh, other women my age are giving birth, does that mean I should too? Well obvs not, but you can’t help but think it sometimes. You can ignore the pressure, focus on yourself.
To do this you might want to sneakily delete news updates from your friends who like to post endless baby pics. Not sure I really wanna see a pic of your little cherub picking their nose or with food all over the face coz it’s totes hilair and cute and all that, but that’s just me. It is hard though when your friends have the most gorgeous little ones, even if like me, you don’t really like kids all that much.
The thing is, I know this will be me when I have a baby. I am bad enough with my dog. I post pictures of my dog or some adorable rescue dog most days on Facebook, which probably gets on a lot of people’s tits. Here’s a cute picture of my dog to demonstrate. I mean, she’s on a children’s slide, how totally adorable, no?
This is not an article moaning about people sharing on social media, because as I said, I could end up doing the same. What I am really interested in is whether social media is increasing the number of women that want to get pregnant (even if it happens without them realising).
After doing a bit of research, I have found zero studies on this. It would be interesting to find out not only whether social media increases women’s desire to get pregnant, but also how much it influences them on topics surrounding birthing options and baby products etc. People will start a full on debate over which cot or pram is the bees knees and what not. OMG I just Googled prams, why are they so darn expensive, are they made of gold?
What sort of signals are all these images and updates sending to our spongy brains? What do you guys think? If you can find any studies on this please let me know. Cheers.
