Source: Substack Parents are Crazy Too Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her Published: January 12, 2026 | Archived: March 21, 2026

When I first started writing about parenting on Substack (hardly my “main” topic, but a fun one to touch occasionally) I could reliably make people laugh by mocking “neurotic moms on Facebook groups.” And they are an easy target! Given that I joined a bunch of safety-related groups after having my first baby in 2020 (lockdown, pandemic, existing anxiety disorder, Facebook safety groups…how can it get more neurotic?) I can attest that I have seen some really bonkers shit: fifteen-year-olds riding in booster seats, fears of “dry drowning” because a baby swallowed some of her bath water, or my personal favorite—when the mom group told a mother struggling with her four-year-old who was scared of “monsters in his closet” that the monsters were either spirits to be exorcized by burning sage, or a real man who was living in the closet at night and molesting him.

You can find these women on Twitter too, although these days they tend to be more of the trad/crunchy variety, obsessed with martyrdom and sacrifice regardless of any real upside. It’s a big contest of who can deplete themselves the most without asking a husband for help, while also insisting that everyone needs to have five or more children. You can’t log onto Parenting Twitter without some butter churning ass bitch living in a log cabin, dressed like Baba Yaga, telling you that you’re “weak” or “spiritually communist” because you wore your baby in a baby carrier instead of holding him with your arms all day as God intended. Usually, this person is either a man in Nigeria or was a liberal atheist seven years ago, but that’s beside the point.

Part of my comedy aimed at neurotic parents is that in many ways, I’m one of them, and I’m self-aware. I worry all the time about my kids’ safety. I worry about being judged for how they behave in public. I worry about a therapist convincing them I was toxic and they need to go no-contact with me if they have any negative experiences in childhood. And while I know I sound crazy when I write this stuff, at least I know I sound crazy. Often, I am the punchline! And when I bring up the crazy stuff I see on these sites which contributed to my fears, Parenting Substack will immediately advise me that I should simply not listen to “crazy moms on the Internet.”

Only one problem: the call is coming from inside the house. The crazy moms are here now. Almost everyone who writes extensively about parenting on Substack, myself included, is neurotic and says things that most IRL people would find absurd. Parenting Substack is a milieu that I enjoy—I subscribe to many of these writers happily. But they are just as weird as I am most of the time, even if their focus is on different things. I say this with love: if you are writing long-form, data-driven content about the best way to raise children, and if your “best way” is something that’s niche and specific—something that your average mom and elementary school pickup would find intimidating if not downright bizarre—you are probably at least a little neurotic. You are the “weird mom from the Internet” that we apparently shouldn’t listen to!

You best start believing in neurotic moms, missy—you’re one of us!

Substack Parenting is neurotic in a different way from Facebook parenting (paranoid, safety-obsessed) and from Twitter (recent Orthodox conversion, LARPing as a pioneer woman.) Instead, Substack neuroticism seems to manifest by advocating for the elimination of basically every modern invention that makes kids happy, or that makes parenting remotely easier, because these things weren’t used in the year 24 AD. Some of the “modern inventions” I’ve seen eschewed on Substack include TV (because of course), toys, cribs, kid-centered activities, day care, school, day camp, and kids’ menus (plus the concept of picky eaters or “kid meals” entirely). Also, the expectation is that moms don’t work outside the home, better yet if we homeschool (or unschool.) From the looks of Parenting Substack, you would probably be under the impression that 30% of American parents are homeschooling (the real number is between 6-8%.)

The ideal Substack Mom (and no, I’m not talking about one specific person, don’t worry, it’s not you) owns nothing that would ever run the risk of making her own life easier or making her child happier, employs nobody, gets help from nobody (grandparents, maybe) and yet, prides herself on being “chill” and “simple” because she doesn’t have a Nanit monitor and Snoo self-rocking bassinet. She’s “chill” because she bedshares and doesn’t fuss over entertaining her kids or worry about their safety, but you know she would melt a Fisher Price light-up aquarium bouncer in her fireplace if a well-meaning relative gifted it, and she might send her kids to an exorcist if they accidentally watch five minutes of Cocomelon at a cousin’s house. The Substack Mom’s ultimate achievement is a brood of six children who have never once misbehaved in public because their dopamine has never once been spiked with anything more thrilling than throwing rocks into a pond. Their most exciting activity of the week is being allowed to unload the dishwasher (cue new Substack post: do we REALLY need dishwashers? Our prehistoric ancestors didn’t even have DISHES.)

The ideal way to brag about your kids on Substack is by showing them engaging in some kind of extremely boring, mundane, all-natural activity (I saw a woman brag that her son spent all afternoon attempting to climb a fence—was he attempting to escape?) and then underscore that despite zero parental involvement or outside entertainment, these kids have never once misbehaved, been bored, or complained. Bonus points if you make some big sweeping statement about an item that has become verboten in your house: “I credit little Jasper’s amazing self-regulation to the fact that we simply DO NOT OWN a DINING TABLE.”

While modern inventions and entertainment are clearly OUT in the Substack parenting world, what’s really verboten is self-doubt, which is perhaps why they don’t see themselves as neurotic. The expectation is that we get rid of everything that makes parenting easier, and then paradoxically, have a much easier time (Source: dude, trust me.) Every few days I open this app to see a new article, by a different person, explaining how actually parenting is extremely easy if you “just stop thinking about it so much,” and of course, “thinking about it” means like…owning toys or enrolling them in a class or helping them with something. You see, the real neurotic moms are the ones who overschedule their kids with stupid activities, camps and lessons. The real neurotic moms install Ring cameras all over their house. The real neurotic moms track every milestone in an app. But you see, here on Substack, the moms aren’t neurotic—their children are just perfectly happy and polite without anyone having to think about it! Also, have you considered your family shouldn’t have a couch?

This is what the “anti-neurotic” Substack articles sound like: Why are you crazy Facebook moms so neurotic about breastfeeding? Why all these trackers and devices and consultants? I mean, duh, breastfeeding is 100% essential and it’s a crime against nature not to do it until your child is able to read chapter books (which for my kids, was age three, thanks to my impeccable unschooling curriculum of “sending them into the woods”), but sheesh, why were you concerned about your baby’s weight gain when you could have just breastfed perfectly like me?! Why did you bother pumping when your boobs are perfectly designed to do their job? Oh, your baby was underweight and you were confident there was a tongue tie or some other issue that was hindering your breastfeeding journey? Well, did you try just removing all the baby’s toys and replacing them with various sticks and leaves?

This new ecosystem of neurotic parents, like any, stems from a core belief. The core belief of Facebook neuroticism is that the world is a dangerous place, pedophiles are camping out in every play structure, and if you’re ever worried about something, you should “trust your mama instinct,” even if your mama instinct would have you at the ER every week or shooting innocent men on the street (I’m reminded of one Facebook post where a mother was told to bring a gun to the playground in case anyone there was smoking pot.) The core belief of Twitter neuroticism is that mothers should be as self-sacrificial as possible, preferably while wearing outfit that displays copious booba booba booba (wait…is this really a woman posting?) The core belief of Substack, however, is that parenting was perfect, extremely easy, and chill, before. Before what, we aren’t totally sure—maybe the 1910s, maybe the 1600s, maybe prehistoric times, but either way, everything was fine before a certain time, and now everything is needlessly bad because parents have too many things and “worry” too much. So guess what bitch? You’re sleeping on a pile of straw now.

One reason I find this line of thinking unconvincing is that the olden days actually sucked ass. Perhaps we can learn a few things from our ancestors, and I enjoy reading about those things, but we don’t live in the olden days anymore so some modern things that are deemed “pointless” because they didn’t exist in olden times are actually necessary to, well, live in modern times. Not to sound like a Marco Rubio type Republican, but how the hell are we going to compete with China if our kids’ “education” consists of wandering around in the forest looking at sticks and learning how to can boysenberry jam? School may be a “modern invention,” but most people throughout history were illiterate! AI may make literacy pointless eventually (which sucks, as I’d be out of a job unless I focus entirely on my Trump impressions, which at that point might be a bit too retro to be relevant) but alas, a lot of the modern things we have are actually kind of necessary to exist in a modern world. And for better or worse, that’s the world in which we live!

I’m not saying these people are entirely wrong. I’ve seen some interesting stuff here, and I love a good data-driven piece or anything that draws on history. Heck, I wrote a whole article about the sex lives of gorillas. But let’s just call this what it is: weird. It’s okay to be a little weird, you just need to come to terms with the fact that you are now the “crazy mom on the Internet” that I’m supposed to not listen to.

A good litmus test for this is, if I went to literally anyone at my son’s school pickup and relayed what I just read, would they have any idea what I was talking about? A while ago, when I was deep into online parenting discourse, I struck up a conversation with some moms about the discussion topic of whether or not compulsory public school just exists to accommodate the post-industrial forty-hour workweek. Want to guess what they said? “What are you talking about? It doesn’t accommodate the workweek. We need to use aftercare.” No wonder I don’t have friends.

It’s easy to say “Just talk to moms in real life instead of wackos online,” when I admit I am one of the wackos, and when motherhood can be isolating. Many of us might not know that many real-life moms with whom to discuss these topics, and many of us might be, for better or worse, taking parenting cues from complete strangers with blogs. And some of these strangers actually have helped me! My weakest point as a parent is discipline because I hate the idea of ever making my kids upset (which has led to some undesirable behavior) and some more experienced moms on here have genuinely helped me become a stronger disciplinarian (I was originally scared off 123 Magic because it was “behavioralist” and caused “people pleasers,” but again…crazy moms on the Internet.) In fact, since becoming a bit firmer and holding boundaries more consistently with my five-year-old for just two months, I’ve noticed significant improvements in his behavior and ability to cope with his emotions. Some kids just need structure, boundaries, and the awareness that there is a grownup in charge. But again, this is something that would not be considered weird if I said it to someone in real life. In fact, they’d think what I was doing before was weird.

But just as you can learn good things from people on the Internet, just remember that Substack writers are not magically more reliable than crazy moms on Facebook. Perhaps we are more reliable than Twitter moms since many of them are likely to actually be young men in Cambodia, but we are still part of the small subset of moms trying to optimize for perfect parenting, even if the way we talk about it emphasizes “not stressing.” I’m sorry, but if I took away everything that had the capacity to entertain my children or make life more comfortable, there would very much be stress.