When I scroll social media, I’m hit with the reminder that no matter how I heal, I must always deal with the wounded child inside of me. It’s like being in perpetual mourning while I continue to parent and re-parent myself. Seeing real-life examples of people having close emotional bonds with their parents over and over again on social media makes me feel like I am constantly holding a funeral for the kind of childhood that part of me wishes I could have had.
It feels petty, especially because it’s not like I don’t want other people to have happy childhoods untouched by dysfunction. I want people to have good relationships with their families. But I just don’t want to have to see it or hear about it.
The Spy Kids movie was the first representation I saw in pop culture of children who had even a slightly dysfunctional family. No, the main characters Carmen and Juni didn’t have home lives exactly like mine. But they did have a dysfunctional family with parents who were lying to them about being international agents, and I could see and feel tension between people who were supposed to love and care for each other—something that, as far as I could tell, was unique to me and my parents. Seeing that representation of familial conflict helped with a personal awakening of mine—I realized that you could have a happy family and still have issues, things that you were keeping from each other, and ways you were unknowingly manipulating each other. And while it didn’t help make me feel “normal,” it did help me realize that the kids around me I was so envious of probably didn’t have perfect family lives either. It’s just what people show on the outside.
At the end of the day, I think that’s why these kinds of videos bother me so much. On the outside, they seem like families having fun, but to me it feels like a shiny, distracting veneer, like something much bigger and more complicated is behind a curtain, and we’re all acting like it doesn’t exist. As I watch a video of a father and daughter dance to show tunes in front of their house, I think, What the fuck are they trying to prove? The truth is, they’re probably just spending quality time together on a weekend. But that doesn’t make it feel any less like a personal attack.
What did I do wrong to end up in a family that isn’t like that? I ask myself, even though I’ve already talked through it with my therapist what feels like a million times. She’s reminded me I didn’t do anything to deserve my parents not treating me the way I needed. But seeing everyone else have what I didn’t get feels like having someone sticking a competition trophy in my face, when I don’t even qualify to enter the contest.
Of course, social media has also provided the opportunity for people without perfect or even happy families to find each other, and knowing there are other friends who are similarly estranged from their families, whose stomachs also churn at these videos, does make me feel less alone. Still, I worry that these videos affect people with dysfunctional families, LGBTQ+ kids who have been disowned or forced to live in homophobic or transphobic families, or people like me who have estranged ourselves—making us feel guilty that we don’t have what we’re “supposed” to. But I don’t think it’s a given to have a perfect home life, and I don’t actually think that people in these videos have totally dysfunction-free families. To me, the myth of the dysfunction-free family is simply perpetuated by videos like these.
Like people have said before, social media is simply a highlight reel. Even those of us who are frequently honest about trauma or hardship we’ve experienced can lean toward posting the good things more frequently lest we be seen as annoying, or worse—pitiable. These happy family videos feel like they’re simply continuing the long, drawn-out trend of showing off the best of our lives—which may or may not actually exist, or might be exaggerated—for likes.
Even still, when I scroll past them online, I feel that old familiar tug in my heart that I felt in fourth grade after summer vacation, or on Mother’s Day, when everyone has a sweet post about their Lorelei-Rory relationship with their mom, or Father’s Day with people’s long lists of everything their fathers taught them to do.
When I see them, I do the only thing I can do. I hit “Do not show me any more content like this.”
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