social media caters to extremely-online narcissistic people who glut themselves like ticks on external validation and possibly the most disturbing aspect of this is the narcissistic parents who use social media to a) flaunt their children and their magical journey of parenthood to the world as some kind of status symbol, b) portray themselves as perfect parents who did absolutely everything right and are qualified to dispense their parenting expertise to other parents, and c) whine about how their kids are ungrateful ill-tempered spoiled brats.
there's like a whole subculture of online echo chamber communities for parents of estranged children where narcissist parents get together and talk about how their kids unfairly abandoned them and cut off contact with them for absolutely no good reason and they blame it on things like "gentle parenting" or psychology/therapists or their kid's partners/spouses or the libural media or ipads or minecraft or anything else they can think of. when you read between the lines you can see that they all have this very clinical behaviorist attitude towards parenting where they talk about their kids as if they were a broken household appliance and they can't figure out how to fix it and make it function properly, they all have absolutely zero self-awareness and can never acknowledge the possibility that their kids don't talk to them anymore for a valid reason, like maybe because they themselves are disconnected, self-centered, emotionally-manipulative, and generally unlikeable people.
the fact that i'm now seeing youtube ads catered toward narcissistic parents is pretty disgusting, but i can see why they would cater to such a target market. "your kid is an asshole and it's not your fault" is an idea that is pretty well guaranteed to get lots and lots of clicks. i looked up the reddit thread referenced by this ad and it's by a parent talking about their 4-year-old who is their firstborn child. this person has been a parent for just 4 years and they're calling their 4-year-old an asshole to random strangers on the internet while simultaneously standing on a soapbox and acting like they are qualified to share their great parenting wisdom and experience to all the other parents of the world. the thread has over 2k upvotes and hundreds of agreeing comments, and because it's reddit of course all the critical comments are hidden and the thread is locked and permanently preserved as-is because the discussion is perfect and everything has been worked out and there's no need for any further discourse on the subject. and of course, when you look at the author's profile you can see that they are extremely-online and they spend all their free time preaching on reddit to other parents and lecturing them on proper parenting and fishing for validation like a typical narcissistic attention whore. i can only imagine how this kid will feel when they grow up and stumble across this post and see their mom/dad calling them an asshole on reddit before they could even tie their shoes. something tells me that the parents of estranged children community will have a new member.