Scrolling Through the Struggle: How Moms Use Humor to Cope

Through Instagram captions, viral memes, and reels that capture the messiness of daily life, many mothers are using humor to talk about something deeper than overtired toddlers. For Sarah Walden, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Rhetoric in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core, these posts represent a significant cultural shift.

Her research explores maternal failure rhetoric, a form of digital humor that highlights the challenges of motherhood and the unrealistic standards women are often expected to meet. By examining content from Instagram accounts before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, Walden identified a clear change in tone.

“In 2020, many posts reflected a personal sense of failure,” Walden said. “Mothers felt like they could not meet everyone’s needs. But by 2022, creators were more likely to talk about the failure of systems. They were saying this is too much because the structures meant to help us are broken."

What began as a personal observation, laughing at relatable parenting content while raising her young son, became a formal study into how humor helps mothers process pressure, build community, and critique cultural norms.

“These posts helped me make sense of a life that required me to wait 20 minutes for someone to put on his shoes,” Walden said. “As someone who thrives on routine, the absurdity of those moments felt overwhelming, and maternal humor offered a much-needed mirror that made me feel less alone.”

To build her dataset, Walden and her research assistant selected Instagram accounts run by individual creators, not brands or groups, who were actively trying to cultivate a following through consistent posting, tagging, and interaction. They looked for creators who were posting in both pre- and post-pandemic to track changes across time.

“Motherhood is isolating in nature,” Walden said. “A woman is often home alone with a newborn, unable to leave due to feeding or nap schedules,” Walden said. “Social media can be a space to see your life reflected in a way that alleviates that isolation and anxiety. However, it can also present an unrealistic view of motherhood that can exacerbate those anxieties.”

Walden’s research contributes to ongoing conversations about gender, digital culture, and activism. While maternal humor seems lighthearted, she sees it as a form of indirect advocacy that helps women name shared stressors, push back against idealized expectations, and question the cultural forces that shape their experiences.

“I often share my work with friends who are not in academia because I want to be sure that what I say is an authentic representation of what they experience,” Walden said. “I want mothers who feel like they are constantly failing to recognize the degree to which that reality is constructed for them, and that there are ways to find community in humor. Sometimes a meme really can stop the spiraling, but it won't solve every problem. I think the shift in maternal humor about failure toward a more socially-engaged model is exactly what we all need. How can we get to the root of a problem and work to address it in a way that serves many women in our situations?”

Walden’s work goes beyond Instagram to explore how maternal identity is portrayed across media, including literature, television, and even horror films. In psychological thrillers, she sees a growing willingness to treat mothers with empathy, offering more nuanced portrayals of their pain and complexity.

“Failure rhetoric keeps showing up, whether I am looking for it or not,” Walden said. “I am fascinated by how we talk about motherhood and caregiving, how perfection and failure are used to frame those roles, and what those stories say about who we are.”

At the core of all her work is a deep curiosity about how culture shapes language and how language, in turn, shapes lives.

“I want to understand the rhetoric that influences our values and behaviors so we can cultivate more empathy,” Walden said. “Mothers are highly valued in theory but rarely understood. If my research can help add nuance to that conversation, then I think it is doing its job.”