Parents Are Comparing Themselves on Social Media Too

We spend a lot of time worrying about teenagers comparing themselves to the impossible lives they see on social media. It turns out their parents may be doing the same thing one generation up.

New research led by Griffith University surveyed 909 Australian parents of 16- to 19-year-olds and examined several pressures that might help explain anxious, overprotective parenting. The researchers looked at perceived pressure to be an ideal parent, fears about broader world instability, parental anxiety and upward comparisons with other parents on social media. Of those factors, social-media comparison stood out: parents who more often felt inadequate after seeing other parents online also reported more anxiety and more overprotective behavior.

The study, published in Family Relations, is Australian and cross-sectional. It cannot establish that scrolling through another parent's polished family life causes someone to become controlling, and its results should not be treated as a direct estimate of American parents. What it does provide is a useful model for thinking about a behavior that travels very easily across borders: parents are not outside the comparison machine simply because they are the adults in the room.

They are watching too.

The study defines overprotective parenting as more than ordinary involvement. It includes taking over tasks, interfering with age-appropriate privacy and autonomy, restricting opportunities for adolescents to make decisions and solve problems, and becoming unusually involved in the child's self-direction. That distinction matters because nobody is arguing that concern itself is pathological. Teenagers still need parents. The interesting line is between helping a young person manage risk and trying to remove so much uncertainty that the parent no longer has to feel it.

A parent checks where a teenager is because the situation genuinely calls for it. A parent checks because the teenager is late. A parent checks because every headline that week has made the world feel dangerous. A parent checks because another parent on Instagram appears to know exactly where their child is, what college they are visiting, which internship they have, how many extracurriculars they are doing and whether their future is progressing on schedule. The action can be identical. The function underneath it may not be.

The Griffith researchers measured that comparison directly with statements such as feeling inadequate as a parent after viewing social media. In the study, upward social comparison was strongly correlated with both overprotective parenting and parent anxiety. In the researchers' statistical model, social comparison also had a large direct association with overprotective parenting, while part of the relationship operated indirectly through parental anxiety.

That is not especially difficult to recognize culturally. Parenting has become highly visible. What used to happen mostly inside families, schools and neighborhoods now arrives as an endless stream of examples: lunchboxes, chore systems, college-planning spreadsheets, travel teams, therapy language, screen rules, enrichment activities, family dinners, boundary scripts, reading lists and carefully photographed proof that somebody else seems to have figured out the part you are worried you are getting wrong.

The comparison is particularly potent because parenting does not have a clean scoreboard. There is no quarterly report that tells you whether the combination of freedom, structure, warmth, discipline, caution and trust you are using today will produce the adult you hope to meet five years from now. Parents work with delayed outcomes, partial information and stakes that feel enormous. Into that uncertainty comes a feed full of people apparently doing it better.

So the performance of successful parenting can become evidence against your own.

The study also found that perceived world threats mattered. Parents who viewed the future as more unstable, scarce or risky tended to report more anxiety and more overprotection. Griffith's research coverage points specifically to economic uncertainty, housing affordability, climate change and broader instability as concerns that may shape the way parents interact with older teenagers. The underlying logic is understandable: if the world looks more dangerous, the instinct to increase control can feel like responsibility.

But older adolescence is also the stage when control becomes increasingly expensive. A 16-, 17- or 18-year-old is supposed to be practicing judgment, making decisions, getting some things wrong and learning how to recover. Protection that removes every opportunity for uncertainty can also remove opportunities to build the skills that uncertainty requires.

That creates a deeply uncomfortable parenting problem. Sometimes allowing a teenager to do something independently is not the emotionally easier choice for the parent. It may be the harder one. The parent has to tolerate not knowing exactly what will happen. The teenager gets the developmental opportunity; the adult absorbs the uncertainty.

Overprotection can reverse that arrangement.

The teenager loses some autonomy, but the parent gets a temporary sense of control. The decision may still be narrated as protection, because protection is a respectable parental motive. That does not mean the motive is fake. Parents can sincerely want to keep a child safe while also using control to quiet their own anxiety. Two things can be true in the same car ride home.

This is one reason “helicopter parent” is often too crude a label. It names the visible behavior while skipping the pressure system around it. A parent may be responding to perceived danger, comparison with other families, expectations about achievement, fear of being judged, or the belief that any preventable setback will be treated as evidence that they failed to parent correctly. Calling the behavior overbearing may describe what the teenager experiences without explaining why the adult keeps doing it.

The research is especially interesting because the children in question are not small. These are parents of 16- to 19-year-olds, the exact period when the cultural script tells families to begin loosening the grip while many external pressures are telling them to tighten it. College competition is visible. Housing looks expensive. Employment feels uncertain. Climate and political instability are omnipresent in media. The teenager is leaving home more often, driving, dating, working, traveling and making decisions that cannot all be supervised.

And social media is there to show you the family that appears to be managing all of it perfectly.

Professor Melanie Zimmer-Gembeck, a co-author of the study, told Griffith that parents feel pressure that there is a “right or best way to parent,” with those messages arriving through society, other parents and social media. The researchers argue that more realistic messaging and reducing harmful social comparison may help parents feel more confident while supporting teenagers as they move toward adulthood.

That recommendation sounds modest, but the cultural problem underneath it is large. Parenting advice used to be limited partly by distribution. You had relatives, neighbors, a pediatrician, a few books, teachers and whatever parenting philosophy happened to dominate your immediate world. Now every uncertainty can be searched, and every search can produce hundreds of people explaining the correct way to handle it. More information can be useful. It can also transform ordinary uncertainty into evidence that there must be a correct answer you have somehow failed to find.

Perfect parenting becomes particularly dangerous as an idea because its proof is outsourced to the child. If the teenager succeeds, the parent did it right. If the teenager struggles, maybe the parent missed something. Once a child's outcomes start functioning as the parent's performance review, intervention becomes difficult to resist.

That is where this study flips the usual social-media conversation in a useful way. We regularly tell teenagers not to compare their ordinary lives with somebody else's highlight reel. Parents may need the same sentence.

The immaculate family calendar is a highlight reel. The college announcement is a highlight reel. The smiling vacation photograph is a highlight reel. The carefully worded post about how a family handled a difficult conversation is still a selected version of the conversation. None of it shows every argument, every mistake, every uncertainty or every night a parent lay awake wondering whether they had handled something badly.

The feed can therefore create a peculiar asymmetry: you experience your own parenting from the inside, with every doubt intact, while experiencing everybody else's parenting from the outside, after editing.

No wonder the comparison feels unfair.

The more useful question may not be whether a parent is protective. It may be what the protection is accomplishing, and for whom. Does the rule address a concrete risk the teenager cannot yet manage? Does it teach judgment? Does it preserve a necessary boundary? Or does it mainly reduce the adult's distress by narrowing the teenager's world until fewer uncertain things can happen?

Those questions are harder than calling someone a helicopter parent because they require parents to examine the function of their own behavior, not merely the intention behind it.

Parents want their children safe. They also want to believe they are doing this enormous, largely ungraded job correctly. Social media did not invent either desire. It did, however, give both of them an infinite comparison set.

We have spent years warning teenagers that the people on their phones are not the standard against which they should measure themselves.

Their parents may need to hear it too.

SOURCE NOTES

• Griffith University research coverage, Sept. 16, 2026
• Ryan et al., Family Relations: Overprotective Parenting: Examining pressures to be perfect, social media comparisons, world instability and parent anxiety
• Reporting note: The study surveyed 909 Australian parents of adolescents ages 16-19. Its findings are correlational and based on a cross-sectional survey, so they do not establish that social-media comparison or perceived world threats cause overprotective parenting. The Australian sample also should not be treated as a direct estimate of U.S. parents.