BACKGROUND
Online support forums allow users to seek advice, information, and emotional support on a variety of issues. Today’s parents navigate unique stressors both off- and on-line, and online forums can provide parents with the social support they need to address contemporary parenting issues. Increased social support can have a positive effect on mental health, including decreasing depressive symptomatology and acting as a buffer to stress. Online support forums may provide parents with increased anonymity to discuss sensitive topics and may provide minority parents with a larger social network for advice seeking. It is, therefore, critical that we examine online support forums to better understand the role that social support might play in these spaces and the way parent posts may influence response.
OBJECTIVE
Research examining social support processes in parenting forums is lacking. This study examines the interpersonal support process within the largest Reddit parenting forum, r/Parenting, to understand how anonymity plays a role in emotional self-disclosure of the parent-poster and subsequent commenter support.
METHODS
Comments and posts made to r/Parenting were collected using Reddit’s API in February of 2020 with a final sample of 118,277 posts and 697,095 comments.
RESULTS
Results suggest the use of throwaway accounts is an important factor in the way emotional self-disclosure occurs both in posts and comments. Our data evidenced that in an online forum for parents to seek advice, information, and support, the use of throwaway accounts was found to be an important factor in the degree of ESD included in both posts and comments. Additionally, there was a direct and positive relationship between the ESD of posts and ESD of comments.
CONCLUSIONS
This suggests that in contemporary society, online spaces may offer parents increased anonymity and greater affordances when it comes to connecting with others, and thus operate as critical venues for social support. We evidenced that one feature that affords users with a greater degree of anonymity online (i.e., pseudonyms) serve as critical component in online support seeking among parents, impacting both the process of support seeking and reception of social support over one of the most popular parenting support forums online, r/Parenting. This signals an evolution in the way’s parents seek social support from others. This paves the way for further research examining interpersonal processes and the impact online support has on family communication through parent support.
Fussy eating in toddlers: A content analysis of parents' online support seeking