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The parental Instagram trend that's a bit odd.

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Ahh, Instagram. the place of birth for SO many parenting trends like #organisedmum and #lunchboxgoals and #fitspomum.

Except there’s a new instagram trend kicking around we’ve noticed.

Parental disclaimers.

Where parents add a caveat to any photo of their kids eating sugar, having a meat pie for dinner, or posing with a drink that could possibly be misconstrued as alcoholic:

#cocktails! #non-alcoholic #disclaimer – AKA – back off, everyone. 

It was listener Meg who brought it to our attention:    

“First, I saw a photo of a child licking cake batter off the beater of a hand mixer. The mum was quick to point out in her photo’s description not to worry, that ‘the hand mixer is not plugged in’. A few photos down, another mum had posted a video of her son bonking her daughter in the head with a balloon with a caption informing us that ‘he wasn’t hitting her really hard’. Clearly not, otherwise you wouldn’t have been filming it and posting it on the internet, right? When did parenting disclaimers becomes a thing?”

It seems to be a trend effecting loads of parents – including Holly Wainwright and Andrew Daddo.   

 And Meg finds herself doing it too.  “When my daughter grabs my tablet and scrolls immediately to videos on Youtube, I make sure people know that I don’t encourage her to use it. I’m so afraid of being judged by other parents for the most minute decisions (letting my daughter wear the same shirt two days in a row) that I sometimes do things I wouldn’t ordinarily bother with just to avoid that possibility.” she writes.

Dare post a pic of a baby with a wine glass? Better include a #disclaimer:

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Holly Wainwright reckons there’s good reason it’s happening. Because she’s suffered the wrath of what can go down if you don’t. “Recently on Facebook, I was having a terrible morning, and Billy threw his breakfast cereal on the floor, and I made a joke about it, saying, ‘you know your day is starting badly when Coco Pops are raining down on you.’…Ohhhhhhhh shouldn’t have said Coco Pops. Because people were like, ‘why are you feeding your kids sugary crap for breakfast?'” she says. And in turn, Holly felt she had to defend herself against the sugar-brigade, by letting everyone know that the cereal was organic AND sugar-free

From taking pictures of her kids out for ice-cream to celebrate a school concert, to snapping a photo of the occasional meat-pie after swimming practise, Holly feels like she can’t post pictures of her kids on social media without justifying what’s happening in the captions.

Andrew Daddo feels the pressure too, explaining, “I think it’s society, we’re all so scared of offending anyone…’cause you only need one person to go, ‘ohhhhhh’, and then everyone else goes, ‘oh wow, that was terrible!'”

Listen to the full episode of The Glorious Mess below, and hear more from Holly and Andrew:

What about you? Is this a trend that you have noticed?

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