Is Sharing Instagram Reels With My Kid a Valid Way to Show Love?
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During this time of year with its early dusk, everyone in my family is home more than usual. It’s cold out, and the world is expensive if you want to be someplace warm. The kids aren’t urbexing or at the basketball court; they are in our home, which is not very big. Inside, we all yearn for the couch. No one wants to parent or be parented; we want to float together in a peaceful, passive coexistence until the days start getting longer again.
Depending on how we choose to facilitate this floating state, it can be blissful or depressing as hell. We’re a family of readers, which I take pride in even if I can’t exactly take credit. Reading on the couch with my kids feels like adding years to my life, like reverse-smoking. But as long as we’re still humans and not immortal literacy gods, we also love to watch our screens. It’s long been true that we are all parenting with and through screens, and I’m ready to call it: Watching TV together can be magic, but watching our phones together can only ever be cursed.
My screen time has gone up sharply over the past few months, and I know exactly why: Reels finally got me. I’ve been resistant to the pivot to shortform video, but the algorithm was done waiting around for me to willingly embrace and has begun aggressively serving me videos that are hypertargeted to my user profile: a mother of teenage boys.
These Reels all share the same quality of being almost uncannily relatable to my current stage of life. I’ve never felt so cornered by my feed’s algorithm as I have the past few months; it’s like looking directly into a mirror at scenes from my day with the levels adjusted for maximum emotion. Unlike TikTok, where the funniest, most poignant content is basically documentary footage, the world of parenting Reels on Instagram is made up of bargain-basement role-playing and sketch comedy. The people who perform these Reels are surely almost all hoping that some career opportunities might come out of it — but their success largely seems to depend on reminding as many people as possible of themselves, so the effect ends up being cheerfully anodyne, sapped of any individuality.
But this doesn’t bother me when I’m chuckling like a half-witted medieval lord at the antics of my faithful court jesters, who know exactly how to flatter me and show me only what I like. So many relatable scenarios! Here’s one in which the family’s in the car and the mom’s freaking out while trying to teach her elder son to drive! Hey! I did that too! Here they are in the kitchen, and, wow, the kids sure can eat! And man, oh man, when you ask them to help you clean up? They do not want to do it! Ah, yes, and here they are on the ski hill since winter’s almost here: Mom’s a cautious skier, but it’s always full-send mode with Dad! (Gender — ever heard of it? LOL!)
The way my feed makes me feel brain-dead is nothing new. What does seem different lately, as my kids are growing right alongside my screen time, is that this content is designed to appeal to just me but seems made intentionally to be shared with them as part of a wholesome family moment on the couch — a way of interacting from within our scroll tunnels. Now that my kids are old enough to have their own accounts, it appears we’ve entered a new social-media level where our language of connection can be almost completely expressed through the sharing back and forth of relatable content. I can sense Instagram’s content adapting to fit into every crack in my life in the manner of this extremely toxic and sticky expanding spray foam (stupidly called Great Stuff™) that my husband and I have sometimes used to insulate the cabin we are ineptly building together.
Ideally, from the perspective of Instagram’s data-capture needs, I would DM this stuff to my kids, a way to keep a thread of connection intact throughout our busy lives. In my case (my children do not have Instagram accounts), I feel compelled to show them Reels in person, the three of us huddled lovingly around my phone. In these moments, while we bask in the glow of reflected us-ness in the form of these desperate bids for our attention staged by strangers, it is as though social media is working to create an entire affective enclosure for my family, and every other family on earth, to live in. Inside our enclosure, I can feel myself experiencing a process that’s akin to something like neoteny: how some animals have evolved to keep certain desirable juvenile characteristics intact as they age. I am being influenced away from the frictions and pressures of maturity and adulthood — tricky conflicts, ambivalences, attempts at determining what I truly think and feel about any given thing — and kept safely in my little pen of sweet, funny moments that remind me so much of my own life.
The novelty of this mirror image, which is possible thanks to the ongoing harvest and packaging of our everyday user data — the scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls this data our “behavioral surplus” — seems only to grow as it enables the joking references to zoom ever closer in on our real lives. Looking back at our reflections again and again, we laugh as the jokes are refined in specificity. We are impressed with how these amateur comedians are “nailing it,” choosing to imagine that we belong to one big human family with a sense of humor just like ours rather than accepting the unsettling truth that the reason we’re being served such vividly specific jokes is that we’ve shed so much data that our entire cultural frames of reference can be conjured by a handful of lines of code.
It’s wild that TV was once considered alienating and unhealthy when, today, it’s the warm glow that leads us out of our respective phone tunnels. Recently, my family began watching The Office together, and when I mentioned this to a friend the other day, she sighed and said, “You’re so lucky. Watching The Office with your kids is a peak family experience. I wish I could do it again for the first time.”
And, you know, she’s right. We’ve enjoyed watching shows as a family before, but something about entering the world of The Office together is different. A show like this could never be made by a streamer in the age of user data scraping. One of The Office’s many exceptional qualities is the restraint maintained by the show’s writers over its many seasons. For all the grandiosity of Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute, the show takes its time revealing what it’s really trying to say about its characters. It is possible, for example, to misunderstand Michael Scott’s whole deal if you aren’t paying attention. Sometimes while we’re watching, my kids are laughing and they’re not even sure why. This is a valuable kind of education — learning to make the cognitive and imaginative leaps into understanding the mechanics of a scene that has nothing at all to do with you, with which you truly cannot “relate.”
It’s not Tolstoy, but it’s a step in the right direction. Part of what educators are perceiving as a crisis of literacy among young people might also be a growing inability (or unwillingness — it’s hard to say which) to pay attention to anything for any length of time that isn’t vividly “relevant” (an overused word, like aesthetic, that I’ve come to dislike) to their own experience. Another way of saying this is that their capacity for engaging with a reality outside their immediate matrix of brand and personality references is diminishing, and this capacity is unfortunately closely linked to our ability to conceive of other people’s minds and to imagine different possible futures.
Comedy is one of the great conduits for culture, but the comedy of Reels is an airless factory farm. I respect the hustle of the comedians trying to break through there, but the medium is hostile to creativity. A lot of what I see is comedy as demographic microtargeting: If someone recites a list of brand names and they are all brands you identify with, you feel seen and therefore like something meaningful has occurred.
One of the reasons certain SNL skits and shows and movies hold up so well is that they transcend their place and time and appeal to something broader and weirder about human beings. “More cowbell” is funny even if you don’t speak English. Elaine Benes’s dancing is funny even if you’ve never been to New York City. The Office is funny even if you’re still years away from getting your first job, even if by the time you’re old enough to work, every office job will have been automated into obsolescence.
Hypertopical humor that doesn’t age well has always been popular. But the direction in which comedy is being pushed by shortform video feels like something different, something new — a genre of content whose objective is to ensnare us into a set of solipsistic social relations. Most of the creators of these Reels have been likewise ensnared; they are chasing views, knowing that virality begets virality, which offers a possible glimmer of success. They study and refine what works in the hopes of riding the right kind of algorithmic wave. Whatever visionary jokes fill their notebooks will not necessarily see the light of day unless they’re likely to do the right kind of numbers.
I guess I should take comfort in the fact that when I try to initiate a little bonding moment with my kids over Reels, they are polite but unenthused. They think the family skits that I show them are corny pabulum meant to warm the hearts of bedraggled parents, and I suspect they will reach adulthood with the healthy disdain for the wonders of relatability slop that millennials like me are lacking. Once social media devolves into its final form of AI-generated references to other things made by AI, I suspect that whatever act of human resistance takes its place will be better than any of the Reels I’m trying to get my kids to watch, and we’ll look back at this period in the history of entertainment with embarrassment.