Mothers and fathers, aren’t they these dissatisfied, constantly stressed beings whose faces show the lack of sleep and happiness in their everyday lives? Social media posts sometimes have this negative view of parenting: What as real talk is actually promoting a pretty chilling version of what the big decisions can do to life: getting married and having children.

Scientists see this negative image of parenthood as a reaction to the fact that, for a long time, decisions such as having children and having a family were not allowed to be questioned at all. “For decades there has been a completely unrealistic exaggeration of motherhood,” the Austrian political scientist Mariam Tazi-Preve once said Conversation with ZEIT. She sees the current negative portrayals of parenthood on social media as a critical examination of earlier images of motherhood. But she also says that there are currently too few realistic, encouraging portrayals of parenthood.