Social Media as Parents and the Paradox of Choice

The other day I was in a panic that I wasn’t rotating my kids’ toys in their playroom.

If you haven’t heard, this is called toy rotation. It is a “parenting hack” on social media - instead of having all your kids’ toys available at once, you divide the toys into smaller groups and rotate them on a regular basis.

The idea is that kids may feel overwhelmed by too many toys at once, and that rotating them can improve the novelty of the toys.

I looked around at my playroom and noticed the amount of toys that we have.

“Am I overstimulating them with the amount of toys?”

“Would that help with boredom this summer?”

“Are they going to be selfish when they’re older because of all of these available toys?”

“If everyone else is doing this successfully, and I don’t even try it, am I not doing a good job as a mom?”

Sounds silly, but this was my internal dialogue.

And then I paused. And reflected on my train of thought. If I didn’t have social media, I would never know this was an option. Sure, it could have occurred to me at some point, but the pressure to do it wouldn’t be there.

Do I really need to do this, or is this just something else to add to my list of to-dos, to overcomplicate things, to make me feel like I’m not doing enough as a mom?

There is research study in which psychologists examined whether people were more or less likely to buy something when given many choices. Participants had the choice of deciding between 24 varieties of jam and 6 varieties of jam.

Even though more people looked at the table with the 24 jams, the table with the 6 varieties of jam led to more sales, as well as reported higher satisfaction of choices, compared to  the table of 24 varieties.

This is known as the paradox of choice - that more options can actually make it harder to make a decision.

With social media, we are overloaded with parenting tips, strategies, hacks. While it provides an incredible amount of access to information, it can also be paralyzing. We never truly feel satisfied because there is always more to be doing - implying that what we are doing is not enough.

What if we reduce our paradox of choice, and only take what feels satisfying, right, true for us as parents?

What if we were able to ask ourselves in the moment -

“Is this the table of 24 jams or the table of 6 jams?

Is doing more actually better, or does it just make things harder than it should be? Can toy rotations work for some people, and it doesn’t have to work for me?”

I decided this specific hack was my 24 varieties of jam- too much. The toy rotation is not happening in our house.

I’m going to sit and rest, and play with my kids instead.

(The irony is not lost on me that I could be reducing my children’s paradox of choice by limiting their options for toys. But then I thought - they’re just toys. It’s really not that serious. Let’s not overcomplicate things.)