Why Do You Mommy Blog?

I think I have a complex with sending incomplete thoughts out into the blogosphere. I need to work on that. 

Meanwhile I'm trying to think of ways to hone in on a topic for my research this semester. I'm in the process of reading my novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and still have a few posts that I need to add later for that. But, while thinking of ways to further incorporate the ideas I already have flowing from that book, I realized I should look into ways the internet has affected families. 

How do families interact with the internet? How has the internet affected the family, our basic unit of society? Of course families regularly communicate through regular forms of social media and communication through Facebook, twitter, and email...etc. One well-known piece of family interaction with the internet is the classic Mommy blog. I'm sure mommy blogging happens outside of the LDS culture, but it's really popular for Mormons.

This blog entry Why I can’t stop reading Mormon housewife blogs addresses a few reasons as to why so many Mormon Moms blog and why people outside the culture are so obsessed with reading those blogs. I cannot say that I agree with everything she says, but one point she brings up a few interesting points. She wonders how mormon women can be so happy and why their blogs portray their lives as so perfect. She says: 

The bloggers I read may be as happy with their lot as they seem. Or not. While some Mormon women prosper under the cultural norms for wife- and mother-dom, others chafe. Utah is, after all, the state with the highest rate of prescription antidepressant use, a statistic the president of the Utah Psychiatric Association attributes to the pressure among Mormon women to be ideal wives and mothers. The creator of Seriously So Blessed, an anonymous Mormon woman, addresses this pressure in an online archive of Mormon women interviews called the Mormon Women Project: “In any highly homogeneous culture we all feel pressure to be and look and think and act a certain way,” she says. “You start to think you need to be absolutely perfect in every area.”

I agree there is a lot of pressure to be 'absolutely perfect' in the Mormon culture. I see it in the girls that  walk past every day. These girls are aiming to be perfect. They have perfect hair, makeup, clothes, bodies, grades, jobs, social lives, spiritual lives, church callings, service, friends, family...etc. When you don't match up to your perfect ideal it is very damaging.

I wonder if constant Mommy blogging has become another requirement for reaching that ideal of perfection.

Do you think there is a culture that has developed that requires young moms to keep a Mommy blog? Do they keep these blogs to keep in touch with their family? Do they keep these blogs to make money?


Why do we perpetuate these old rules and ideals of perfection in a new social arena?

I plan on doing a little more research and asking people in my social network why they blog about their families.