# How Do Mothers and Fathers Talk About Parenting to Different Audiences?

Audience Effects and Stereotypes: An Analysis of r/Daddit, r/Mommit, and
r/Parenting Using Topic Modelling

Melody Sepahpour-Fard  0000-0002-8472-9514 SFI Centre for Research Training in
Foundations of Data Science and Department of Mathematics and
StatisticsUniversity of LimerickCastletroyLimerickIrelandV94 T9PX
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>and  Michael Quayle  0000-0002-7497-0566 Centre for
Social Issues Research and Department of PsychologyUniversity of
LimerickCastletroyLimerickIrelandV94 T9PX Department of Psychology, School of
Applied Human SciencesUniversity of KwaZulu-NatalDurbanKwaZulu-NatalSouth
Africa4041<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
(2022)

###### Abstract.

While major strides have been made towards gender equality in public life,
serious inequality remains in the domestic sphere, especially around
parenting. The present study analyses discussions about parenting on Reddit
(i.e., a content aggregation website) to explore audience effects and gender
stereotypes. It suggests a novel method to study topical variation in
individuals’ language when interacting with different audiences. Comments
posted in 2020 were collected from three parenting subreddits (i.e., topical
communities), described as being for fathers (r/Daddit), mothers (r/Mommit),
and all parents (r/Parenting). Users posting on r/Parenting and r/Daddit or on
r/Parenting and r/Mommit were assumed to identify as fathers or mothers,
respectively, allowing gender comparison. Users’ comments on r/Parenting (to a
mixed-gender audience) were compared with their comments to single-gender
audiences on r/Daddit or r/Mommit using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)
topic modelling.

Results showed that the most discussed topic among parents is about education
and family advice, a topic mainly discussed in the mixed-gender subreddit and
more by fathers than mothers. The topic model also indicated that, when it
comes to the basic needs of children (sleep, food, and medical care), mothers
seemed to be more concerned regardless of the audience. In contrast, topics
such as birth and pregnancy announcements and physical appearance were more
discussed by fathers in the father-centric subreddit. Overall, findings seem
to show that mothers are generally more concerned about the practical sides of
parenting while fathers’ expressed concerns are more contextual: with other
fathers, there seems to be a desire to show their fatherhood and be recognized
for it while they discuss education with mothers. These results demonstrate
that concerns expressed by parents on Reddit are context-sensitive but also
consistent with gender stereotypes, potentially reflecting a persistent
gendered and unequal division of labour in parenting.

Reddit, parenting, gender stereotypes, social identity performance, audience,
LDA topic modelling, natural language processing, computational social
science, social psychology

††copyright: acmcopyright††journalyear: 2022††copyright:
rightsretained††conference: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022; April
25–29, 2022; Virtual Event, Lyon, France††booktitle: Proceedings of the ACM
Web Conference 2022 (WWW ’22), April 25–29, 2022, Virtual Event, Lyon,
France††doi: 10.1145/3485447.3512138††isbn: 978-1-4503-9096-5/22/04††ccs:
Applied computing Psychology

##  1\. Introduction

The present study explores how mothers and fathers express concerns related to
parenting on Reddit. Using topic modelling, more than a hundred thousand
comments published on Reddit in 2020 were analysed to describe parenting talk.
Parents’ comments on three subreddits related to parenting—two single-gender
(r/Daddit and r/Mommit) and one mixed-gender (r/Parenting)—were analysed using
topic modelling to see whether speakers are sensitive to the audience’s gender
identity and if the content of parents’ talks reflects gender stereotypes.
Parenting is an important domain of study because women frequently face a
double burden of working full-time outside the house but also carrying the
primary responsibility for caring and home-making (Brines et al., 1990).
Consequently, women often lower their professional ambitions to satisfy the
needs at home and, therefore, fragilise their financial independence (Raley et
al., 2012). Equality in the public sphere first requires equality at home. Why
are women still preferentially perceived to be primary caregivers (Wall and
Arnold, 2007)? Generalisations about the shared attributes of social groups
(Judd and Park, 1993), or stereotypes, constitute an essential factor in
assigning such duties to women (Ellemers, 2018). From simple beliefs,
stereotypes become concrete in shaping individuals’ behaviour once they are
widely accepted and become injunctive norms for a social group to act in a
specific way (Ellemers, 2018).

The parenting domain has especially profoundly rooted stereotypes about how
mothers and fathers should behave. For this reason, the present study will
focus on discourses related to parenting behaviours using congruency with
gender stereotypes as a framework of understanding. In the literature review,
we will first define stereotypes related to gender and show how they can
create expectations for mothers and fathers regarding parenting behaviours.
Secondly, we will integrate audience as a factor that can make a social
category salient and facilitate identity-relevant behaviour. For this second
part, we will define social categorisation, how it has been theorised, and its
relation with social identity performance (Klein et al., 2007) in front of an
audience. Finally, we will describe the online context of Reddit, the selected
subreddits, and related previous research.

##  2\. Literature Review

###  2.1. Gender Stereotypes and Parenting

Gender stereotypes assign specific attributes, characteristics, and
responsibilities, and these become standards to which individuals should
conform to be positively judged by society (Villicana et al., 2017).
Generally, women are assigned ”communal” characteristics such as selflessness
and care, and men ”agentic” characteristics such as mastery and assertiveness
(Eagly and Steffen, 1984). These gender stereotypes are associated with the
domains of family for women and work for men, and thereby culturally
facilitate home-making for women and outside work for men (Ellemers, 2018).
Put differently, these gendered associations can undermine women’s
professional ambitions in favour of their domestic identity. For instance,
women are more likely than men to pass up promotions, take less demanding
jobs, switch to part-time jobs, and drop out of the labour force once they
become parents (Raley et al., 2012). The reverse is true for fathers, who are
still considered secondary parents (Wall and Arnold, 2007), even if they
aspire to be more involved in caring (Bulanda, 2004).

###  2.2. Social Categorisation and Audience Related to Stereotypical
Behaviours

####  2.2.1. Social Categorisation and its Theorisation

Categorisation – the assignment of people to discrete categories based on
fuzzy criteria – is a fundamental psychological process (Tajfel, 1974; Tajfel
et al., 1979), resulting in perceptions of groups characterised by sets of
defining characteristics, or stereotypes (Ellemers, 2018). Social
categorisation is, therefore, a precondition to the formation of stereotypes.
As described in the Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1974; Tajfel et al.,
1979), when people identify with a social group, they think, feel, and act as
group members (Tajfel et al., 1979), and appropriate behaviour is defined by
the group’s self-stereotypes and norms (Tajfel et al., 1979). The Self-
Categorization Theory (Turner et al., 1987) adds a dynamic aspect, noting that
people can shift across social identities as they move across social contexts.
When individuals define themselves with a social category in a specific
context, they tend to conform to the norms characterising their social
identity in that context (Turner, 1991).

”Mother”, ”father”, and ”parent” are social categories individuals can
identify with. They can become salient in a given context and prompt
individuals towards more identity-relevant (i.e., stereotypical) behaviours.
Thus, the audience is an important trigger of the salience of social
categories.

####  2.2.2. Audience and Self-Categorisation

The social identity performance framework (Klein et al., 2007) describes the
impact of an audience on the salience of a social category: available and
visible audiences affect the expression of social identity, and the audience’s
feedback affects the nature of the social identity itself. Actors are
particularly likely to enact group norms when they define themselves as group
members and think they are visible to an audience (Klein et al., 2007).
According to this framework, the people likely to conform to group norms most
enthusiastically are those with uncertain membership (Branscombe et al., 1999)
who might ”overconform” with an identity consolidation purpose, i.e., enacting
even more intensely the group’s norms to make their commitment clear (Klein et
al., 2007).

There is evidence that the audience and its expectations regarding gender
roles can shape individuals’ behaviour (Meyers et al., 1997; Postmes and
Spears, 2002; Quayle et al., 2018). For example, in the context of education,
although both men and women can make stereotypical choices, the influence of
gender stereotypes in a mixed-gender environment seems to be stronger for
girls: girls tend to act more gender stereotypically in mixed-sex schools than
in single-sex schools, whereas boys tend to act more gender stereotypically in
single-sex schools (Favara, 2012). These findings encourage research exploring
behavioural differences between single- and mixed-gender audiences and how
behaviours in these environments can reflect gender stereotypes.

###  2.3. Reddit as a Platform to Study Gender Stereotypes and Audience
Effects Related to Parenting

####  2.3.1. Presentation of Reddit and Parenting Subreddits

Reddit is a social media content aggregation platform. Although headquartered
in the USA, it has a global reach. Regarding demographics, Reddit users are
more likely to be men, below 50 years old, and urban and suburban residents
(Duggan and Smith, 2013). Content is published by pseudonymous registered
members on different topical communities called ”subreddits” in the form of
links, text, images, or videos and can be upvoted, downvoted, or commented on
by other users. Subreddits cover topics such as politics, religion, science,
video games, and many others, including parenting. The three most popular
subreddits related to parenting are r/Parenting with 3,524,346 members,
r/Mommit with 290,837 members, and r/Daddit with 265,191 members (as of
October 2021). r/Parenting is a mixed-gender subreddit, r/Mommit is a mother-
centric and overtly single-gender subreddit, and r/Daddit is a father-centric
and overtly single-gender subreddit. We will focus on these subreddits to
explore the extent to which parenting talk reflects common gender stereotypes,
but also how it is sensitive to the audience, as we describe in more detail in
the method section below.

####  2.3.2. Prior Studies on Parenting Subreddits

At least two published studies have explored the expression of parenthood on
Reddit, one using an ethnographic approach (Feldman, 2021) and the other using
a computational approach (Ammari et al., 2018).

Feldman’s study (Feldman, 2021) applied qualitative grounded theory to posts
on r/Mommit and r/Daddit to explore how Reddit users negotiate gendered
parenting ideologies. They found that Reddit users reproduce the stereotypical
gender roles painting the mother as the primary caregiver and the father as
the secondary caregiver on r/Daddit and r/Mommit. For instance, on r/Mommit,
mothers talk about a dyadic mother-child relationship while fathers on
r/Daddit talk about a triadic father-mother-child relationship. Furthermore,
whereas good fathering is defined as being present and spending time with
their child (shown through pictures of their child), good mothering is defined
as positively shaping and impacting their child. Feldman (Feldman, 2021)
describes fathers’ concerns to be centred around whether they care for their
child and mothers’ to be about how to care for their child. While Feldman’s
research (Feldman, 2021) provides essential insight, the method is intensive
and only allowed the analysis of one month of data. With the number of
published posts on Reddit being substantial, quantitative text analysis
methods such as topic modelling may allow more comprehensive analysis.
Furthermore, as this work is about expressed concerns in interaction and
knowing that single-gender audiences differ from mixed-gender audiences
(Favara, 2012; Patterson et al., 2004), it is interesting to see how Reddit
parents interact on a mixed-gender subreddit. The latter can tell us whether
the users differ regardless of the audience or if their expressed concerns
relate to the audience they interact with.

A study by Ammari et al. (Ammari et al., 2018) used topic modelling to
describe the most discussed topics on r/Mommit, r/Daddit, and r/Parenting.
They collected the comments published on these subreddits between 2008 and
2016, from which they identified 47 topics, summarised in eight main areas (as
one area is missing in their article, we consider the seven others): (a)
Birth, milestones, and transition to teen years; (b) Discipline or abuse; (c)
Judgment; (d) Play and competition; (e) Purchase suggestions; (f) Faith and
family; (g) Posting norms. r/Parenting users talked more about discipline and
teen talk. r/Mommit users discussed the most topics such as Sleep training,
breastfeeding, milestones, child weight gain, pregnancy recovery, and
housework. On r/Daddit, the most frequent topics were congratulations,
Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) experience, legal questions for custody
battles, and Halloween costumes. Both r/Daddit and r/Mommit users talked about
posting on social media, preparing food, circumcision, vaccination, and naming
children.

Although Ammari et al. (Ammari et al., 2018) present interesting results,
there are significant limitations that we will tackle in the present research.
In terms of design, although they acknowledge that r/Mommit and r/Daddit are
mother-centric and father-centric, respectively, they do not emphasise their
particularity of being single-gender subreddits and r/Parenting being a mixed-
gender subreddit, and therefore miss any possible contextual audience effects.
However, research showed the effect of the audience gender at school (Favara,
2012), online (Postmes and Spears, 2002), and offline (Meyers et al., 1997).
Therefore, the gender diversity of an audience should be considered and
studied to include potential variations due to it.

###  2.4. Present Study

The present research extends previous research to integrate the study of
audience effects, a quantitative text analysis method using topic modelling,
and a precise and transparent process of qualitative inference. Regarding the
audience effects, little research on the differential impact of single- and
mixed-gender audiences has been done, especially regarding parenting. To
analyse the variation linked to the audience, participants who have interacted
with both types of audiences are selected. This design allows the study of
gender differences in relation to the context in which they appear. More
specifically, this study explores how mothers and fathers discuss topics
related to parenting with different audiences through the analysis of comments
published in 2020 in Reddit’s popular subreddits regarding parenting:
r/Daddit, r/Mommit, and r/Parenting. These three subreddits mainly differ in
the audience they claim to gather, either a single-gender audience (r/Daddit
and r/Mommit) or a mixed-gender audience (r/Parenting). The difference in
audience is assumed from the descriptions of the subreddits themselves:
r/Daddit is for fathers, r/Mommit is for mothers, r/Parenting is for parents.
First, we will identify mothers (users who have posted on both r/Mommit and
r/Parenting but not r/Daddit) and fathers (users who have posted on both
r/Daddit and r/Parenting but not r/Mommit). Then, topic modelling is used to
describe parenting talk and see if the change in expressed concerns
corresponds with the change of audience and if there are gender differences in
relation to gender stereotypes.

##  3\. Method

###  3.1. Dataset

Reddit comments were collected using Pushshift’s API111Code in Python by
Mikołaj Biesaga, The Robert Zajonc Institute for Social Studies, University of
Warsaw. GitHub repository: https://github.com/MikoBie/reddit (Baumgartner et
al., 2020), a social media data collection, analysis, and archiving platform
updated in real-time. Two sets of comments were collected: (a) all the
comments published in 2020 on r/Daddit and r/Parenting by authors who
published on both and (b) all the comments published in 2020 on r/Mommit and
r/Parenting by authors who published on both. The raw dataset contains 194,497
comments published by 8,361 unique Reddit users.

###  3.2. Topic Modelling

Topic modelling is a computer-based method developed in the field of Natural
Language Processing. Given a vast amount of text data, the machine learning
algorithm identifies underlying topics in the corpus. Because it is automatic,
the method allows very consistent detection of topics for large datasets,
whereas manual qualitative analysis, which relies on human coders, can be
inconsistent (Carron-Arthur et al., 2016) and very time-consuming. To find
suitable topics, topic modelling involves counting words and grouping similar
word patterns. However, topics based on word co-occurrence in documents rather
than conceptual similarity can result in the algorithm’s output showing hardly
interpretable topics.

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Blei et al., 2003) topic model is one of the most
well-known topic modelling techniques. It is a generative probabilistic model
of a corpus. The probabilistic model generates data by identifying how the
input data was created word by word. The generated data is based on two
probability distributions associated with two hyperparameters: (a) the
probability q, which captures how likely it is for each topic to represent a
document. The hyperparameter ${\alpha}$, the topic prior, is associated with
the probability q and controls how many topics we expect each document to
have. The higher the value ${\alpha}$, the more topics each document will be
associated with. (b) the probability z, which captures how likely it is for
each word to represent each topic. The hyperparameter ${\beta}$, the word
prior, is associated with the probability z and controls how topic-specific we
want each word to be. The higher the value ${\beta}$, the greater the number
of topics each word will be associated with (Hovy, 2020). To test and evaluate
different topic models efficiently, a coherence measure ($C\textsubscript{V}$)
is used to assess the human interpretability of the model (Röder et al.,
2015). The interpretation and labelling of topics are qualitatively carried
out using the keywords defining each topic in the output of the topic model.
Once the topics are identified, we can then describe each of our documents as
a distribution of those topics and find the dominant topic in each document
(Hovy, 2020).

###  3.3. Preprocessing

To be coherent with our assumption that r/Mommit posters are most likely to
identify as women and r/Daddit posters as men, we removed 502 authors who
posted both on r/Mommit and r/Daddit as they make the comparison between these
two groups less meaningful. They potentially correspond to mothers posting on
r/Daddit and fathers posting on r/Mommit. Thirty-six obvious bots, identified
because their pseudonyms contained the word ”bot”, were removed. Deleted
comments, comments written by the Auto Moderator, and stop words (i.e., the
words that occur in abundance and provide only little to no information about
the content of textual data) were removed too. Some authors were removed
because of empty comments (e.g., single-word comments such as ”OK” became
empty because of the removed stop words). We kept only the authors for whom
the dataset still contained at least one post on a single-gender subreddit and
one on the mixed-gender subreddit. In this way, we were able to analyse the
effects of a change of audience for the same users. This dataset represents
145,771 comments posted by 7,791 authors (comments per author:
${\textit{M}=18.71}$, ${\textit{SD}=62.24}$, ${\textit{Mdn}=7.00}$,
${\textit{Min}=2.00}$, ${\textit{Max}=3769.00}$). Of these, users who have
posted on both r/Daddit and r/Parenting in 2020 represent 2,967 users, with
16,328 comments on r/Daddit and 27,263 comments on r/Parenting; users who have
posted on both r/Mommit and r/Parenting in 2020 represent 4,824 users, with
23,977 comments on r/Mommit and 78,203 comments on r/Parenting. For clarity
regarding the explanation of results, we assumed that users posting on
r/Daddit or r/Mommit (and not on both) identify as “fathers” and “mothers”,
respectively. We made the text lower-case and removed punctuation, special
characters, and hyperlinks. This dataset was kept for the second part of the
study, which will use the topic model to attribute a relative frequency of
topics in each comment.

The data was lemmatised (i.e., the different inflected forms of words were
replaced by their normalised form) using NLTK (Bird et al., 2009), a module
for Natural Language Processing in Python (Van Rossum and Drake, 2009) and
WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998; Miller, 1995), a lexical database for the English
language. The data was tokenised, and the list of English stop words
(Pedregosa et al., 2011) was removed. Additionally, after a first model
inference, we added these words to the list of stop words (Schofield et al.,
2017) to increase interpretability: ”time”, ”hair”, ”day”, ”month”, ”week”,
”hour”, ”year”, ”minute”, ”idea”, ”adult”, ”age”, ”comment”, ”people”,
”person”, ”man”, ”sure”. The Gensim module (Řehůřek and Sojka, 2010) was used
in Python to create a bigram model for improving the quality of the inferred
topics (Wallach, 2006). A bigram model uses a sliding window of two terms to
examine the text (each combination of two adjacent words is considered) and
find combinations of two words which should be analysed as one term because
one unique concept spans the two words, e.g., ”mental health” (Hovy, 2020).
Using Gensim (Řehůřek and Sojka, 2010), a dictionary giving each term an
integer identification was created, and doc2bow (i.e., document to bag-of-
words) function was used to convert documents into a bag-of-words format. A
document in bag-of-words format means that each document is represented by the
number of unique terms it contains and the number of times each of these terms
occur. To reach a more interpretable topic model, we tried to keep only nouns
and nouns and verbs using NLTK’s (Bird et al., 2009) part-of-speech tagger
(i.e., a function that assigns each word a grammatical descriptor). After
calculating the coherence scores for models ranging from two to 50 topics, we
decided to keep the model with only nouns, resulting in higher coherence
scores and greater human interpretability. The corpus used for topic modelling
contained 136,256 documents (i.e., comments) and a vocabulary of 9,969 unique
tokens.

###  3.4. Data Analysis

LDA topic modelling was run222The Python code associated with this study can
be found here: https://github.com/melodyspr/parenting_reddit on the corpus
using Gensim module (Řehůřek and Sojka, 2010) in Python (Van Rossum and Drake,
2009). Coherence scores ($C\textsubscript{V}$) were used to define the optimal
number of topics. $C\textsubscript{V}$ was at its highest value when the model
had 12 topics. Therefore, we pursued the analysis with 12 topics. To set the
hyperparameters $\alpha$ and $\beta$, we ran multiple models for different
values of hyperparameters and then selected the settings that resulted in the
best $C\textsubscript{V}$. The highest coherence score was
${C\textsubscript{V}=.60}$ when ${\alpha=.01}$ and ${\beta=.61}$. Chunk size
controls how many documents are processed at a time in the training algorithm,
passes control how often we train the model on the entire corpus, and
iterations control how often we repeat a particular loop over each document
(Řehůřek and Sojka, 2010). We set ${chunksize=5000}$, ${passes=40}$, and
${iterations=1000}$ and the topic model reached a coherence score
${C\textsubscript{V}=.62}$.

Once we have established the topic model, we can represent each comment as a
distribution of topics. The keywords defining a topic were compared with the
words in the comment, and from the similarity between these two sets of words,
we could calculate the relative frequency of topics in each comment333Code in
Python by Tawfiq Ammari, School of Information, University of Michigan. GitHub
repository: https://github.com/tawfiqam/Parenting-Reddit. Because we used a
very low alpha parameter (${\alpha=0.01}$), the comments were represented only
by a few topics, making the comparison between comments easier, especially for
comparing groups of comments. From these relative frequencies, the average
scores of topics were calculated for comments aggregated by gender and
audience: mothers on r/Mommit, mothers on r/Parenting, fathers on r/Daddit,
and fathers on r/Parenting.

##  4\. Results

###  4.1. Topics

The resulting topic model included 12 topics: Thank you/Appreciation, Medical
care, Education/Family advice, Furniture/Design, Birth/Pregnancy, Change/Potty
training, Physical appearance/Picture, Work/Raise children, Food, Leisure
activities, School/Teaching, and Sleep training. To label each topic, we used
the list of keywords and the comments which scored the highest on the topics
(see Appendix). We will give examples of keywords used to label each topic so
the reader can understand the inference process:

  * •

Thank you/Appreciation: ”thank”, ”thanks”, or ”advice” indicate that this
topic seems to be related to parents responding to advisory or helpful posts
and thanking other users.

  * •

Medical care: ”doctor”, ”issue”, or ”health” indicate that this topic seems to
be related to parents sharing experiences about their health and their
children’s.

  * •

Education/Family advice: ”situation”, ”family”, or ”problem” indicate that
this topic seems to be related to parents sharing their advice about how to
handle a situation.

  * •

Furniture/Design: ”room”, ”floor”, or ”space” indicate that this topic seems
to be related to parents discussing physical arrangements, e.g., in the house.

  * •

Birth/Pregnancy: ”life”, ”pregnancy”, or ”birth” indicate that this topic
seems to be related to parents reacting and congratulating other parents for
birth and pregnancy announcements.

  * •

Change/Potty training: ”diaper”, ”potty”, or ”toilet” indicate that this topic
seems to be related to parents sharing experiences about their children’s
diaper changes, stools, and toilet training.

  * •

Physical appearance/Picture: ”look”, ”face”, or ”picture” indicate that this
topic seems to be related to parents reacting to pictures and physically
describing their children.

  * •

Work/Raise children: ”home”, ”family”, or ”work” indicate that this topic
seems to be related to parents sharing experiences about finding a balance
between work and raising children.

  * •

Food: ”food”, ”meal”, or ”snack” indicate that this topic seems to be related
to parents sharing recipes and experiences about their children eating.

  * •

Leisure activities: ”book”, ”play”, or ”fun” indicate that this topic seems to
be related to parents sharing about their free-time activities.

  * •

School/Teaching: ”school”, ”teacher”, or ”class” indicate that this topic
seems to be related to parents sharing about academic education and teaching
practices.

  * •

Sleep training: ”night”, ”sleep”, or ”bedtime” indicate that this topic seems
to be related to parents sharing about sleep training.

###  4.2. Relative frequency of topics

Figure 1 shows topics’ scores (i.e., the average relative frequency of topics
in comments) for the different groups (i.e., fathers on r/Daddit, fathers on
r/Parenting, mothers on r/Mommit, and mothers on r/Parenting).

Figure 1. Scores of mothers and fathers’ comments on the twelve topics

The figure is showing the scores of each group (fathers on r/Daddit, fathers
on r/Parenting, mothers on r/Mommit, and mothers on r/Parenting) for each
topic. As the figure is best described with a table, we added a table in the
Appendix (Table 2) which shows the same data.

We will describe the results and analyse the topics summarised into four areas
of concern: Basic needs (Food, Sleep training, Medical care, Change/Potty
training), Announcements and introductions (Birth/Pregnancy, Thank
you/Appreciation, Physical appearance/Picture), Education and leisure
(Education/Family advice, Work/Raise children, School/Teaching, Leisure
activities), and Physical arrangements (Furniture/Design). The following four
paragraphs will develop each of these areas.

Basic needs were more discussed by mothers. Except for Change/Potty training,
mothers discussed more than fathers the topics related to children’s basic
needs, regardless of the audience. Mothers (on r/Mommit and r/Parenting)
discussed more the topics Sleep training, Food, and Medical care than fathers
(on r/Daddit and r/Parenting). Regarding Change/Potty training, there was a
clear distinction between the mixed-gender subreddit and the single-gender
ones; the topic was more discussed on the latter. However, although the
difference seemed to be due to the audience, mothers on r/Mommit discussed
Change/Potty training more than fathers on r/Daddit and mothers on r/Parenting
more than fathers on r/Parenting. Among mothers, a similar interaction between
gender and audience was visible in the other topics related to basic needs as
mothers always discussed them more on the single-gender subreddit r/Mommit.

Announcements and introductions were an important topic for fathers in the
single-gender subreddit. Fathers on r/Daddit had the highest scores on the
topics Birth/Pregnancy, Thank you/Appreciation, and Physical
appearance/Picture. Among these topics, the topic Birth/Pregnancy, which
includes birth announcements and congratulating comments, showed the greatest
difference between fathers’ comments on the single-gender subreddit r/Daddit
and other comments.

Education and leisure were especially discussed by mothers and fathers on
r/Parenting. In other words, the topics Education/Family advice, Work/Raise
children, Leisure activities, and School/Teaching were more discussed with the
mixed-gender audience. These topics seemed to represent norms regarding the
expected topics Reddit users should discuss on r/Parenting. Regarding gender
differences, mothers and fathers discussed Work/Raise children, Leisure
activities, and School/Teaching similarly, whereas Education/Family advice was
discussed more by fathers than mothers. Education/Family advice was also the
most discussed topic overall.

Physical arrangements were more discussed in the single-gender subreddits than
in the mixed-gender.

Findings showed gender differences and differences between single and mixed-
gender subreddits, but, for some results, the subreddits’ norms and their
potential influence should be considered. Our sample included four groups
(i.e., fathers on r/Daddit, fathers on r/Parenting, mothers on r/Mommit,
mothers on r/Parenting) but only three subreddits. This fact was, to some
extent, reflected in the results. Across all topics, there seemed to be more
similarities between mothers and fathers on r/Parenting than between other
groups. For instance, there appears to be an important overlap between mothers
and fathers on r/Parenting for the topics Thank you/Appreciation,
Birth/Pregnancy, Change/Potty training, Physical appearance/Picture, Leisure
activities, and School/Teaching.

##  5\. Discussion

The findings of the study illustrate the concerns expressed by mothers and
fathers on Reddit. Leaning on the social identity performance framework that
shows the importance of an audience for social identity salience (Klein et
al., 2007), the study aimed to explore gender differences in relation to an
audience. Three popular subreddits related to parenting were selected as they
differ in the gender and audience they target and attract: r/Daddit is a
father-centric subreddit with an overtly single-gender audience, r/Mommit is a
mother-centric subreddit with an overtly single-gender audience, and
r/Parenting is a parent-centric subreddit with a mixed-gender audience.
Parents’ posts across these subreddits were analysed using LDA topic
modelling, which captured 12 topics summarised into four areas: Basic needs
(Food, Sleep training, Medical care, Change/Potty training), Announcements and
introductions (Birth/Pregnancy, Thank you/Appreciation, Physical
appearance/Picture), Education and leisure (Education/Family advice,
Work/Raise children, School/Teaching, Leisure activities), and Physical
arrangements (Furniture/Design). These 12 topics were then used to compare
parents in terms of gender and audience, resulting in three main findings.
First, basic needs were more discussed by mothers regardless of the audience.
Second, announcements and introductions were more discussed by fathers with a
single-gender audience. Third, education and leisure were discussed by both
mothers and fathers, especially with a mixed-gender audience. We will put
these results into perspective, comparing them with theories and previous
studies in the following paragraphs.

Firstly, findings showed gender differences between mothers and fathers. The
latter appeared in three topics, with mothers always discussing them the most:
Food, Sleep training, and Medical care. Sleeping, eating and health are
probably the most important topics related to the child’s survival; they
represent their basic needs. By being the users who discuss the most these
topics, mothers position themselves (and are positioned) as the primary
caregiver with communal characteristics (Eagly and Steffen, 1984; Ellemers,
2018). These findings are coherent with the previous studies of Ammari et al.
(Ammari et al., 2018) and Feldman (Feldman, 2021), conducted in the same
context. Ammari et al.’s (Ammari et al., 2018) found that r/Mommit users are
the ones discussing the most topics related to sleep training, breastfeeding,
milestones, child weight gain, and pregnancy recovery. Feldman’s analysis
(Feldman, 2021) showed mothers as more concerned about how to care for their
child, i.e., child-rearing’s practical and concrete sides. Therefore, gender
differences, as predicted by previous research, were reflected in the present
study, especially for mothers expressing concerns about the child’s basic
needs, and this was the case regardless of audience and context for the topics
Food, Sleep training, and Medical care.

Secondly, findings partially demonstrated an audience effect as described by
previous research. Research on the Self-Categorization Theory (Turner et al.,
1987) and the social identity performance (Klein et al., 2007) has shown how
the salience of a social category and the audience result in individuals
behaving in coherence with the group norms. Additionally, as demonstrated in
the comparison between mixed and single-sex schools, the mixed-gender
environment pushed girls towards more stereotypical behaviours than the
single-gender environment, whereas the opposite happened for boys (Favara,
2012). In the present study, it seems like fathers did act more gender
stereotypically with a single-gender audience, but for mothers, the findings
are more nuanced and depend on the topic. With single-gender audiences, both
mothers and fathers announced pregnancies and births and introduced their
children. However, fathers, in terms of relative frequency, scored higher on
these topics than mothers. The latter confirms Ammari et al.’s (Ammari et al.,
2018) findings where one of the most discussed topics in r/Daddit was
congratulations. The results are also coherent with Feldman’s (Feldman, 2021)
results: r/Daddit users talking about whether they care for their child
through posting pictures, announcing pregnancies and births, and reacting to
these announcements. In the present work, the topics Thank you/Appreciation,
Birth/Pregnancy, and Physical appearance/Picture touch on an abstract,
superficial aspect of parenting, which is more about the recognition of a
”parent” identity (the whether (Feldman, 2021)) than the actual parenting
function (the how (Feldman, 2021)). This quest for recognition and the
emphasis on physical appearance and celebration create an almost trophy-like
image of the child and can be associated with gender stereotypes related to
the expectation of performance for men (Ellemers, 2018) and confirm the
increase of gender-stereotypical behaviours for fathers in single-gender
environments (Favara, 2012). The results are more nuanced for mothers. On the
one hand, mothers expressed less stereotypical concerns with a single-gender
audience, as they talked more about topics related to recognition and
celebration. On the other hand, mothers also expressed more stereotypical
concerns with a single-gender audience. Indeed, mothers expressed concerns
regarding the child’s basic needs (Sleep training, Food, and Medical care)
preferentially with a single-gender audience. Therefore, although the audience
seemed to have an expected effect on fathers with announcements and
introductions, the findings were unexpected for mothers who discussed more the
stereotypical area of basic needs with a single-gender audience than with a
mixed-gender audience.

Thirdly, under pseudonyms, fathers on r/Parenting interact with other fathers
and with mothers, from whom they may wish to gain recognition as legitimate
parents. The salience of the ”parent” social category and the threat to be
rejected because they are expected to be secondary parents (Wall and Arnold,
2007) can push them towards ”overconformism” (Klein et al., 2007), making them
behave more as prototypical parents than mothers. The topic Education/Family
advice seems to reflect this phenomenon. This topic is discussed approximately
twice as much with the mixed-gender audience than with the single-gender
audiences by both mothers and fathers. However, although both mothers and
fathers posted a lot about this topic, the difference between mothers and
fathers on r/Parenting is the greatest among all topics. The latter might
reflect fathers’ overconformity in this context. As an alternative
explanation, we can also question the particularity of the topic
Education/Family advice. The comments which scored the highest on this topic
reflect an agentic aspect of parenting (Eagly and Steffen, 1984) where parents
give advice about what they would do and what other parents should do in
different situations. This agency seems to reflect the position of authority
or control fathers are associated with (Benjamin, 1978) and be, thus, a
stereotypical behaviour associated with men. Therefore, fathers talking
predominantly about education and giving family advice with the mixed-gender
audience is difficult to interpret as it can be due to overconformism but also
to the agency associated with advising others.

###  5.1. Implications

The present work explored how expressed concerns about parenting can inform us
of gender stereotypes and audience. Additionally, this study introduced a
novel method to explore, in parallel, differences between two groups (i.e.,
mothers and fathers) and individuals’ contextual differences (i.e., with a
single-gender audience or a mixed-gender audience). This method allowed the
capture of gender and audience differences regarding parenting talk on Reddit.
With this method, mothers and fathers’ behaviours were analysed when separated
in single-gender audiences and gathered in a mixed-gender audience.
Previously, in a study gathering r/Daddit, r/Mommit, and r/Parenting, Ammari
et al.’s (Ammari et al., 2018) had included r/Parenting comments in their
dataset without acknowledging the potential impact induced by the change in
audience. Leaning on the social identity performance framework (Klein et al.,
2007) and Favara’s study (Favara, 2012) about single-sex schools, the
inclusion of r/Parenting was made meaningful and allowed the exploration of
audience and gender in interaction. In the following two paragraphs, we will
expand on the scientific contribution of the present research and its
potential societal impact. The findings contributed to two research areas: the
expression of concerns related to gender stereotypes and the relationship
between audience change and behavioural change.

The results presented here enrich the literature about the evolution of gender
roles by providing a picture of parents’ concerns expressed on Reddit in 2020.
The topics and their distribution across users’ comments showed a gendered
division of parenting in parents’ discourse. Additionally, the research
supported the hypothesis of a gender-differentiated impact of mixed and non-
mixed audiences on individuals. Research on this differential impact has been
mainly studied in the education context (Favara, 2012) despite potentially
touching every sphere of society. Therefore, we broadened the research on
single-gender and mixed-gender environments by applying this perspective in
the social media context in relation to parenting. To suggest a more robust
methodology, we included the framework of social identity performance (Klein
et al., 2007). This way, we focused on individuals’ behavioural changes
related to an audience as a social identity activator. The integration of the
two frameworks of understanding, i.e., gender stereotypes and audience,
allowed for a holistic approach to the analysis of expressions online.

Regarding the societal impact of this research, the findings echoed the
unequal division of labour in the offline world. On the one hand, mothers
expressed concerns about the practical aspects of child-rearing, reflecting
the characteristics associated with motherhood. On the other hand, fathers
seem to be more concerned about expressing their fatherhood and showing that
they care for their child. Although this study does not establish any causal
relationship between stereotypes and gender differences on Reddit and only
describes their overlap, we can still question the potential effect of
stereotypes. Stereotypes can profoundly impact behaviours, resulting in group-
based expectations that restrain individuals from behaving in a non-expected
manner. In this study, the overlap between parenting talk and gender
stereotypes shows how stereotypes constitute a powerful framework for looking
at and understanding interactions regarding parenting.

###  5.2. Limitations

####  5.2.1. A non-representative sample

The sample does not include all parents who published on the three subreddits
in 2020. We have only selected mothers and fathers who have published comments
on both a single-gender subreddit (r/Mommit or r/Daddit) and a mixed-gender
subreddit (r/Parenting). This participants’ selection strategy might have
biased the results. Indeed, parents may choose to post comments on two
different subreddits about parenting precisely because they want to express
different concerns to different audiences. Therefore, our results might not
apply to parents who published on only one of the subreddit. For example,
r/Daddit users who publish exclusively on this subreddit might express all
their concerns (including all the topics found in this study) to that
audience. Thus, the choice of reducing the sample to only the users who
published on at least two parenting subreddits may have biased the findings.

The sample also has an impact on the generalisability of the study. Reddit
data is not representative: Reddit parenting communities do not represent all
social media parenting communities, let alone offline parenting. For instance,
Reddit is popular in English-speaking countries. Even if there are other
languages on Reddit, the subreddits we chose gathered almost exclusively
comments written in English. Therefore, the work cannot be generalised to all
cultures. Moreover, fathers writing on r/Daddit and sharing experiences about
fatherhood may be a population that is already more concerned about parenting
than the average father. Therefore, the latter can result in fewer differences
between mothers and fathers on Reddit (in these subreddits) than there is
offline. Thus, the particularity of Reddit and its users should be considered
to prevent overgeneralisation.

####  5.2.2. Analytic judgement

We note that the advanced techniques of machine learning and topic modelling
do not erase interpretation bias. Once the topic model has been created, the
researcher has several sets of words from which they want to make sense.
Although some topics are almost obvious, others are more subject to
interpretation, and this judgement is qualitative.

###  5.3. Future Research

The present research has shown how parenting talk reflects gender stereotypes
and how the audience can shape the expression of concerns. To support and
solidify the findings about the audience effect, the gendered expression of
concerns and an actual unequal division of labour between parents, this
exploratory and observational study can be complemented by an online
experiment and a survey. With an online experiment, we can effectively
anonymise participants and make them interact online with other participants
about parenting, either with a single-gender audience or with a mixed-gender
audience. The gender identifiability, the name of the communities, and the
number of mothers and fathers can be manipulated. With a survey, it will be
possible to explore the relationship between online and offline behaviours
related to parenting. Finally, for further investigation, we would like to
question the use of gender as binary in this study and encourage future
research to consider other possible definitions of gender and parenting, which
can be different from the simple spectrum of motherhood and fatherhood.

##  6\. Conclusion

In the present investigation, we studied parenting talk on Reddit to explore
how it reflects gender stereotypes and is sensitive to the audience. Findings
indicated that, first, mothers posted more about children’s basic needs,
regardless of the audience, reflecting the communal characteristics
stereotypically associated with women. Secondly, fathers posted more than
mothers to announce pregnancies and births and introduce their child,
especially to a single-gender audience, showing a more superficial aspect of
parenting focused on the social recognition of the ”father” identity. Finally,
among Reddit parents, discussing education and giving advice were mostly
expressed to a mixed-gender audience and more by fathers than mothers,
reflecting either the agentic characteristics associated with masculinity or
overconformism. The study of audience and gender stereotyping in parenting
talk gives an important window into the construction of gender identity in
private contexts, which are usually out of view.

Although no link can be directly drawn between these findings and offline
behaviours, the echo of gender stereotypes in these online interactions
questions the impact of stereotypes in the real world. When mothers decide to
behave in a stereotype-based expected manner, they usually have to fragilise
their careers through less demanding or part-time jobs. These stereotypes are
consequential. Child-rearing not being a paid occupation, instantiating a
stereotypically appropriate parenting identity imposes a professional
opportunity-cost for women: if women are expected to be primary caregivers at
home with their children, men are expected to be outside and contributing to
society’s organisation.

###### Acknowledgements.

We would like to thank Geoffrey Cideron for his useful suggestions throughout
this work. This publication has emanated from research conducted with the
financial support of Science Foundation Ireland under Grant number 18/CRT/6049
and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon
2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 802421).

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##  Appendix A Topics’ Labels, Keywords, and High-Scoring Comments

Table 1. Topics’ labels, keywords, and high-scoring comments Label |  Keywords |  High-scoring comments
---|---|---
Thank you/appreciation |  ”thank”, ”word”, ”thanks”, ”toddler”, ”sound”, ”advice”, ”today”, ”moment”, ”hug”, ”mama” |  ”Thank you! I appreciate your insight and you made good points especially on reversing the words I’m using too:) I like it. Thank you and I really appreciate it.”
Medical care |  ”doctor”, ”issue”, ”hospital”, ”formula”, ”anxiety”, ”pain”, ”risk”, ”depression”, ”health”, ”weight” |  ”I have the Copper. I can’t do the hormonal ones,not even the minipill. Severe Migraines and doctor feared a higher chance of clots. I’ve had spotting between periods, but only 2 periods in 14mos. They are very painful.I should note, I didn’t find childbirth painful and didn’t need pain meds afterwards so I’m not that sensitive to pain.”
Education/Family advice |  ”situation”, ”life”, ”family”, ”relationship”, ”problem”, ”issue”, ”need”, ”behavior”, ”choice”, ”question” |  ”If I were you, I would call CPS on your husband. I called CPS on my ex while we were still together.He needs tough boundaries and consequences for his choices. You need to protect your children. CPS can provide you with resources to help, and can provide him with resources if he chooses to seek help. Honestly, unless he stops drinking your relationship is over anyways. Set yourself up to be the custodial parent by doing the right things to protect your kids well-being.”
Furniture/Design |  ”room”, ”toy”, ”floor”, ”door”, ”clothes”, ”house”, ”head”, ”bathroom”, ”foot”, ”space” |  ”Or, stand on a rug,l and draw an outline of yourfeet. Cut them out and duck tape them to your feet.Plus, you never need to buy carpets for your house”
Birth/Pregnancy |  ”life”, ”friend”, ”love”, ”partner”, ”pregnancy”, ”family”, ”heart”, ”birth”, ”care”, ”sorry” |  ”Congrats dad! I’m pretty convinced that when babies come out this big they’re a lot happier and easier than the littler ones, so I hope that’s true for you!”
Change/Potty training |  ”diaper”, ”post”, ”body”, ”hand”, ”sex”, ”potty”, ”poop”, ”toilet”, ”arm”, ”grandma” |  ”I’ve been changing her constantly. I typically cloth diaper but I have her in honest co diapers and I’m changing these things 2-3 times an hour!”
Physical appearance/Picture |  ”dog”, ”look”, ”face”, ”eye”, ”picture”, ”cat”, ”memory”, ”stranger”, ”color”, ”cousin” |  ”My son is 6 months old and he has long eye lashes like in Incredibles coz he looks just like that”
Work/Raise children |  ”home”, ”family”, ”work”, ”house”, ”car”, ”job”, ”money”, ”friend”, ”seat”, ”birthday” |  ”Raising a kid takes a village. Give yourself a break on the weekends or after work if you can. Go for a walk before you pick him up, and get some help so you can have some time. Everyone needs personal time.”
Food |  ”food”, ”water”, ”meal”, ”milk”, ”snack”, ”dinner”, ”bottle”, ”cup”, ”lunch”, ”eat” |  ”One day I was in the kitchen cooking dinner and I turned my back for 1 second. I turn back and my son had nearly eaten a full clove of garlic like it was a piece of candy. Kids are crazy lol”
Leisure activities |  ”book”, ”game”, ”play”, ”attention”, ”activity”, ”phone”, ”tv”, ”video”, ”fun”, ”stuff” |  ”Indeed, board games gets them really excited :) Pick the games that is more about the adventure / fun than on the winning / losing, so that the focus is not so much on that ”end” part.Thanks for the great suggestions :)”
School/Teaching |  ”school”, ”teacher”, ”class”, ”daycare”, ”home”, ”work”, ”language”, ”group”, ”college”, ”therapy” |  ”I’ve heard that teaching multiple languages might delay your child’s spoken language a little bit compared to just teaching them one language but it’s only temporary and the pay off is they end up fluent in more than one language.”
Sleep training |  ”night”, ”bed”, ”sleep”, ”morning”, ”room”, ”nap”, ”bedtime”, ”crib”, ”work”, ”schedule” |  ”I am definitely a morning person! And I struggle to get back to sleep, too. I just like very peaceful, easy mornings. My daughter (who has always been my champ sleeper) takes after me. My son was the baby that woke up every 2h on. the. dot. until I finally had it in me to sleep train after he turned 1. He wakes up ready to charge and tends to be my morning mayhem instigator, despite his efforts to not.”

##  Appendix B Scores of the Groups for Each Topic (Complement to Figure 1)

Table 2. Scores of the groups for each topic (complement to Figure 1) Topics | Fathers/Parenting | Fathers/Daddit | Mothers/Mommit | Mothers/Parenting
---|---|---|---|---
Thank you/appreciation | .104 | .121 | .114 | .101
Medical care | .050 | .054 | .078 | .062
Education/Family advice | .253 | .118 | .106 | .208
Furniture/Design | .055 | .073 | .079 | .063
Birth/Pregnancy | .100 | .159 | .120 | .101
Change/Potty Training | .045 | .066 | .074 | .048
Physical appearance/Picture | .053 | .094 | .079 | .048
Work/Raise children | .078 | .069 | .072 | .082
Food | .039 | .042 | .068 | .051
Leisure activities | .077 | .066 | .060 | .075
School/Teaching | .058 | .034 | .035 | .061
Sleep training | .069 | .075 | .092 | .083