About a third of American parents with young children visit online parenting communities at least once a month, turning to spaces like Reddit for advice on everything from screen time battles to money stress, according to a Pew Research Center report released in November 2025.
The study combines a national survey with an analysis of six months of posts from Reddit’s largest parenting forum, offering a window into what parents actually ask each other online.
Moms and new parents lead the way online
Pew’s survey finds that 34% of parents say they visit online parenting communities at least monthly. Another 34% say they rarely visit them, while 33% say they never do.
The habit skews heavily toward younger mothers. By comparison, 31% of parents ages 30 to 49 visit online parenting communities regularly, as do just 17% of parents ages 50 and older.
Newer parents, whose oldest child is under 5, are especially drawn in: almost half (47%) of parents whose oldest child is under 5 visit these communities regularly. That pattern is documented in a study released by Pew Research Center.
The forum at the center of the study, r/Parenting, is no niche corner of the internet. It is the largest community for parents on the site, with more than 8 million members as of November 2025.
Pew’s team pulled an analysis of all user submissions and comments on the r/Parenting subreddit from January to July 2025, with the resulting dataset containing 29,295 posts and 853,209 comments posted during that period , to see what parents were actually discussing, not just what they said they talk about in surveys.
Tech use, child care and money dominate the threads
The subjects that bring parents to these forums are strikingly consistent. According to Pew, on Reddit, 44% of all posts in r/Parenting mentioned one or more of these issues: division of child care responsibilities between parents, kids’ technology use, and financial challenges of raising a child.
On Reddit’s largest parenting forum, around one-in-five posts mention kids’ tech use , making it one of the single most common topics parents raise with strangers online.
That overlaps with a related concern this site has tracked before, as hobby groups rank among the most common online communities parents and other adults join.
But parenting forums stand apart for how emotionally charged the posts tend to be. Pew’s analysis found posts often express negative emotions, but comments are overwhelmingly supportive.
Communities cut both ways on how parents feel
The emotional payoff of scrolling these forums is mixed. Among those who ever visit online parenting communities (even if only rarely), 63% say these spaces make them feel more informed about being a parent. And about half (48%) say online communities make them feel more connected to other parents.
That suggests the advice itself lands as useful even when the posting parent arrived in distress.
But the experience is not uniformly positive. 38% say parenting communities make them feel more overwhelmed because of all the information they need to know. And sizable shares say these communities make them feel less informed and less connected to other parents.
That tension echoes a broader pattern in how Americans navigate digital social life, not unlike the dynamic in Americans spending less time with friends but reporting no more loneliness, where digital substitutes for in-person contact produce complicated, not simply positive, results.
Posting is still a minority behavior
Despite how many parents read these forums, fewer actually participate directly. Among parents who ever visit online parenting communities, 40% say they have posted or commented about their own experiences as a parent. But only 5% say they do this often.
That gap between lurking and posting suggests most parents treat these spaces more like a reference library than a public square, scrolling for reassurance or a quick answer rather than joining the conversation themselves. Some 46% of mothers who visit online parenting communities say they ever post or comment, compared with 30% of fathers.
The report adds evidence that for a large share of American parents, the search for validation and practical tips runs through Reddit threads and similar forums as a regular part of modern parenting.
