Beyond the Frame
Because the Picture Is Never the Whole Story
Before my oldest son’s mental health crisis at age fifteen, I didn’t spend much time thinking about the people on the other side of my social media posts.
Like many parents, I posted pictures of family vacations, school milestones, and moments I wanted to remember. Facebook was still relatively new when I joined in 2008. My children were young, and sharing pieces of family life felt like a way of connecting with people I loved. It never occurred to me that someone else might experience those posts very differently than I intended them to.
Then my son turned fifteen.
Recently, a reader commented on an essay I wrote about my oldest son. She mentioned how hard it is to raise children in a world where social media constantly presents images of perfect parents and perfect children.
Reading her words brought me right back to 2021. At the time, my son was going through one of the hardest periods of his life, and our family was going through one of the hardest periods of ours.
A little background may be helpful: my oldest son, now twenty, was what a 1950s mother might have called a spirited child. He was diagnosed with ADHD at a young age and struggled with emotional dysregulation and frustration intolerance.
Over the years, I became his rescuer, devoting an enormous amount of energy to preventing the big reactions of a kid who felt everything intensely. I anticipated problems before they happened, smoothed rough patches, negotiated conflicts, and tried to make his life easier.
The irony is that I knew better. I was, and am, a psychologist who understands that children develop confidence by facing challenges and discovering they can survive them.
When it came to my oldest son, though, my anxiety won almost every time.
I loved him fiercely, and I hated watching him suffer. What I didn’t understand was that my efforts to protect him from distress were gradually teaching both of us something that wasn’t true: that he couldn’t tolerate disappointment.
As he entered adolescence, the strategies that had seemed helpful when he was younger stopped working. His struggles intensified, and my anxiety intensified right alongside them. Before long, it felt as though our entire household revolved around managing crises, preventing explosions, and trying to keep everyone afloat.
Every time I opened Facebook during those years, it seemed I was greeted by smiling teenagers getting their driver’s licenses, dressed for prom, holding college acceptance letters, enjoying family vacations, or celebrating athletic achievements. There were so many photographs of children who appeared to be moving through life exactly as children were supposed to.
Intellectually, I knew I wasn’t seeing the whole story; emotionally, it didn’t matter. Each post felt like a reminder of what I feared my son might never have. I wasn’t angry at the people posting those pictures, and I didn’t begrudge them their joy; what I felt was something closer to grief. Why them? Why not us? Why did everyone else’s children seem to be moving forward while mine was stuck?
Of course, none of that was actually true. Plenty of families were struggling, plenty of parents were lying awake at night worrying about children they loved, and plenty of households were carrying burdens invisible to the outside world. They just weren’t posting about them on social media. Even the ones posting their triumphs had struggles that didn’t make the highlight reel.
Still, when you’re in the middle of your own pain, other people’s joy can make you feel like you’re the only one struggling.
I want to be clear that I don’t think people should stop sharing happy things. Human beings have always celebrated with one another, and social media didn’t invent that. We are responsible for our own media consumption, and sometimes the healthiest choice is to step away.
Eventually, I did pull back from social media. I didn’t leave entirely, but during those years, I posted less and scrolled less. Instead of spending time with picture-perfect posts, I found myself in groups filled with parents whose families were struggling in ways that looked a lot like ours.
For the first time in years, I was surrounded by parents who were talking openly about the hard things happening in their families. They were worried, exhausted, heartbroken, and doing the best they could. The more time I spent with them, the less I believed that my family was uniquely broken.
They reminded me that every family contains struggle and joy, often at the exact same time. Every family has worries, disappointments, losses, fears, and heartbreak that live outside the frame.
The picture is real.
It just isn’t the whole story.
This makes me think of the period when I was going through infertility and feeling tortured by everyone else's baby scan photos, pregnant bump photos, newborn pics, first days of school etc. etc. etc. Social media can be its own special kind of torture 😖
I still post on FB from time to time, mostly for donors and supporters of our ministries here in the Philippines. As you know, I run a school for poor kids and a safehouse for victims. I also run a dive resort which generates income for our ministries. I post beautiful photos of palm trees, gorgeous sunsets, and snippets of my underwater adventures chasing sea turtles and Nemo. All these posts are real and my contentment in life is authentic. But, as you said, it is not the whole story. I also have a daughter I am estranged from because of her long-standing mental illness. It's been four years since we've actually talked. I also have a son who is currently dealing with another serious form of mental illness. When he was a teenager, he was what every parent dreamed of: top of his class, editor-in-chief of the school paper, member of the choir, a math wizard who led the school team to win scholastic bowl awards, and at the time, he was dating one of the most popular and prettiest girls at his high school. He was genuinely liked and admired by peers and teachers alike. I should know, I taught at his high school and I was always proud of him. He went off to Cornell U and graduated with a double degree: Economics and Philosophy. Then he got his MBA from Columbia U and was hired by McKinsey. Yup...McKinsey...one of the top financial consultancy firms that advices its clients from dictators to multi-billion-dollar companies how to become even wealthier, more powerful, and also more ruthless. That's when I stopped talking about my son (or any of my family members) on social media. Because that's also the time when I watched my "golden boy" give in to deep-seated anxieties and a debilitating form of self-loathing that I never thought I would see in him. All my worried attention had been given to my daughter for so many years because it was she who was always getting into trouble since high school. My son was the one I thought I never needed to be concerned about. Now he is the one I think about the most. He quit McKinsey because of the high pressure, the sense of failure they make their employees feel when they make a single mistake, and the utter disregard for the value of human beings who cannot perform at the highest levels. He fell into the deepest depression that I thought he would never come out of it. He has come out of the worst thanks to therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists. But it's been two years and he refuses to go back to the working world. He looks at his long list of achievements and he says he takes no pleasure in any of them. He is so lost and spends his days playing Smash Brothers (that's a video game). His wife is a doctor so they're not starving. He also saved money from his days of making six-figure incomes. BUT it is his utter lack of purpose that worries me. His wife is also getting very weary of coming home to a husband who is not the man she married. They used to be go-getters and they met and fell in love while at Cornell. He encouraged her through med school and she pushed him to finish his MBA. But since having a severe mental breakdown while working at McKinsey...he has lost all desire to do anything. It saddens me that I seem to be able to help girls who have been sexually abused and human-trafficked here in the Philippines...but I am clueless how to help my 33-year-old son get his "mojo" back. It's like he has given up on the world and has isolated himself in a world of his own making. We still talk and I try not to judge. I try to be open-minded and available. But I'm at a loss as to how to reach a young man who spent his life running after the American dream...only to find out what a nightmare it really is...and has now retreated to a place I know nothing about. That's why I'm grateful for Substack. I know I can share things here with you and your readers and I won't be accused of being a horrible mother. I promise you I'm not. I'm just a very bewildered one right now. And I know this kind of honest sharing has no place on FB.