A Very Adorable Trend on Instagram Reels Has a Dark Underbelly

Family A clip about how having kids under 4 is a “peak experience” is making some moms anxious—for a good reason. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus. If you follow certain people on Instagram and TikTok—parenting influencers, brands trying to sell things to parents—you may have recently noticed your feed overtaken by adorable videos of babies and toddlers, set to a little lecture on the importance of the early years, in the voice of a man who sounds a little bit like Kermit the Frog. For the uninitiated: You have little kids for four years. And if you miss it, it’s done. That’s it. So, you gotta know that. It’s, you know, lots of things in life, you don’t get to do more than once. Now, obviously you can have more than one child, but all I’m saying is, that period between 0 and 4, 0 and 5, there’s something about it that’s really, it’s like a peak experience in life. It isn’t much of your life. You might think of it as a long time. But it’s not that long. Four years goes by so fast, you can’t believe it. And if you miss it, it’s…
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