'Pinterest stress' not just for moms?
Almost half of women get stressed out trying to live up to the standards set on social media, according to a survey. "Pinterest stress" is also a problem in the home of Crave writer Eric Mack, but not for the woman of the house.
- Finalist for the Nesta Tipping Point prize and a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
I don't know exactly when it happened, but I can now say for sure that I live in a Pinterest household. The influence of the digital pinboard has infiltrated numerous aspects of life in the Mack family palace, from our wardrobe to nightly dinners to the bling I've been instructed to install on the door of the oven those dinners are cooked in.
That's right, I'm going to bling out my oven because my wife told me to, because it looked cool to her in a thumbnail on a punnily named social network.
This is not quite the future the Jetsons promised us, but we're living it.
So I was very interested to read the findings of a recent survey about what stresses out American moms. The online survey of more than 7,000 women in the U.S. was conducted by Insight Express/NBC News for TodayMoms.com and revealed one particularly fascinating nugget:
Measuring up to all the cool crafts they see on Pinterest causes stress for 42 percent of moms.
So, I know there's lots of cultural pressure out there to be perfect parents, but this still struck me as a little nuts. So I checked in with my in-house Pinterest aficionado, my wife Johanna. You know, the one who recently sent me to the hardware store to buy some shiny vinyl panels of a sort I didn't even know existed for affixing to the oven door.
"Absolutely not."
That was her answer when I asked her if she felt any Pinterest-related stress in her life. If anything, she told me, she finds a sense of empowerment from the numerous perfect-looking and ultimately inspiring pins.
And the results are all around me. There's the pin that inspired the new chalkboard paint job on the front of our refrigerator (great for grocery lists and our daughter's chalk drawings), the one that led to our ownership of the world's most colorful folding table and chairs, not to mention the ones that resulted in countless new recipes and wardrobe modifications.
Pinterest definitely isn't a source of stress for my wife, it's a cornucopia of ways to up-cycle on a budget.
There's just one problem. Certain Pinterest projects require some assistance from the member of the household with a little more experience with various power tools, epoxies, and soldering (apologies if you're bothered by the rather traditional gender roles implied here, but it should be known that my wife also has some pretty exceptional wilderness survival skills that saved my butt at least once). Unfortunately, that person in my house also happens to be a little bit more of a perfectionist than the person with the actual vision. I just really like getting things to look like the picture. And on Pinterest, the pictures tend to be really, really beautiful.
I'm sure that blinging out my oven will be completely worth it in the end just like all the other Pinterest-inspired projects around my home. But you might find me in my kitchen at 1 a.m. dripping drops of sweat and tears on that shiny piece of vinyl as I try to get it perfectly plumb with the edge of the oven door without getting any more Liquid Nails in my hair.
So does Pinterest cause stress for the mom in my house? As she said, absolutely not. But it might be time somebody did a survey of the levels of Pinterest-induced stress on dads.