Why America’s Mom Crisis Is Fake News

America, we have a problem. In the past three weeks, six different mothers have violently attacked their children. In five of those attacks, the result was death. That is not what the linked post implies. It suggests eight attacks, but a little cursory research reveals that one — a murder-suicide in which a mom killed two of her sons and her husband before fleeing with the youngest son, only to turn the gun on him and then herself — occurred in Mexico. In another case shown in the screenshot, the gruesome killing occurred in 2024 but is being presented as recent because the mother just took a plea deal. An obsession with Lindsay Clancy may have been a factor in two of the cases.

It’s easy to establish a correlation with the fervor around the Clancy case, suggesting that women are spiraling into an ever-increasing state of insanity, one that precludes them from being trusted to care for their children as social media pushes them further to the edges of psychosis. And there is a grain of truth to that sentiment; you just have to remove almost all the words from the preceding sentence and focus on just two: social media.

America does have a problem, but women are not becoming more frequent child killers, either in general or because of Lindsay Clancy. The problem is that social media shapes opinion, which often informs legacy media on what to focus on. And right now, Clancy is big news. This isn’t to say filicide isn’t a problem. It is. Roughly 450-500 children per year are murdered by their parents. The assumption is that mothers are more likely to kill their young children and fathers the older children, but this 2014 study didn’t find such a correlation.

The Clancy case isn’t far enough in the past for us to have any data surrounding whether or not there has been a spike in maternal filicide since her trial. Six stories in three weeks is a lot, and extrapolated, we’d be looking at roughly 48 more attacks in the weeks remaining in 2026 if those numbers hold. But right now, no numbers show an increase, especially since overall 2026 numbers won’t be released until next year at the earliest. In other words, we really don’t know.

Granted, even one death is too many, but thankfully, filicide isn’t a major problem in the United States. Even as the population has grown, the 450-500 number has remained constant. That it will likely go down as the population gets increasingly older is cold comfort.

When it comes to social media, though, we do have more numbers. We don’t know how the two Clancy-obsessed moms followed the story, but 62% of women get their news from Facebook, so it wouldn’t be shocking to find it was a factor. And even if they weren’t getting their Clancy updates there, the social media angle isn’t just an issue in terms of creating stories. It’s also the negative effects the networks are having on our mental health.

Headlines often focus on children and teens, but social media is awful for adults, too. It eats away at time that could be used for more intellectual pursuits. It inhibits normal socialization. Staring at the blue screen, even with new technologies designed to mitigate the negative effects, disrupts sleep patterns.

It also presents a curated world, an image of life that no one actually achieves. Even as much of the outrage is performative, so too is the perfection. People post elegant meals, not a piece of pizza savagely eaten directly from the box. Vacations make the cut; the pencil that’s been under the edge of the coffee table for the past week does not.

It might also make it seem like crazy patterns are emerging, ones in which the classic comedy “Serial Mom” becomes less absurd and more documentary. Beverly Sutphin, the serial killer mom in the film, is obsessed with perfection, which would make her an epic influencer. That isn’t where we are, though.

America, we do have a problem. Mostly it’s with the truth and the outlets we trust to provide it. Post-Elon X is no exception, even as it’s become much more tolerant of free speech. With that tolerance, though, comes a raft of a different kind of B.S. And, thankfully, an onslaught of killer moms seems to be part of that.

Which is why it’s important to follow that old Russian proverb popularized by President Ronald Reagan: Trust, but verify. Because, admit it, when you first looked at the image, at all those moms who attacked their families over the past three weeks with the implication being that cases are on the rise, it seemed all too plausible, didn’t it? But it’s not. Most women, and most moms, remain pretty awesome, regardless of what a psychotic nurse in Massachusetts and some crazy broads in other states did to their kids.

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Rich Cromwell is a writer living in Northwest Arkansas. He produces the Cookin’ Up a Story podcast, which you can listen to here. You can also follow him on X: @rcromwell4