What is competitive parenting and why experts say toxic parents might actually be losing

Competitive parenting is on the rise and it comes at a cost, according to experts.

Amy Hetherington has made a career out of fighting competitive parents with comedy. Picture: Ben Clark

When Amy Hetherington’s daughter, Ruby, was just a baby, the social media comments from competitive mums started coming thick and fast.

“I got told ‘if you care about your baby, you must exclusively breastfeed’. And my response was ‘what made you think I care about the baby?,” jokes the comedian, whose daughter is now three.

Competitive parents take aim at other mums and dads with passive aggressive observations about parenting styles or subtle boasts about their own children.

They are active on social and parent WhatsApp groups – and contribute to the guilt that’s overwhelming Australian parents.

They have become the butt of jokes for Hetherington’s comedy gigs, where she takes aim at unsolicited advice and gloating mums.

Amy Hetherington and her three-year-old daughter, Ruby, in Adelaide. Picture: Ben Clark

“I think most of it comes from people feeling insecure about themselves. They see someone else’s projected success, and they presume that that means that they’re not doing the right thing. So their way to deal with that is to make the other one feel bad,” says the Darwin-based comedian, who is appearing at the Adelaide Fringe Festival and across suburban and regional South Australia before travelling to Melbourne and Queensland next month.

REVEALED: THE $20 CANTEEN LUNCH PRICE TAG

Amy Hetherington with her daughter, Ruby, at the NTFL Women’s Grand Final in Darwin in 2023. Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

“But I am a competitive person, I’m happy to admit that I was always, like Bluey, waiting for my baby to win the walking race but the beauty of hindsight is knowing that pushing isn’t so advanced. My toddler, who was walking before everyone else’s kids, got into the bathroom and destroyed my good makeup, absolutely ruined my lipstick all over the floor. So you actually don’t want an advanced kid ... let it be a potato a little bit longer.”

But there’s a serious side to competitive parenting.

Competitive parenting is more prevalent now than it was 10 years ago, fuelled by social media.

Dr Elisabeth Duursma, research theme fellow at the University of Western Sydney, said it was contributing to the overwhelming guilt being suffered by parents all over the country.

News Corp’s Great Australian Parent Survey 2025, conducted online last month, found two out of three mums and dads experience feelings of guilt about their parenting.

Dr Duursma said competitive parenting was more prevalent today than it was 10 years ago, spurred on by social media and its false projections of perfection.

“It places unrealistic expectations, with people comparing themselves with what they see online. You can never measure up,” she said.

“It makes parenting really challenging ... and it comes at a cost.”

Dr Elisabeth Duursma, from the University of Western Sydney. Picture: Supplied

Dr Duursma said WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages had also exacerbated the problem, with incessant posts from parents about their children’s milestones or merits.

She said the motivation for engaging in competitive parenting was “validation from other parents that they are doing a good job – look what I have accomplished or my child has accomplished”.

She said insecurity also played a part.

“It becomes ‘you must be doing something wrong because your child hasn’t done X, Y and Z yet’ and you start to doubt yourself as a parent,” she said.

“At the end of the day, no one really cares what age your child is potty-trained, no one’s ever going to ask about it again. No one’s ever going to ask ‘when did your child sleep through the night?’. These are all irrelevant things later on. Keep that in perspective.”

Dr Duursma urged parents to trust that they would know what is best for their children and resist the urge to compete with others.

“No one can live up to all these things and we don’t have to,” she said. “I’m hoping at some point this competitive parenting will hit a ceiling and there’s going to be a backlash.”