On Parenting

Caitlin McCormick Murray ’05 has built one of the most popular parenting accounts on social media—not by posting camera-ready bento box lunches or filming adorable toddler enrichment activities, but rather by railing against those who do. “Just knock it off,” she says in one video posted to her social media account, Big Time Adulting. “I’d literally rather hear you describe your journey with irritable bowel syndrome than see another photo of you at sunset with your family in matching outfits. Give me something real, for the love of Goldfish-crusted car mats.”

Murray is clearly not alone in her interest in an uproarious, unfiltered look at parenting, because the mother of three kids (aged 10, 8, and 5) has amassed a following of more than 1.5 million on Instagram. That figure lands her in the highest tier of social media personalities, categorized by some experts as “mega influencers,” on par with celebrities like Jennifer Garner (1.7 million) and Bill Burr (2.4 million), both of whom follow Murray on the platform. She’s done it by ranting about the most exhausting, exasperating, and bewildering aspects of parenthood, from the physical changes a mother experiences after giving birth to the shameless defiance of three-year-olds. “If anyone else treated me the way my toddler treats me, I’d probably have a restraining order by now,” she says in one video viewed more than 5.3 million times.

She is able to put into words the frustrations that most parents have experienced but are unwilling to say out loud, and those jokes are particularly cathartic for parents of young kids because of how isolating raising babies and toddlers can be. Murray’s posts range from warnings to those who are considering having kids to solo dance routines she improvises for the camera, overlaid by voiceovers like “It’s a known fact that shaking your ass in your kitchen as hard as you can lifts your spirits out of a seasonally depressed funk for at least five minutes.” At less than a minute long, her videos are easier to consume than a parenting book when one is nursing a baby or finding refuge for four minutes alone in the bathroom.

One reason Murray’s followers seem particularly fervent is because of her compassionate messages for parents. She ends many of her posts with her signature catchphrase, “Get yourself a snack,” poking at the camera lens with each word for emphasis. It’s a reminder, she says, “that moms are always taking care of everyone else, but that we need to take care of ourselves too.”

Her most popular post (with more than 33 million views) is a pro tip for struggling mothers: “When you are on the verge of a mental breakdown, when nothing is working,” she says, looking both exhausted and empathetic, “take a second, exit the room . . . and strongly consider leaving your family.” A beat later she says, “Let it bring you to tears, because you’d be frigging miserable without them, and then get back in there and resume the role of CEO of those little dickheads. You got this.”

More than 544,000 people shared the video. A further 12,800 responded with comments like “You’re an essential vitamin in woman form,” along with a truly heart-wrenching one: “I’ve recently become a single mom after my husband passed away. On the days when I feel like it’s too much, you seem to post something that makes me laugh and take a deep breath.”

Murray’s compassion for her audience derives from her own travails with parenting. When her eldest child, Callum, turned three, on the day after Christmas, he was diagnosed with leukemia. After four anguishing years of treatments, he was cleared of the disease, and Murray says the experience freed her from the sometimes-crippling self-judgment parents feel. It also shut off her filter. Murray routinely jokes about her own kids being “sociopaths” and “gaslighting” her. She tells her followers it’s OK if they let the gentle parenting practice slip sometimes when they have “a roomful of kids acting like cats on cocaine. Sometimes you just have to yell at them to knock it off.”

“I feel like people might give my jokes a little more grace knowing that I’d been through something so horrible,” she says. Looking at the volume of her positive audience response, it appears she is right. “I swear to God, my horrible postpartum depression disappears at least for a few moments when I watch one of your videos,” wrote a viewer.

Callum’s leukemia is also what literally launched Murray’s media career. At the time of his diagnosis, she was working as a fundraiser for a private K–12 school in Manhattan, but the frequent emails she wrote to friends and family updating them on Callum’s progress soon turned into a blog. She named it Big Time Adulting, an over-the-top riff on the jokey way that 20-somethings referred to any responsible decision.

Murray loved, she says, “the therapeutic and cathartic part of writing,” but the blog also let her unfurl the sense of humor she’d been known for her whole life. Like many who routinely make their friends and family laugh, Murray had harbored thoughts of writing or performing but had never allowed herself to take them seriously. “It was like I was waiting for someone to give me permission,” she says. A year or two into blogging, someone finally did, in a roundabout way.

Her neighbor, who worked in publishing, showed Murray’s work to some of her colleagues. The verdict was that her writing was good, but in the harsh reality of today’s publishing world, Murray was pronounced too unknown for a book contract.

So, in December 2018, Murray set about getting known, launching her parenting Instagram account. Her second post was a picture of Callum’s rendition of the figure 900, which, thanks to a backwards nine essentially read “poo.” From here forth, Murray wrote, “going poo will only be referred to as having to do a 900. If it’s an emergency, call it a ‘Nine Zero Zero.’”

More than 1,000 posts later, Murray counts among her followers not just celebrities like Garner and Burr, but also Penelope Cruz and Jennifer Aniston. She is also followed by comedians Jimmy Kimmel and Chelsea Handler. Various Kardashians have shared her videos. “It’s a really bizarre feeling,” she says, to be in the thick of creating popular culture.

“My daughter has asked me if I’m famous,” says Murray, because her teachers or her friends’ parents might mention something about Big Time Adulting videos. “I assure her that I’m a Z-list celebrity.”

Nevertheless, that level of fame is worth a lot in today’s social media economy. Murray does have a talent agency, a company run by a pair of Canadian moms who specialize in social media clients. One of her agents, Sam Ryley, says that what makes Murray stand out as a content creator is the number of shares and comments her content receives, calling her engagement level “bananas.” Murray’s content also stands out in that people tend to watch her reels all the way to the end, a testament to her writing. Because the algorithms social media platforms use to sort content tend to favor that kind of engagement, Murray’s videos are increasingly being seen by ever more people in a virtuous cycle.

What makes Murray rare among social media celebrities is that she hasn’t done much to cash in on her fame. At her level, every bespoke ad a content creator posts is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet rather than pushing out the reams of product endorsements common among influencers these days, Murray partners with just a handful of companies, promoting products she actually uses (among them, snacks!).

“I didn’t get into this to get famous and push a bunch of product,” she says. In 2024, she also started writing a weekly newsletter called Soul Snacks, which has quickly grown to 32,000 subscribers. She is also working with her agency to spin up all of her material into a long-term sustainable business, whether that’s licensing products or creating more media. Murray declined to divulge her plans except to say that she did finally land a book contract.

“From the time I hit 100,000 subscribers, I was getting solicited by literary agents,” she says. It wasn’t until last spring, though, that she finally decided to entertain some of those offers. She has since inked a contract with Penguin Random House for an as-yet-untitled book of essays, due in November of 2025.

In the meantime, she’s posting videos every week or so, warning new parents that toddlers are impervious to reason and railing against people “who tell moms we look tired.” (“We know we look tired. We fantasize about what it would be like not to be tired all the time.”) She’s also ducking her daughter’s requests to make social media content together or to appear in Big Time Adulting videos. Murray almost never features her kids, for reasons of privacy and because it isn’t her style. “I tell her no, scram. I can’t make fun of you when you are right next to me.”