Text mining of Reddit posts: Using latent Dirichlet allocation to identify common parenting issues

Background: Parenting interventions offer an evidence-based method for the prevention and early intervention of child mental health problems, but to-date their population-level effectiveness has been limited by poor reach and engagement, particularly for fathers, working mothers, and disadvantaged families. Internationally, there has been a call for more sensitive intervention frameworks that better recognize parents’ differences and match support accordingly. Tailoring intervention content to parents’ context (i.e., to common parenting situations) offers potential to enhance parent engagement and learning by increasing relevance of content to parents’ daily experiences. However, this approach requires a detailed understanding of the common parenting situations and issues that parents face day-to-day, which is currently lacking.Objective: We sought to identify the most common parenting situations discussed by parents on parenting-specific forums of the free online discussion forum, Reddit, one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. We aimed to understand perspectives from both mothers and fathers, and therefore retrieved publicly available data from two parenting-specific ‘subreddits’ (r/Daddit; r/Mommit).Methods: We used latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to identify the most common topics discussed in the Reddit posts. Once topics were identified, we completed a manual text analysis of the 10 posts ranked as most relevant to each topic, and summarized the parenting situations that were described. Our pre-specified definition of a parenting situation required that the post involve a parent and their child aged 0-18 years and describe a potential or actual difficulty or issue.Results: We retrieved 340 (r/Daddit) and 578 (r/Mommit) original posts. A model with 31 LDA topics was found to be the best fitting model. Of these, 24 topics included posts that met our inclusion criteria for manual review. From these, we identified 45 unique but broadly-defined parenting situations. The majority of parenting situations were either focused on basic childcare situations relating to eating, sleeping, routines, sickness and toilet training; or related to how to respond to child negative emotions or difficult behavior. Most situations were discussed in relation to infant or toddler age children, and on the whole, there was a high level of consistency in the themes raised in r/Daddit and r/Mommit.Conclusions: Our text analysis of the r/Daddit and r/Mommit posts highlighted two overarching themes in topics commonly discussed in online parenting forums; basic childcare, and management of child emotions and behavior. Our results offer potential to tailor parenting interventions in a meaningful way, creating opportunities to develop content and resources that are directly relevant to parents’ lived experiences.