It’s the beginning of August, and I’ve spent nearly five months looking out my front door at my son’s desolate elementary school playground across the street. I never dreamed it would be sitting empty this long.

As the coronavirus pandemic swept through the nation and schools converted to Zoom lessons after shutting their doors, I thought nothing could be as frightening as those early days of lockdown this spring. With 1-month-old twins and a 4-year-old, those earliest days are already a jumble in my memory, a caregiving chess match to keep on top of the chaos. But it turns out there is indeed something scarier than being told to stay in your house as much as possible: being tasked to make all of our own risk calculations and decisions about a pandemic that’s still far from under control.

In early July, our school district in Durham, North Carolina, announced it was prepping an in-person option for elementary and middle school students at half capacity, five days a week; virtual-only instruction for high school; and an online option for anyone who wanted it. I was briefly elated at the prospect that maybe things would be more like “normal” this fall. But as the days went by, my certainty that sending my son back was the right choice started to waver.

Without many more details coming from our district or school about what the year would look like, I found myself doing way too much doomscrolling. “I know this is already all over FB and mom’s groups, but I’m really interested in this group’s perspective on what you are going to do about school,” one mom, an essential health care worker, posted in a smaller Facebook group I’m in. She admitted she was worried about being shamed in other, larger social media groups for considering in-person school. Another started: “How are you all dealing with this massive uncertainty right now? I am anxious about not going back to school in person because of the impact on our students and their families, and anxious about going back to school in person because of the impact on us ALL.”

Further anguishing parents is that there’s no universal formula in making a decision. Factors around local infection numbers, school board politics, family economics, mental health, learning loss, and a child’s age and affinity for online school create a complex personal matrix. And no parent alive today has been through this situation before. We can’t fall back on what we’ve always done, or what our own parents did for us. So many of us keep looking for answers that the parent internet has started to feel like one giant search party, everyone scrolling for the story, the argument, the expert opinion, the statistic, or the new data that will help us clarify the “right” thing to do.

As I dove further into these online discussions, I noticed that people were starting to share ideas and writing and statistics from people they thought had some special insight. There was a cut-and-pasted post, supposedly from an unnamed Covid-19 doctor at Duke University Hospital, about why she wouldn’t risk sending her kids to school, which I later found shared in multiple local Facebook groups. There was a long, ranty post about how we don’t know the long-term health effects of Covid-19. I first saw it shared with no author, and another time it was attributed to Dr. Anthony Fauci, for which I found no evidence.

Then there was a post shared by a Facebook friend who said reading it made her reconsider in-person school. It was written by a public school parent in a neighboring state who didn’t claim to be any kind of expert yet had calculated that if his school district reopened with in-person classes, several hundred students would die of Covid-19. Reading his post, I was both scared and puzzled.

As a journalist and former fact-checker, and as someone who has my local Health and Human Services website bookmarked, I knew something didn’t quite add up. It turns out the problem was his math. He made a bunch of errors in his calculation — the statistical likelihood of a child in his school district dying from Covid-19 was close to zero. I messaged him to point out the error, as did a few other commenters, but he declined to change anything in the post. As of this writing, it’s been shared 24,000 times and has more than 600 comments, with many parents thanking him for opening their eyes to the dangers of in-person school.

Since the uncertainty about the upcoming school year set in this summer, I’ve witnessed a steady stream of unsourced and unvetted information circulating among parents who are trying their best to make huge, anxiety-filled, life-altering decisions about school and day care. I get why. Every day we’re bombarded with contradicting information about Covid-19, kids, school openings, and risk as we try our best to tackle the complex pandemic decisions that lie in front of us. But why is it so hard to find trustworthy information? And how should parents navigate decision-making during this unsettling time?

The risks of spreading misinformation online

In mid-March I felt so overwhelmed by the news that I had to shut it off. I took the New York Times app off my phone, too upset to read stories about the overwhelmed hospitals and the death toll in New York, a city I once lived in for nearly 12 years. I removed Apple News from my welcome screen so I wasn’t hit with some shatteringly awful piece of information when I checked a text message.

The only news I allowed myself to consume was from my local paper, the Raleigh News & Observer, so that I could stay up to date on relevant state and local case counts, decisions, and issues. Since the pandemic started, hyperlocal news has never been more relevant as testing, hospitalization, and death rates vary wildly from state to state.

Yet the timing couldn’t be worse for the news industry. Over the past 15 years, more than 2,000 local newspapers have closed, according to a report from the University of North Carolina. Despite the fact that subscriptions and readership are up for some outlets during the pandemic, advertising and live event revenue has tanked, and some experts are calling the financial strain of the pandemic “an extinction-level event.” Nearly 36,000 journalists have lost their jobs, been furloughed, or had their pay cut since the start of the crisis. In the absence of multiple robust, trusted news sources, what thrives online is opinion — and misinformation.

Nora Benavidez, director of US free expression programs at PEN America and an expert on media literacy and misinformation, says part of the pernicious effect of misinformation is that it plays into two psychological phenomena — illusory truth and confirmation bias — that are currently thriving as parents search for answers and make high-stakes decisions. Illusory truth is the idea that repeated exposure to an idea makes us more likely to believe it, such as when we see a post being shared multiple times on social media. “This illusory truth effect can occur despite being aware that the source of a statement is unreliable, despite previously knowing that the information is false,” Dr. Joe Pierre writes in Psychology Today. In other words, seeing multiple people share something that says hundreds of kids in one school district will die could make us more likely to believe that Covid-19 kills a lot of children — even if we know that math is wrong.

Confirmation bias is when we seek out and better absorb information and opinions that validate either our existing worldview or something we hope is true, such as deciding in-person school is the vastly superior choice for your family and then paying attention only to information that validates that belief. “We constantly have to actually undo those passive reactions where it’s just our instinct to want to believe more of what we’ve seen,” Benavidez explains.

Beyond social media, the complexity of the news landscape means it can also be difficult to know which news sources are trustworthy. “Not all local, or national news, for that matter, is created equal,” Viktorya Vilk, director of digital safety and free expression programs at PEN America and lead author of the PEN America report “Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions,” explains. She advises asking yourself a series of questions about a news source. “Have you heard of it? Is it local? Do you trust it? Does it have a masthead? Can you find out who’s actually the leader of it? Do they say anything about an ethics policy or fact-checking policy? Do they correct things when they’ve made mistakes?”

However, even going to “reliable” news sites doesn’t always provide easy answers. I asked Brown University economics professor Emily Oster, co-creator of the COVID Explained website and writer of the ParentData newsletter, about a spate of recent scary-sounding headlines (including “Nearly a Thousand Covid-19 Cases Reported in California Day Cares,” published by an NBC TV affiliate.

“One thousand out of what?” Oster counters. “One of the problems with many of these articles is that there is a lot of reporting of cases and almost no reporting of rates. Remember, the US is big. California is big.” Although it may sound like obvious advice, Benavidez recommends reading beyond headlines, especially before you share, and making sure the articles provide relevant context with regard to numbers.

Benavidez and Oster also recommend primary sources, such as medical institutions, state health department dashboards, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization, as more reliable sources of data. Of course, we don’t always have the time, resources, or expertise to become amateur public health officials or epidemiologists digging through government websites. One easy way to be a more sophisticated consumer of information is to check the credentials of the poster. Can you confirm with a quick search that they’re actually, say, a professor of public health? Take cut-and-pasted text that’s not tied to an original author or news story with a serious grain of salt, and be wary of unsourced numbers, screenshots, or viral memes, even if they “sound right” and echo your own hunches or beliefs.

Not succumbing to panic and actually confirming something is true with additional sources before sharing potentially unreliable information are important parts of the solution.

“We can’t control what others say or do online, but we can control our reactions and if we share it,” explains Benavidez. ”Media literacy is a constant and ongoing process that you’ll get better at as you do it.”

Once you find particular news outlets that meet your standards and that you trust, “Keep going to those sources and ideally pay for them, because if you don’t, they’ll go away, to put it bluntly,” emphasizes Vilk.

How to make a decision when there are no good choices

Although learning about how to find reliable information is important, information alone doesn’t do the toughest part for parents faced with pandemic schooling choices. On the topic of school and day care, Oster cautions that “people should try not to think about this until they are able to actually think about it concretely. Until your school district has said what they’re doing, you can’t develop contingency plans. The first step is [to] just wait until you know what some of the options are. And then start to think about what you see as the alternatives.”

Oster also points out that, despite some drawbacks, social media can be very helpful in connecting with people and sharing resources. Building community and a “kitchen cabinet” of trusted advisers to be sounding boards for ideas as we navigate these uncharted waters can be crucial for parents, and social media platforms can help foster those discussions. “We need to have a community of allies that we’re weighing all of these issues [with], including how to evaluate trustworthy information,” Benavidez points out.

I get how hard it is to sort through the news avalanche right now. My brain is constantly humming with new information and anxieties, fear, and dread that rises and falls with each new headline. Remember back in March, when the surgeon general begged people not to wear masks? Remember when not spending two hours wiping down your groceries after you brought them home was seen as highly reckless? But it’s worth it to slow down, read carefully, evaluate, and avoid panic-sharing as we all do our best to search for solutions to the near-impossible choices we’re being presented with.

As for my decision about in-person kindergarten for my son? After long discussions with my husband, my parents, and a few friends, our choice … was no choice at all. Our school district changed course and decided to go all-virtual for all students for at least the first nine weeks.

I know there is a moment coming, someday, where I’ll have to decide whether to send him back to school. But it’s not today. And in the meantime, my babies will grow older, and I’ll spend many more weeks staring at that empty playground.

Katherine Goldstein is a journalist and the creator of a reported podcast called The Double Shift about a new generation of working mothers. Find her on Twitter @kgeee or sign up for her newsletter.

In 2013, I was a Sheryl Sandberg superfan. When Sandberg’s book, Lean In, came out, I was a 29-year-old hard-charging New York social media strategist and editor. The manifesto felt like a cross between a playbook and a bible. I devoured its contents, and I decided to create my own Lean In Circle of women following a program created by Sandberg’s companion nonprofit, LeanIn.org. I documented the year-long experience at Slate and was even quoted in a later edition of the book, extolling the virtues of starting a circle.

Fast-forward to today, when Sheryl Sandberg has been in the news for several storms of criticisms related to how she handled Russian election meddling on Facebook, where she’s the chief operating officer. A May 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek piece points out that five years later, Lean In may have helped with some incremental advancements for individual women in corporate America, but it doesn’t seem to have moved the needle at all on big issues like overall pay equity.

This week, Michelle Obama declared in front of a stadium-size audience, “And it’s not always enough to lean in, because that shit doesn’t work all the time.” I found myself vigorously nodding in agreement with the former first lady. So what happened in the past five years to transform me from devotee to critic? Now seems like the perfect moment to go back and revisit my own experience with the Lean In movement.

First, the good. Five years ago, when Lean In came out, I was happy with some of my career accomplishments but was hungry for more. I was eager for advice on how to break into that next level of leadership in media and journalism. I was taken with Sandberg’s message, that women may be unconsciously holding themselves back from professional advancement and thought I could reap benefits from joining a circle. When I couldn’t easily find one, I leaned in and started my own.

When I look back at my Lean In circle, there were definitely benefits to our group of around seven. We were all in our late 20s and early 30s with a range of professional goals, such as wanting more leadership responsibility, deciding whether to apply to grad school, or exploring a job change. The point was to encourage each other, be a sounding board, and try to pick new skills by doing the exercises and watching the instructional videos provided by Lean In.

We followed the curriculum, which we accessed online, and met monthly in each other’s Brooklyn apartments for a year. Some of the formalized lessons Lean In provided felt cheesy and stilted, like going around the group to declare, “I’m leaning into this circle because …” But the group stayed committed. About three months into forming our group, we learned that three of the seven women in our group had asked for raises, all inspired by the book or our meetings. Additionally, we had an eye-opening discussion where we noticed how much we all downplayed our own achievements in describing our accomplishments at work.

As I think about Sandberg’s feminist legacy, her true positive contributions came from using her platform to make it common knowledge that women are less likely to negotiate and more uncomfortable talking about our successes, and commonly suffer from impostor syndrome. I also think creating a supportive community for women through these “circles” is a worthy mission, one that rewarded us; around half of the group actually got raises before the end of our time together.

As I dig deeper, I realize our circle had some notable shortcomings that didn’t allow us to fully understand the limits of the Lean In message. While our group had some racial diversity and job industry diversity, we were all well-educated, white-collar New York City professionals, and none of us were mothers.

Many people criticized Sandberg’s message as elitist and out of touch when the book came out. But I didn’t personally bump up against the limitations of her message until something in my life changed dramatically: I became a mom. I now believe that Lean In promoted a completely unrealistic portrait of what working motherhood is like. I knew being a working mom would be tough, but in Sandberg’s cult of hard work and personal responsibility, I thought it would be nothing I couldn’t handle. I could just lean in, or, as Sandberg specifically advised for working women thinking about having a baby: “Don’t leave till you leave,” meaning you shouldn’t step back from work just because you anticipate becoming a mother.

I took her advice seriously in 2014 when I was offered a higher-profile, higher-paying, more demanding job where there would be no other parents on my team, even though I was trying to get pregnant at the time. I remember specifically thinking about Sandberg’s mantra as I left behind a place with a flexible work culture and tons of working parents for a much more traditional office where I’d be the only mom on my team. Being a trailblazer is what leaning in is all about, right? In the Sheryl Sandberg playbook, I had nothing to worry about.

But not only did my Lean In devotion not prepare me for the challenges I faced in the coming years as a new mom, its rose-colored doctrine also supplied me with plenty of damaging illusions.

My son was born in July 2015 with some serious but treatable health problems. His illness filled my earliest moments of motherhood with trauma and anxiety. But I was still back at my desk when my too-short maternity leave was up, because I was terrified that my colleagues would judge me as not committed to my job if I tried to take more time to be with my baby. I went on to lose that job shortly after returning from leave.

This turn of events shattered my self-confidence and led me to question my whole identity as a competent professional. In my darker moments, I was convinced everyone had this working mom thing figured out but me, that I was just personally a failure. I was no longer leaning into negotiations for plum positions of leadership. I felt like I was just scraping by for professional survival.

In the coming years, I started to turn my journalistic attention toward working mothers. It became clear to me that nobody has this whole working mom thing figured out, and it wasn’t because we weren’t leaning in enough. Sandberg, after her husband’s death, publicly admitted that she didn’t fully understand what single mothers go through or how hard it is to lean in when you feel overwhelmed at home. But I don’t still think she fully understands the depth of obstacles mothers face.

While sexual harassment and workplace malfeasance has been unearthed in the public consciousness in the past year like never before, in my own reporting, I’ve found that so much of women’s lack of advancement is due not to a failure to negotiate, or an abstract, generalized sexism, but specifically to motherhood bias.

A recent New York Times investigation into pregnancy discrimination called the problem an “epidemic.” In my New York Times op-ed “The Open Secret of Anti-Mom Bias at Work,” I detail the serious barriers mothers face in hiring and how they are judged more harshly than childless colleagues. For women who have children during the prime childbearing years of 25 to 35, their earnings never recover, and their salaries often drop precipitously after having a kid. All of this does serious, long-term damage to women’s economic prospects.

My feminist thinking about women and workplaces is now in pretty direct opposition to Sandberg’s Lean In message. I believe telling mothers to raise their hands and try harder in the open sea of hostility we face in the workplace is like handing a rubber ducky to someone hit by a tsunami. I think it also inadvertently encourages us to internalize our own discrimination, leading us to blame ourselves for getting passed over for raises, eased out of jobs, not getting called for job interviews, and being denied promotions.

I now believe the greatest lie of Lean In is its underlying message that most companies and bosses are ultimately benevolent, that hard work is rewarded, that if women shed the straitjacket of self-doubt, a meritocratic world awaits us. My own life, and my research and reporting, along with interacting with hundreds of mothers in the past two years, has convinced me this is untrue.

Today, I think my previous warm embrace of corporate feminism has allowed me to reject it more thoughtfully and try to seek out something different. My hard fall off the ledge of leaning in forced me to reinvent my career. I’ve left New York City and have permanently abandoned my old corporate ladder-climbing life. But I still have tons of ambitions. I’ve entered an exciting phase of being a journalist-entrepreneur. I’m much more interested in judging my own successes in terms of personal fulfillment and positive impact on the world, rather than a fancy title and a big salary.

We are now living in an age where mothers at the New York Times, Lyft, and Amazon have banded together to demand change from their leadership on better family leave policies for women employees, including, in Amazon’s case, its hourly warehouse workers. Sen. Kamala Harris and Rep. Pramila Jayapal have just introduced a domestic worker’s bill of rights to Congress, which would finally provide an overlooked group of mostly women with much-needed federal workplace protections. Workers in the fast-food industry and at Google have organized walkouts to fight sexual harassment.

Irrespective of Sandberg’s standing in the court of public opinion, which has undoubtedly changed, the conversation is moving well past her brand of feminism. Women are realizing that looking out for each other is even more powerful than just looking out for ourselves.    

Katherine Goldstein is a journalist and the creator of a reported podcast called The Double Shift, about a new generation of working mothers, out in 2019. Find her on Twitter @kgeee.

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