“Would people be okay if this were a father and daughter???” one social media user remarked.

“Our boys are our sons, not our companions,” one mom said. “LEAVE THEM SPACE TO BE.”

“Would people be okay if this were a father and daughter???” another remarked. “It’s weird.”

At one point in the piece, Mollen describes her boys as “the most emotionally high-maintenance men I’ve ever dated” and describes her sons’ hypothetical future partners as “some crazy bitch who will weaponize my flaws in therapy.” 

When her eldest started texting a peer, a 12-year-old girl, Mollen said she could already tell that the girl was “my brand of toxic.” 

“I complained to Jason that I wanted to intervene before he got hurt and that she wasn’t even hotter than me,” she wrote.

Mollen may be bearing the brunt of the current wave of criticism, but she’s hardly the first “boy mom” to post content so questionable it verges on parody. 

On TikTok, there’s no shortage of videos to convince you that the “boy mom” to toxic mother-in-law pipeline is very much a thing: Women filming themselves crying because their sons are “going to get married and move away” someday. Women calling their babies their “lil boyfriend” or “forever boyfriend.” Women who are weirdly confrontational toward their sons’ hypothetical future wives.

It’s cringey posts like these that make some women with sons back away from identifying as “boy moms” and simply call themselves a “mom to boys.”

“I actually really despise the construct of boy moms and girl dads. I think it’s lazy, among many other not-great qualities,” said Kate Auletta, the editor-in-chief of Scary Mommy and Romper.

Abby Eckel, an online content creator and mother of two young boys, has previously spoken out about what she sees as the “emotionally incestuous” tendency among some boy moms to treat their sons like “pseudo-husbands.” She believes that putting so much emotional weight on boys ultimately does them ― and their future romantic partners ― a disservice.

“It creates this idea that the world is expected to center their comfort, to evolve around their comfort, that women are meant to serve them, to, you know, make them the center of their world, while also saying, ‘no woman will essentially ever be good enough for my son,’” she told HuffPost.

Like Eckel, content creator Payal Desai, a mother of two boys, says she feels bad for the sons of overly intense “boy moms.” Still, she suspects Mollen may have been intentionally stirring the pot, posting “ragebait” to generate outrage and attract attention to her Instagram page.

“In the case that it isn’t, what we’re seeing is a mother who hasn’t separated her identity from her son, which is unfortunately pretty common,” Desai told HuffPost, adding that favoring your sons feels “rooted in patriarchy” by “giving the men in your life, no matter what form they come in, power and priority over your own sense of self.” 

“And the language she uses about dating her son, being jealous of girls he’s involved with, wanting his future wife to be motherless, places the burden of managing her emotions directly on him,” she said. 

The job of parents is to raise kids to embrace the world and prepare them for their own independent, fulfilling lives, “not trap them in our unhealed issues,” Desai said. 

Jennifer Chappell Marsh, a marriage and family therapist in San Diego, sympathized with Mollen when she saw the viral post.

“She’s grieving, her marriage is ending, and she’s scared of losing her sons, too, but that fear is coming out sideways,” Marsh told HuffPost.

When a primary attachment relationship ends, people look for connection elsewhere. For mothers of boys, that somewhere is often their sons. It’s not always conscious or done with any intent or hurt, but the emotional pull is real, the therapist said.

“What Mollen wrote reflects that,” Marsh said. “It’s dark humor with an underlying truth of where she’s getting her emotional needs met.”

“In attachment theory, this is called enmeshment,” she said. “The boundary between a parent’s emotional life and their children’s dissolves. The son stops being just her son and starts functioning as her person.”

Marsh said “emotional incest” might apply to some boy moms’ relationship with their kids, too: The term sounds icky, but it’s nothing physical. Instead, it describes a child being recruited to meet emotional needs that belong in an adult relationship.

“When a son becomes his mother’s confidant, her comfort, her primary source of closeness, he’s functioning as a surrogate spouse,” she said. “The relationship looks loving from the outside. Inside it, the child is doing a job he was never supposed to do.”

“Kids sense that ― they always do,” she said. “So instead of a son just growing up, he starts monitoring her emotional state. He learns to manage her feelings before his own. He becomes a very vigilant, good reader of the room.” 

As an adult, Marsh said, a “boy mom” son may seek out partners who need caretaking, because that’s what love looked like in his own experience. And he may feel guilt any time he chooses his partner over his mother.

“Or he may wall off entirely because closeness has always come with obligation,” she said. “The enmeshment doesn’t stay in childhood. It becomes the template.” 

“A lot of mothers read that essay and recognized something of themselves in it,” she said. “The problem isn’t having those feelings. It’s using your child to hold them. Kids need to know that growing up won’t destroy their mother.”

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.