Parental stress is a nationwide health crisis according to the U.S. Surgeon General's 2024 advisory. To allay stress, expecting parents seek advice and share experiences in a variety of venues, from in-person birth education classes and parenting groups to virtual communities, for example, BabyCenter, a moderated online forum community with over 4 million members in the United States alone. In this study, we aim to understand how parents talk about pregnancy, birth, and parenting by analyzing 5.43M posts and comments from the April 2017--January 2024 cohort of 331,843 BabyCenter "birth club" users (that is, users who participate in due date forums or "birth clubs" based on their babies' due dates). Using BERTopic to locate breastfeeding threads and LDA to summarize themes, we compare documents in breastfeeding threads to all other birth-club content. Analyzing time series of word rank, we find that posts and comments containing anxiety-related terms increased steadily from April 2017 to January 2024. We used an ensemble of topic models to identify dominant breastfeeding topics within birth clubs, and then explored trends among all user content versus those who posted in threads related to breastfeeding topics. We conducted Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to identify the most common topics in the full population, as well as within the subset breastfeeding population. We find that the topic of sleep dominates in content generated by the breastfeeding population, as well anxiety-related and work/daycare topics that are not predominant in the full BabyCenter birth club dataset.

翻译：根据美国卫生总监2024年的建议，父母压力已成为全国性的健康危机。为缓解压力，准父母们从线下的生育教育课程和育儿团体到虚拟社区（例如BabyCenter——仅在美国就拥有超过400万会员的受监管在线论坛社区）等多种渠道寻求建议并分享经验。在本研究中，我们旨在通过分析2017年4月至2024年1月期间331,843名BabyCenter“生育俱乐部”用户（即根据婴儿预产期参与预产期论坛或“生育俱乐部”的用户）的543万条帖子和评论，来理解父母如何讨论怀孕、分娩和育儿。我们使用BERTopic定位母乳喂养主题帖，并采用LDA归纳主题，将母乳喂养主题帖中的文档与所有其他生育俱乐部内容进行比较。通过分析词汇排名的时间序列，我们发现包含焦虑相关术语的帖子和评论从2017年4月到2024年1月持续稳定增长。我们采用主题模型集成方法识别生育俱乐部中的主导母乳喂养主题，进而比较所有用户内容与在母乳喂养相关主题帖中发帖用户的趋势差异。通过潜在狄利克雷分配（LDA）主题建模，我们识别了整体用户群体以及母乳喂养子群体中最常见的主题。研究发现，睡眠主题在母乳喂养群体生成的内容中占主导地位，同时焦虑相关及工作/托育主题也较为突出，而这些主题在完整的BabyCenter生育俱乐部数据集中并不占主导。