‘Today’s Dylan Dreyer Admits How Social Media Makes Her Feel ‘Insecure’

Dylan Dreyer got candid about feeling the negative effects of social media.

The Today meteorologist chatted about parenthood with NBC News’ Vicky Nguyen on the Thursday, April 17, episode of her The Parent Chat podcast. While discussing how social media can affect young kids, Dreyer revealed that she is still impacted by it even as an adult.

“I feel icky after I look at Instagram. I’m feeling insecure, and I’m not a very insecure person,” she revealed. “I know my lane, I’m confident in my areas. But I’ll watch Instagram and I’m like, ‘Man, should I be going to Fashion Week? Because it seems like everybody I know here is going to Fashion Week.’ And I’m starting to feel insecure about myself.”

Nguyen went on to note, “You’re a full-grown woman with a confident platform, and it still eats away at you.” Dreyer replied, “[I have] a successful job. I’m a great mom, but it still eats away at you. So, I love that you can have that.”

Dreyer’s confession came after Nguyen revealed that she banned her eldest daughter from joining social media. (Nguyen shares her three girls — Emerson, Odessa, and Renley — with her husband, Brian.)

“I do try to find, also, some ways to manufacture hardship for them, because it’s not built into their lives. … I just try to add a little bit of friction,” she told Dreyer. “The biggest friction I think I’ve added to my eldest is not having her be on social media.”

When asked if her daughter fights her on the decision, Nguyen said, “Luckily, she’s actually a pretty rule-abiding, classic eldest daughter. And so, she recently did a little presentation about why it would be great for her to have access to Instagram.”

Nguyen explained that her daughter recently gave her and her husband a presentation about why she should be allowed on social media. “I also know I have a very unfair advantage because I’ve done the reporting. I’ve talked to the experts,” she noted. “I’m unfairly way more prepared than she is, so I’m ready with my arsenal of facts and research and data. But I want her to make the healthy argument.”

Nguyen said she’s “not naive” to the fact that her eldest daughter has been exposed to social media by her friends. “I also like what Matthew McConaughey said, which is, ‘You want to let them know and figure out who they are before the world starts telling them who they are,'” she shared. “And I think especially for girls — but it’s starting to happen with boys, too — the body image, the self-esteem, the anxiety, the depression rates, like, all of it goes up because they haven’t figured it out yet.”

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Dreyer agreed, stating that kids are “exposed to enough of it.” She even revealed that her eldest son, Calvin, has already opened up to her about some of those struggles. (Dreyer shares her three kids, including sons Oliver and Rusty, with her estranged husband, Brian Fichera.)

“Calvin, he’s 9, he asked me, ‘Do I look fat?’ And I was like, ‘What?’ First of all, ‘You look healthy,'” she shared. “We didn’t have Instagram and social media growing up, but we certainly had the magazines. We had all of that. So, I do think this is one of those things where when your kids are 25, they’re going to be like, ‘Thank you for letting me find myself.'”

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