I don't remember the last time I was so happy to be Black and ignored by capitalism. Only after reading this have I realized that I've been free to make motherhood mine because American society doesn't expect me to mother at all.
I admit that I used to follow Naomi Davis of Love Taza. I have 3 kids around the same ages as her oldest kids. I’d read her posts and be torn between disbelief that traveling with 3 little kids and navigating NYC with them was supposedly so easy and, otoh, desire to believe the fantasy because the photos were so pretty, lol.
There were parts that I found really distasteful - sometimes they’d cross a line for me by monetizing supposedly special moments with their kids. For example, I remember one time Naomi took her oldest daughter out for a special “mother daughter” day yet it turned out to be an ad for jeans. And it was heavily photographed too so I guess Josh was along to document it (he acted as her photographer at the time)? Did the daughter understand why he’d be along on her special outing with mom? Idk, it was kinda weird and starting to verge too much on the Truman Show for me.
Related to this, I did read Petersen’s book and I was disappointed that she didn’t have much to say on the inherent “ickiness” of these influencers using their kids, who aren’t old enough to give consent no matter what they may say to the contrary, to make money. There’s a difference between a fashion influencer who occasionally mentions their kids to what “Momfluencers” are doing which is commodifying their family lives and their children’s childhoods. And again, if you follow along for any length of time like I did with the Davis family, it does start to become very Truman Show-esque. When the kids grow up and look back on their childhood memories, are they going to wonder what was real and authentic and what was staged to sell jeans and applesauce?
There’s also the fact that when they grow up, these kids will have a digital footprint the size of Montana that they’ll never be able to scrub away and that they didn’t ask for. As a parent, I think it’s important to protect my kids’ privacy and anonymity until they are old enough to make decisions for themselves.
Thank you for saying this point about children being unable to consent. I know this something that I personally have struggled with as I’ve gotten older. My mother will regularly post a photo of me on Facebook, and I often have to ask her to please not tag me in that, or don’t post it altogether. And she’s the top of the iceberg in terms of how disrespectful some parents are about this! It feels like this is a point that, on the whole, younger generations understand more acutely than older ones: your digital identity is extremely important to curate, as it has a huge influence on IRL existence (esp. certain employment prospects) for better or worse. I have oodles of respect for Very Online People (mostly YouTubers, as that’s my main online space these days) who rarely to never show their kids (e.g. Vlogbrothers, or withwendy). Your online presence is *yours* to do with what you will; keep your kid out of it, or at least limit your sharing about them to the least public arenas.
Saying this makes me a bit unpopular with my friends and family, but I appreciate you pointing it out because I have strong feelings about the digital footprint so many parents are creating without their kids' consent. We have no idea what the tech companies or others will do with that data by the time the kids grow up, but we do know they're harvesting and making money off of it.
The idea of Ballerina Farm being a "good mom" is where, I think, the whiteness stuff REALLY shows up for me. She fairly regularly posts content of situations that are actually pretty dangerous for kids (like tiny infants unsecured in vehicles) that would result in accusations of her being negligent if she wasn't a rich, pretty white lady. But she gets a "they are farm kids, the rules are different" pass from her followers that REALLY makes clear that people are romanticizing the farming lifestyle (hang out with real farmers for long enough and you'll find that almost all of them have a story about a kid being killed or maimed in a farming accident). This idea that because their life looks so wholesome that it can't be dangerous is really wild to observe.
omg YES! The amount of CONSTANT safety policing in the comment sections of a few disabled moms and crunchy Black moms I follow is truly wild, while Hannah always seems to get a free pass
Wow, Sarah, thank you for sharing about how social media influenced your decision to have a third child. My jaw actually dropped because I don't see that discussed openly often at all. There can be so much reluctance and fear around transitioning out of the prescribed child bearing role and you really nailed it in that small paragraph.
ETA: I don't have 3 kids, but I very much relate to this. I remember feeling oddly lost after my 2nd kid was born and I was no longer deciding whether to be pregnant, trying to get pregnant,.or being pregnant. I almost convinced myself to try for a 3rd, I think in part because of that lostness and also because it would validate the image of me as one of those hardcore MOMS. Even having "just" one kid felt immensely disruptive and difficult and exhausting, but no one could see it. How many kids does it take before you feel like someone sees the work, sacrifice, commitment, depletion of yourself that you are putting forth as a mother?? It doesn't make SENSE to think this way, but it was definitely part of my mental soup at the time.
I stopped using Facebook in maybe 2018 and quit Instagram in 2020. I am so, SO happy to not have that "content" put in front of my eyes constantly any more. I used to be self employed and needed to create content for IG to promote myself. Even as someone with a tiny smattering of followers, the mental health ramifications of it were just too weird. When my business closed early in the pandemic, I was so relieved to not feel like I needed to be on SM any more.
The visibility thing is really insightful, thank you. I know this will seem like a bit of a weird reach but it reminds me of the effed up dynamics that can be part of experiencing chronic illness or invisible illness; there can be relief in framing up your challenges in a way that others quickly see and understand (whether that’s a diagnosis, or some culturally acceptable physical evidence, or whatever) because it’s shorthand for a complex and frequently undermined experience. When certain things aren’t “real” until they fit into some box, it can be pretty isolating and invalidating, and I get the drive to find that box.
I agree. I could read thousands of words about fertility decisions and “aging out” of being the parent of young kids. I also feel like I’ve seen influencers be accused of having a new baby for content or to bolster their image-- really just an admission of this same concept at work.
I am sort of speechless and I have a lot to think about... it’s almost like I just realized that the decision to have kids can be something that holds the possibility of being influenced. I always thought it was something sacred that social media couldn’t touch because in my mind it’s such a huge deal that is nobody’s business but yours. But if I’m being really really honest with myself I HAVE been influenced by certain lifestyles and visions that are presented to me when I think about the (likely) possibility of starting a family and what I think it will be like. I feel duped by the culture, I thought I could see through these kinds of things. Thank you, AHP, excellent interview.
Lula, I completely relate to this. I think that I told myself the same thing for a long time. Or even when I would have moments of awareness that I was being influenced about family size by what I saw on social media I would stifle it down because to admit that and sit with it feels very uncomfortable. At the same time, it makes perfect sense - it's designed to make folks want to have/replicate what they see (or think they see - since as AHP and Sarah discuss in this conversation, viewing someone's "content" is not actually knowing a person and how they are in their 3D life). If you're constantly seeing all these images of families with 2, 3, 4 kids, it's going to get in your head, especially when you're getting an idealized, curated look.
I'd even argue that often the white influencers who present a more "realistic" insight into the more chaotic, messy side of parenting are often still inadvertently feeding into the idea that female exhaustion (which is the sister to martyrdom) is proof of authenticity and commitment to motherhood.
I feel slightly bad being critical about this because it often feels like women are going to get cut down no matter what they present and it f***ing stinks. But I know that for me, viewing this stuff definitely had a negative impact on my self image and at times had me considering making big life choices and financial decisions (like having a 3rd kid, which I ended up not doing) that were way more in response to what I was seeing than a true desire I had. That is scary to think about and to consider where that might be happening in your life. And - I'm really glad I didn't have a 3rd because while OF COURSE I LOVE MY CHILDREN it turns out that even "just" one kid was immeasurably hard, 2 even harder, and 3 probably would have put my mental (and physical) health completely over the edge. So there's that :-)
As an older and childless Gen Xer I find this discussion upsetting and gross. I have a few of these “momfluencers” in my Insta feed and I check out their #grwm posts occasionally with curiosity, disbelief, and despair. In between assembling these wardrobes and filming themselves wearing the free clothes, how many hours are left in the day to, um, parent? And some of them claim to have other outside-the-home jobs!
Why do younger newer moms need Instagram to tell them how to parent? This is an honest question. Where are the moms, grandmoms, aunties, older sisters, godmoms, family friends who ostensibly filled this role before we had the internet? I get that all influencers exist to sell us stuff we don’t need. But I find it hard to believe that young women don’t know how to parent without momfluencers. I’ve just assumed that people tune into these feeds for shopping tips and escapist entertainment. I’m sad about my own naïveté. How lonely and alienated we Americans have become.
I don't think it's moms looking to slavishly emulate people on Insta, it's moms looking for community. I'm going through some things, how do I cope? How have other people with similar sensibilities done it? I would 100% rather ask the internet than my own mom, who 1) is out of touch and doesn't understand how times have changed and 2) doesn't really get me. I enjoyed the mention of cloth diapers, researching those led me to a couple of great online communities and friendships, many of which have lasted even as I'm getting ready to send my kid off to college. It's sort of been my personal Greek chorus as I navigate my way through motherhood.
Most people know that mommy blogs/accounts aren't real life and how much it takes to curate it. (The trick is to take in the info without simultaneously feeling bad about oneself.) I think they've filled the niche that magazines used to occupy, ones like Better Homes and Gardens and Good Housekeeping.
Women have always been judged for their parenting choices and the SAHM/working mom wars are still alive and well, mostly because everyone is insecure about their choices. There is always the road not taken, and the responsibility of raising a child makes those other roads look that much more tempting. Mommy blogs/mominfluencers are designed to exploit that insecurity.
This comment seems pretty harsh. As someone with elementary and younger kids, I would say that most parents I know turn to both parents and folks in their communities along with seeing how folks online do things.
As a sidenote, I would also mention that anyone who has had kids in the last few years has had their access to in-person community affected by covid. My oldest was 4 when covid started and his experience of a neighborhood network with lots of playdates and nursery school family nights totally evaporated. My middle child who was just under 2 at the start of covid had a very different experience.
That's a really good point re: how this was probably amplified by covid.
I have a 2012 kid and online was where I found people who were thoughtful and grounded about parenting in ways that really resonated. I'll go to the mat for what online community can offer. Reading this article, though, I am really glad to not be doing it now. These accounts are not the ones I would ever have been following but the idea of having be unable to escape their influence even if you don't sounds rough.
Totally. I am a childless elder millennial but also a stepparent. I guarantee I am not the target audience for this stuff, which is both a VAST relief and kind of isolating; it’s like parenting without the info-sharing and sense of shared experience that moms can find more easily.
I’m also someone whose decision not to have children of my own was absolutely influenced by early mommy blogging. Is that the flip side of “influencing” around these decision, before influencing was quite a thing? Otherwise known as “access to more information” before it became “access to TOO MUCH information?” I don’t know. I feel like there is or was a right-sized version of online parenting stuff that fostered connection without quite so much capitalism and that’s what we wish for but can’t find in 2023.
Late Boomer/early GenXer here -- my own childlessness was not by choice, but I am sometimes glad I didn't wind up parenting when I see the "intensive" helicopter-style parenting that seems to be the norm these days (vs the way I was parented when I was growing up). I find it exhausting just reading about it. If this is what it takes to be a "good" parent these days, no wonder so many women are choosing to opt out!
I don’t think Sara is saying that younger moms need influencers to tell them how to parent, but that it’s hard to fully avoid their, well, influence if you’re a new mom participating in online spaces at all.
I’ve certainly found that to be true, which is why I find this discussion (and Sara’s work in general) so insightful and valuable. I’m a new parent who’s lucky enough to have strong positive familial ties and good examples of parenting in my own life (my older sister, my mom for the most part, friends, etc.). I also consider myself quite media literate, and have filled my media diet with critiques like this one AND YET there’s still ways that momfluencer culture infiltrates my brain, especially in the areas of motherhood where I feel the most insecure/inadequate (feeding is a big one, which Virginia Sole-Smith has been a great counter-programming resource for).
For example, this morning I was giving my toddler some yogurt for breakfast, and I briefly felt anxious that the yogurt had too much sugar. Like, that this might be bad for her and I’m a lazy mom for feeding it to her when I should have tried harder to diversify her palate or whatever. Images of Julie O’Rourke (rudyjude) and those “Everything my 18-month-old ate today” gentle parenting reels ran through my head which I KNOW aren’t a helpful depiction of real life and of course the yogurt is fine. And I think of how much more dominant those images would be if I felt more isolated, more insecure, etc.
I see how you could come away with these questions/conclusions, looking at this post in isolation; but I think of this as part of the CSEU (Culture Study Extended Universe) and find a lot of insight by doing so. I don’t think you can approach this without the larger context of how radically some things have changed since we grew up. In answer to your questions, I would point to previous posts on geographic separation from parents, friends, community; how childcare has changed, including stuff like babysitting; social media in general; cost of living in general; how the nature of work has changed (which changes home life in turn); optimization of everything; the impact of the pandemic on parents (often specifically mothers); so, so much goes into why things are the way they are, why this specific thing exists in this way.
“...how many hours are left in the day to, um, parent?” is a pretty modern and maybe even U.S.-centric concept. Fwiw, there is some interesting discourse on when did parenting become a verb vs. a physical state/relationship descriptor.
Yes! How much of this is based on the deeply harmful narrative that we can’t trust ourselves to make our own decisions...for our bodies, our family, our lives?!
I don’t know but I’m equally curious! I was free and curious and fully myself until I was in high school and that’s when I started to doubt my own judgment. And talking with other female writers on here, I know it’s not a unique experience.
I can tell you when I was pregnant with my son in the mid nineties I was freaked out by how many people were trying to sell me things to do the job of parenting effectively. And what was even worse is that I was inclined to listen to them because it seemed like such an amazingly hard job and whose to say which product I needed to avoid catastrophe or to be a good mother? I feel like this is just a fancier version of this. Remember these mom blogs are all product placement.
Raising kids today is so vastly different than raising kids in our parents age that it is by and large pointless to speak wth parents, grandparents, aunties etc. about it. I am the mother of an incoming college freshman daughter and a rising high school sophomore son. Our parents/in laws always tell us that we are too involved with our kids these days. My friends hear the same thing over and over again. We were told last year that we should just let our daughter figure out the college process on her own. That is what our parents did with us. I cannot even imagine letting kids figure out the process on their own now. High school classes are harder and require more work than they did in my days, the college process is so much more competitive etc. Speaking to parents/grandparents leads to more frustration than anything else. Friends are a huge help and a great source of information but everyone is so buys because everyone in my circle has 2 working outside of the home parents ( also a difference from our parents time), kids in sports/activities and are taking care of aging parents to some extent. Influencers/the internet is just another source of information/validation for many of us.
Part of the issue might be that women are having children at older ages than previous generations? By the time my child was born, my aunts were dead. My grandmother was alive, but had Alzheimers. My mother and I did not have a healthy relationship.
I have a wonderful sister-in-law that I turned to for advice, but her ability to help had limits because all children are different. For example, if my baby struggled to sleep and hers hadn’t struggled, then she didn’t have advice to offer.
I also think sleep-deprivation plays a tremendous role in the early years of parenthood. I found it very easy to doubt myself and feel desperate when I was surviving on 15-minute increments of sleep! (There’s a reason why sleep deprivation is used as a torture method.)
My parental confidence and ability to problem-solve grew exponentially when: (a) my child started sleeping for longer stretches of time; and (b) my child could verbalize their thoughts/feelings, thereby taking a lot of guesswork out of parenting.
I also think that it’s important to remember that a lot of parenting in the early years happens in the middle of the night. When you’re breastfeeding from 2:00 to 2:45 a.m., you can’t call a friend or pop over to your neighbour’s house for advice/support. But you can use your one free hand to grab your phone and start mindlessly scrolling through Instagram in a desperate attempt to keep yourself awake during the feeding so that you don’t drop your baby. I can see how new parents would easily get sucked into a momfluencer's world.
This is so great! It completely lit a fire for me on a trend I experience first hand ad nauseam.
I work with rural and small town kids (in Anne Helen’s old stomping grounds) on college access. A lot of that is working with families and moms. And this exposes me to the whole “empty nest” phenomenon IRL and online.
We all feel when (if) our kids go to college. A person who was a center of the home isn’t there any more. It’s a huge shift in your family dynamic, relationship with your spouse if you have one; even your pets feels it.
But some parents REALLY fall hard. They grieve like it’s a death and it sometimes threatens their kids ability to engage in the next phase in life.
And it’s become a whole social media thing. Check out the FB a group Grown and Flown this time of year.
Anyway, I was caught in the idea that we are offered Mom as our identity with NOTHING after that, and it makes a lot more sense.
I am dropping off my oldest for her freshman year of college in a few days and I am feeling this 100%. It's funny though because on paper I have many more identities than my mom or mother in law ever had ( VP at work, mentor to many, mom to two etc) but there is no identity more important to me than the mom one. I just think that our generation parents very differently than our parents did. For most of us, we are way more invested in the day to day lives of our kids than our parents were. I also think that we worry about our kids' futures more/in different ways than our parents did. Neither my mom or my mother in law cried when I or my husband left for college. I think to them, raising kids was a "job" and this milestone was a sign that in part, their job was done. Not that they did not love us or support us but it was just very different. I see this too in how much less our parents are involved in their grandkids' lives than our grandparents were in ours. Most of my friends have the same experience and it is not because of distance... their parents tell them that they raised their own kids and it is now our turn. I also think that we are going to grandparent very differently than our parents are.
I hope everything goes well! This is a huge change for your family, even with all those other identities you have. The other thing that’s interesting comparing our college going to our kids is how much less contact we had. I only called home every couple weeks and the calls were short because of the cost.. But you can have pretty much constant contact if you both want it!
Yes! Finding the right frequency of contact will be trial and error I think. I think 2 years of pandemic living with teens is also making this change hard.... I keep telling myself that this is the end of chapter, not the end of the book. Thank you so much for your well wishes!
It takes a little doing to find that balance with contacting your college kid. We have family group chat and also a Snapchat group -- I only joined Snap to hear from my kids. Basically whenever my daughter calls I talk to her, but we don’t have regular sunday calls like my parents and I did in college.
I can relate! Dropping off our oldest at college was a big deal. And then... our relationship changed! He's now graduated, self-supporting, and living on the other coast. I love chatting, sharing memes and music, talking politics, and visiting / traveling with him (and his lovely girlfriend). It's all very fun. Our middle kid starts college in a couple weeks. There was no drop-off: he chose to live off campus at a state school a couple hours away, and moved himself in a month ago. We took him out for lunch last weekend. I figure short take-him-and-friends-out-for-meals visits are the path for now, and providing practical support ("here's a Costco card") as he transitions to living independently. Each of our kids needs very different things, and as they each move on to their next stage, it's opening up new possibilities--also fun!
Wow. That really puts some things into perspective for me--thanks! I'm a cis-het, married, mom of three. I've always worked, and been the sole breadwinner since our middle kid was born (19 years ago this week!). I got SO MUCH CRAP from so many directions (my mom, friends who had kids and were at home with their kids, random acquaintances) when the kids were little about how "sad" it was that I was not able to be home with my kids. So very many comments! Sure, it would have been great to work less and travel less for work back then, but I had a mortgage to pay, we needed health insurance, and we had three kids to educate, and so I worked and did my best on all the fronts. And now, at the other end of those chapters (one kid still at home), I'm seeing some of the people who didn't respect my choices and circumstances experiencing that empty nest loss. Your comment gives me a gateway to compassion and also helps to contextualize the "you're so lucky to have had a career" discussion: we all make choices, and those choices all involve tradeoffs, some of which are painful. Doesn't matter which path you take; what does matter is whether the tradeoffs are ones you can live with.
I'm childless, by circumstance; I found out I had POV at 37 after I got my fertility tested. Being childless, but wanting to have had children, I pay more attention to this stuff than other childless people might, especially because many of my friends had children around the time I found out I couldn't. Anyway, I was surprised at how much becoming a mother rocked their worlds, sense of self/confidence, and continues too. I think the ache for shared experience and community and need for validation is incredibly powerful. I know it is very much for me as I journey through early perimenopause. And these types of life transitions can be so lonely. If there had been the kind of "menoinluencer" stuff ten years ago as there is momfluencer stuff, who knows what (other terrible) rabbit hole I would have went down (and how mush STUFF I would have bought!). Anyway, I just wanted to empathize with what I think is sometimes the initial motivation of the content creation and the ultimate consumption - to feel less alone, to be better understood, and make sense of a massive life shift.
Oh, yeah, it's definitely here and going to grow. On one hand, I'm so grateful for the amount of information and resources that are available now, but at the same time, worry about the judgement and pressure, plus confusion that may come from it (re: natural vs "unnatural" approaches to symptoms, collapsing of experience into the one, right kind, the "best" way to do menopause). I'm so glad you're ok now. 😊
If a momfluencer and children weave their way into the golden rod fields and no one is there to photograph it, were [checks notes] solitude, silence, and privacy really had?
It feels timely; my husband and I were recently comparing our Instagram feeds, which since the birth of our 15 mo have become terribly kid centric. We realized all of his feeds are fear mongering (don't slide with your kid!! Feed your kid fish or their brain won't develop!! Ah!) and all of mine are about the complex, need-an-advanced-degree-in-developmental-psychology dance of raising good, well behaved, thoughtful, independent, happy, and emotionally intelligent humans. I'm sure we've partially & accidentally self-curtated these different narratives... But damn are they gendered.
Anywho, thank you for the permission slip to NOT follow these accounts and embrace the dozens of toys strewn over my floors.
So true!!! I think this is why I'm forever loving Pinterest. Not mom Pinterest but like yummy plant based recipes and tattoos Pinterest ha. The last frontier where my role & politics can be left behind.
Yes, and even the digital emotional labor - of sourcing the recommendations, hunting for items on local 'free stuff' groups, etc - is gendered. I've noticed that even if a dad does the physical picking-up of an item, it's almost always a mom who looked for it and typed yes on something that another mom posted. And the momfluencers are part of this recommendation ecosystem. On one hand, social capital and community spaces for new mothers. On the other hand, yet more gendered digital labor.
My husband and I both follow a lot of “comedy parenting” accounts but his are totally titled to “when you ask your wife if you can play golf” memes whereas I get all the “make sure your kids overhear you saying how wonderful they are!” “Keep exposing your kids to broccoli” even though we know almost child will touch broccoli between the ages of 2 and 18
The gendered experience of parenting came as an unwelcome shock to me, I will say. Even tho my husband was the "at-home" parent, I still got the calls. Weird.
Ah! That's so wild. I'm so attuned to that stuff... My kid is so young we haven't even gotten to that yet but I know it's coming and am always wondering how to reduce it
Just keep repeating! In one memorable example, my youngest had a fever and needed to be picked up from day care immediately. I was like “I’m sorry, but I’m on a work trip in NYC. Please call my husband, and if you can’t reach him, continue down the list.” That solved it for the center’s director, but there’s always new staff, and they always need re-training on this.
“I often think about how effectively aesthetics have been sold to me as a placeholder for personhood.” What a great line. This describes perfectly my unease with social media generally, particularly the momfluencer space. Can’t wait to read this book.
What a great interview! I’m an old, chronically online millennial with two kids, aged almost 10 and 6. Momfluencer culture surprisingly hasn’t flooded my feeds, though it’s there. I wonder if part of this is because of timing, as the interview points out—it was less of a thing a decade ago. The pushback / antidote insta account to aestheticized motherhood is @officialsadbeige which I’m sure many folks here will know. It started as Hayley (sad beige) doing a funny Werner Herzog bit as voiceover for niche children’s products, like white wooden everything and expensive potato sacks re-purposed as onesies, but it’s become a commentary on / forum for the difficulty and joy of parenting in 2023. It’s also made me laugh a lot. I love it.
I love @officialsadbeige! A friend of mine admitted she was just about to purchase a beige wooden “educational” toy just before discovering this account, then promptly realised how unnecessary it was. We all know kids love the rainbow plastic stuff...
I'm sharing this link to save someone else a little confusion. The Ruby Warrington book is "Women without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood." I went to look up the book and couldn't find it at first because I searched for "Women without Children."
Piggybacking on this helpful comment to also recommend WITHOUT CHILDREN by Peggy O'Donnell Heffington, which probably came up in your search. I haven't read Warrington's book, and it looks like they both came out this year, but I really enjoyed Heffington's.
Ruby Warrington's book is excellent, and she did a podcast episode for Sounds True's Insights at the Edge podcast that is absolutely fantastic. Well worth listening to if you don't have children, by choice or circumstance, and feel constantly and demeaningly othered for it.
Fundie Fridays has a hilarious video about Kelly Havens.
The bit about book influencing about the end of this interview stopped me in my tracks, because a friend of a friend's wife pivoted to trying to be a "book influencer" after she left her MLM. Monetizing your life seems so exhausting to me.
I’ll have to grab a copy, since my clients keep hiring these folks. I’ve always suspected that they have spread the influence of upper-middle-class motherhood standards deeper than ever into the middle class...I can’t think of worse factory of needless anxiety. Proliferating needless moral alternatives is one of the more destabilizing effects of media. It causes self-doubt your own social network is not raising.
This is the modern day exemplification of domestic containment (Elaine Tyler May) and I have sooo many thoughts. Is our national uncertainty and terror of the near future what makes this so appealing? Why are we attracted commodified whiteness?
Maybe the most demoralizing thing about the North Idaho story is that a good slug of the people responsible for this won't be fazed by the certain and foreseeable increases in infant or maternal mortality. Something bad happens, it's the will of God.
Yep, this is true. As in : We can’t understand now in our grief why God called mom, baby, both home so soon but one day we will understand His Perfect Will. Meanwhile they are happy in the loving arms of Jesus.
In contrast, a whole bunch of other things that happen are because the will of God is being thwarted, by Obama, the damn libruls, trans-people, foreigners, pretty much anyone who disagrees with them.
Yes and these attitudes seem perfectly consistent to them, through the lens of their reading of the Bible, prayer, personal revelation, preaching, and church dogma. Many feel persecuted and discriminated against but take solace in the example of the early church martyrs. The political right has been extremely successful in identifying targets (eg predators and trans people) that can be used to manipulate these Christians.
I don't remember the last time I was so happy to be Black and ignored by capitalism. Only after reading this have I realized that I've been free to make motherhood mine because American society doesn't expect me to mother at all.
I admit that I used to follow Naomi Davis of Love Taza. I have 3 kids around the same ages as her oldest kids. I’d read her posts and be torn between disbelief that traveling with 3 little kids and navigating NYC with them was supposedly so easy and, otoh, desire to believe the fantasy because the photos were so pretty, lol.
There were parts that I found really distasteful - sometimes they’d cross a line for me by monetizing supposedly special moments with their kids. For example, I remember one time Naomi took her oldest daughter out for a special “mother daughter” day yet it turned out to be an ad for jeans. And it was heavily photographed too so I guess Josh was along to document it (he acted as her photographer at the time)? Did the daughter understand why he’d be along on her special outing with mom? Idk, it was kinda weird and starting to verge too much on the Truman Show for me.
Related to this, I did read Petersen’s book and I was disappointed that she didn’t have much to say on the inherent “ickiness” of these influencers using their kids, who aren’t old enough to give consent no matter what they may say to the contrary, to make money. There’s a difference between a fashion influencer who occasionally mentions their kids to what “Momfluencers” are doing which is commodifying their family lives and their children’s childhoods. And again, if you follow along for any length of time like I did with the Davis family, it does start to become very Truman Show-esque. When the kids grow up and look back on their childhood memories, are they going to wonder what was real and authentic and what was staged to sell jeans and applesauce?
There’s also the fact that when they grow up, these kids will have a digital footprint the size of Montana that they’ll never be able to scrub away and that they didn’t ask for. As a parent, I think it’s important to protect my kids’ privacy and anonymity until they are old enough to make decisions for themselves.
Thank you for saying this point about children being unable to consent. I know this something that I personally have struggled with as I’ve gotten older. My mother will regularly post a photo of me on Facebook, and I often have to ask her to please not tag me in that, or don’t post it altogether. And she’s the top of the iceberg in terms of how disrespectful some parents are about this! It feels like this is a point that, on the whole, younger generations understand more acutely than older ones: your digital identity is extremely important to curate, as it has a huge influence on IRL existence (esp. certain employment prospects) for better or worse. I have oodles of respect for Very Online People (mostly YouTubers, as that’s my main online space these days) who rarely to never show their kids (e.g. Vlogbrothers, or withwendy). Your online presence is *yours* to do with what you will; keep your kid out of it, or at least limit your sharing about them to the least public arenas.
Saying this makes me a bit unpopular with my friends and family, but I appreciate you pointing it out because I have strong feelings about the digital footprint so many parents are creating without their kids' consent. We have no idea what the tech companies or others will do with that data by the time the kids grow up, but we do know they're harvesting and making money off of it.
The idea of Ballerina Farm being a "good mom" is where, I think, the whiteness stuff REALLY shows up for me. She fairly regularly posts content of situations that are actually pretty dangerous for kids (like tiny infants unsecured in vehicles) that would result in accusations of her being negligent if she wasn't a rich, pretty white lady. But she gets a "they are farm kids, the rules are different" pass from her followers that REALLY makes clear that people are romanticizing the farming lifestyle (hang out with real farmers for long enough and you'll find that almost all of them have a story about a kid being killed or maimed in a farming accident). This idea that because their life looks so wholesome that it can't be dangerous is really wild to observe.
omg YES! The amount of CONSTANT safety policing in the comment sections of a few disabled moms and crunchy Black moms I follow is truly wild, while Hannah always seems to get a free pass
Wow, Sarah, thank you for sharing about how social media influenced your decision to have a third child. My jaw actually dropped because I don't see that discussed openly often at all. There can be so much reluctance and fear around transitioning out of the prescribed child bearing role and you really nailed it in that small paragraph.
ETA: I don't have 3 kids, but I very much relate to this. I remember feeling oddly lost after my 2nd kid was born and I was no longer deciding whether to be pregnant, trying to get pregnant,.or being pregnant. I almost convinced myself to try for a 3rd, I think in part because of that lostness and also because it would validate the image of me as one of those hardcore MOMS. Even having "just" one kid felt immensely disruptive and difficult and exhausting, but no one could see it. How many kids does it take before you feel like someone sees the work, sacrifice, commitment, depletion of yourself that you are putting forth as a mother?? It doesn't make SENSE to think this way, but it was definitely part of my mental soup at the time.
I stopped using Facebook in maybe 2018 and quit Instagram in 2020. I am so, SO happy to not have that "content" put in front of my eyes constantly any more. I used to be self employed and needed to create content for IG to promote myself. Even as someone with a tiny smattering of followers, the mental health ramifications of it were just too weird. When my business closed early in the pandemic, I was so relieved to not feel like I needed to be on SM any more.
The visibility thing is really insightful, thank you. I know this will seem like a bit of a weird reach but it reminds me of the effed up dynamics that can be part of experiencing chronic illness or invisible illness; there can be relief in framing up your challenges in a way that others quickly see and understand (whether that’s a diagnosis, or some culturally acceptable physical evidence, or whatever) because it’s shorthand for a complex and frequently undermined experience. When certain things aren’t “real” until they fit into some box, it can be pretty isolating and invalidating, and I get the drive to find that box.
I agree. I could read thousands of words about fertility decisions and “aging out” of being the parent of young kids. I also feel like I’ve seen influencers be accused of having a new baby for content or to bolster their image-- really just an admission of this same concept at work.
I am sort of speechless and I have a lot to think about... it’s almost like I just realized that the decision to have kids can be something that holds the possibility of being influenced. I always thought it was something sacred that social media couldn’t touch because in my mind it’s such a huge deal that is nobody’s business but yours. But if I’m being really really honest with myself I HAVE been influenced by certain lifestyles and visions that are presented to me when I think about the (likely) possibility of starting a family and what I think it will be like. I feel duped by the culture, I thought I could see through these kinds of things. Thank you, AHP, excellent interview.
Lula, I completely relate to this. I think that I told myself the same thing for a long time. Or even when I would have moments of awareness that I was being influenced about family size by what I saw on social media I would stifle it down because to admit that and sit with it feels very uncomfortable. At the same time, it makes perfect sense - it's designed to make folks want to have/replicate what they see (or think they see - since as AHP and Sarah discuss in this conversation, viewing someone's "content" is not actually knowing a person and how they are in their 3D life). If you're constantly seeing all these images of families with 2, 3, 4 kids, it's going to get in your head, especially when you're getting an idealized, curated look.
I'd even argue that often the white influencers who present a more "realistic" insight into the more chaotic, messy side of parenting are often still inadvertently feeding into the idea that female exhaustion (which is the sister to martyrdom) is proof of authenticity and commitment to motherhood.
I feel slightly bad being critical about this because it often feels like women are going to get cut down no matter what they present and it f***ing stinks. But I know that for me, viewing this stuff definitely had a negative impact on my self image and at times had me considering making big life choices and financial decisions (like having a 3rd kid, which I ended up not doing) that were way more in response to what I was seeing than a true desire I had. That is scary to think about and to consider where that might be happening in your life. And - I'm really glad I didn't have a 3rd because while OF COURSE I LOVE MY CHILDREN it turns out that even "just" one kid was immeasurably hard, 2 even harder, and 3 probably would have put my mental (and physical) health completely over the edge. So there's that :-)
As an older and childless Gen Xer I find this discussion upsetting and gross. I have a few of these “momfluencers” in my Insta feed and I check out their #grwm posts occasionally with curiosity, disbelief, and despair. In between assembling these wardrobes and filming themselves wearing the free clothes, how many hours are left in the day to, um, parent? And some of them claim to have other outside-the-home jobs!
Why do younger newer moms need Instagram to tell them how to parent? This is an honest question. Where are the moms, grandmoms, aunties, older sisters, godmoms, family friends who ostensibly filled this role before we had the internet? I get that all influencers exist to sell us stuff we don’t need. But I find it hard to believe that young women don’t know how to parent without momfluencers. I’ve just assumed that people tune into these feeds for shopping tips and escapist entertainment. I’m sad about my own naïveté. How lonely and alienated we Americans have become.
I don't think it's moms looking to slavishly emulate people on Insta, it's moms looking for community. I'm going through some things, how do I cope? How have other people with similar sensibilities done it? I would 100% rather ask the internet than my own mom, who 1) is out of touch and doesn't understand how times have changed and 2) doesn't really get me. I enjoyed the mention of cloth diapers, researching those led me to a couple of great online communities and friendships, many of which have lasted even as I'm getting ready to send my kid off to college. It's sort of been my personal Greek chorus as I navigate my way through motherhood.
Most people know that mommy blogs/accounts aren't real life and how much it takes to curate it. (The trick is to take in the info without simultaneously feeling bad about oneself.) I think they've filled the niche that magazines used to occupy, ones like Better Homes and Gardens and Good Housekeeping.
Women have always been judged for their parenting choices and the SAHM/working mom wars are still alive and well, mostly because everyone is insecure about their choices. There is always the road not taken, and the responsibility of raising a child makes those other roads look that much more tempting. Mommy blogs/mominfluencers are designed to exploit that insecurity.
This comment seems pretty harsh. As someone with elementary and younger kids, I would say that most parents I know turn to both parents and folks in their communities along with seeing how folks online do things.
As a sidenote, I would also mention that anyone who has had kids in the last few years has had their access to in-person community affected by covid. My oldest was 4 when covid started and his experience of a neighborhood network with lots of playdates and nursery school family nights totally evaporated. My middle child who was just under 2 at the start of covid had a very different experience.
That's a really good point re: how this was probably amplified by covid.
I have a 2012 kid and online was where I found people who were thoughtful and grounded about parenting in ways that really resonated. I'll go to the mat for what online community can offer. Reading this article, though, I am really glad to not be doing it now. These accounts are not the ones I would ever have been following but the idea of having be unable to escape their influence even if you don't sounds rough.
Totally. I am a childless elder millennial but also a stepparent. I guarantee I am not the target audience for this stuff, which is both a VAST relief and kind of isolating; it’s like parenting without the info-sharing and sense of shared experience that moms can find more easily.
I’m also someone whose decision not to have children of my own was absolutely influenced by early mommy blogging. Is that the flip side of “influencing” around these decision, before influencing was quite a thing? Otherwise known as “access to more information” before it became “access to TOO MUCH information?” I don’t know. I feel like there is or was a right-sized version of online parenting stuff that fostered connection without quite so much capitalism and that’s what we wish for but can’t find in 2023.
Late Boomer/early GenXer here -- my own childlessness was not by choice, but I am sometimes glad I didn't wind up parenting when I see the "intensive" helicopter-style parenting that seems to be the norm these days (vs the way I was parented when I was growing up). I find it exhausting just reading about it. If this is what it takes to be a "good" parent these days, no wonder so many women are choosing to opt out!
I don’t think Sara is saying that younger moms need influencers to tell them how to parent, but that it’s hard to fully avoid their, well, influence if you’re a new mom participating in online spaces at all.
I’ve certainly found that to be true, which is why I find this discussion (and Sara’s work in general) so insightful and valuable. I’m a new parent who’s lucky enough to have strong positive familial ties and good examples of parenting in my own life (my older sister, my mom for the most part, friends, etc.). I also consider myself quite media literate, and have filled my media diet with critiques like this one AND YET there’s still ways that momfluencer culture infiltrates my brain, especially in the areas of motherhood where I feel the most insecure/inadequate (feeding is a big one, which Virginia Sole-Smith has been a great counter-programming resource for).
For example, this morning I was giving my toddler some yogurt for breakfast, and I briefly felt anxious that the yogurt had too much sugar. Like, that this might be bad for her and I’m a lazy mom for feeding it to her when I should have tried harder to diversify her palate or whatever. Images of Julie O’Rourke (rudyjude) and those “Everything my 18-month-old ate today” gentle parenting reels ran through my head which I KNOW aren’t a helpful depiction of real life and of course the yogurt is fine. And I think of how much more dominant those images would be if I felt more isolated, more insecure, etc.
I see how you could come away with these questions/conclusions, looking at this post in isolation; but I think of this as part of the CSEU (Culture Study Extended Universe) and find a lot of insight by doing so. I don’t think you can approach this without the larger context of how radically some things have changed since we grew up. In answer to your questions, I would point to previous posts on geographic separation from parents, friends, community; how childcare has changed, including stuff like babysitting; social media in general; cost of living in general; how the nature of work has changed (which changes home life in turn); optimization of everything; the impact of the pandemic on parents (often specifically mothers); so, so much goes into why things are the way they are, why this specific thing exists in this way.
“...how many hours are left in the day to, um, parent?” is a pretty modern and maybe even U.S.-centric concept. Fwiw, there is some interesting discourse on when did parenting become a verb vs. a physical state/relationship descriptor.
Yes! How much of this is based on the deeply harmful narrative that we can’t trust ourselves to make our own decisions...for our bodies, our family, our lives?!
And has this distrust always existed to such a profound extent? Genuinely curious.
I don’t know but I’m equally curious! I was free and curious and fully myself until I was in high school and that’s when I started to doubt my own judgment. And talking with other female writers on here, I know it’s not a unique experience.
I can tell you when I was pregnant with my son in the mid nineties I was freaked out by how many people were trying to sell me things to do the job of parenting effectively. And what was even worse is that I was inclined to listen to them because it seemed like such an amazingly hard job and whose to say which product I needed to avoid catastrophe or to be a good mother? I feel like this is just a fancier version of this. Remember these mom blogs are all product placement.
Raising kids today is so vastly different than raising kids in our parents age that it is by and large pointless to speak wth parents, grandparents, aunties etc. about it. I am the mother of an incoming college freshman daughter and a rising high school sophomore son. Our parents/in laws always tell us that we are too involved with our kids these days. My friends hear the same thing over and over again. We were told last year that we should just let our daughter figure out the college process on her own. That is what our parents did with us. I cannot even imagine letting kids figure out the process on their own now. High school classes are harder and require more work than they did in my days, the college process is so much more competitive etc. Speaking to parents/grandparents leads to more frustration than anything else. Friends are a huge help and a great source of information but everyone is so buys because everyone in my circle has 2 working outside of the home parents ( also a difference from our parents time), kids in sports/activities and are taking care of aging parents to some extent. Influencers/the internet is just another source of information/validation for many of us.
Part of the issue might be that women are having children at older ages than previous generations? By the time my child was born, my aunts were dead. My grandmother was alive, but had Alzheimers. My mother and I did not have a healthy relationship.
I have a wonderful sister-in-law that I turned to for advice, but her ability to help had limits because all children are different. For example, if my baby struggled to sleep and hers hadn’t struggled, then she didn’t have advice to offer.
I also think sleep-deprivation plays a tremendous role in the early years of parenthood. I found it very easy to doubt myself and feel desperate when I was surviving on 15-minute increments of sleep! (There’s a reason why sleep deprivation is used as a torture method.)
My parental confidence and ability to problem-solve grew exponentially when: (a) my child started sleeping for longer stretches of time; and (b) my child could verbalize their thoughts/feelings, thereby taking a lot of guesswork out of parenting.
I also think that it’s important to remember that a lot of parenting in the early years happens in the middle of the night. When you’re breastfeeding from 2:00 to 2:45 a.m., you can’t call a friend or pop over to your neighbour’s house for advice/support. But you can use your one free hand to grab your phone and start mindlessly scrolling through Instagram in a desperate attempt to keep yourself awake during the feeding so that you don’t drop your baby. I can see how new parents would easily get sucked into a momfluencer's world.
This is so great! It completely lit a fire for me on a trend I experience first hand ad nauseam.
I work with rural and small town kids (in Anne Helen’s old stomping grounds) on college access. A lot of that is working with families and moms. And this exposes me to the whole “empty nest” phenomenon IRL and online.
We all feel when (if) our kids go to college. A person who was a center of the home isn’t there any more. It’s a huge shift in your family dynamic, relationship with your spouse if you have one; even your pets feels it.
But some parents REALLY fall hard. They grieve like it’s a death and it sometimes threatens their kids ability to engage in the next phase in life.
And it’s become a whole social media thing. Check out the FB a group Grown and Flown this time of year.
Anyway, I was caught in the idea that we are offered Mom as our identity with NOTHING after that, and it makes a lot more sense.
I’d love to see more writing on the subject!!!
I am dropping off my oldest for her freshman year of college in a few days and I am feeling this 100%. It's funny though because on paper I have many more identities than my mom or mother in law ever had ( VP at work, mentor to many, mom to two etc) but there is no identity more important to me than the mom one. I just think that our generation parents very differently than our parents did. For most of us, we are way more invested in the day to day lives of our kids than our parents were. I also think that we worry about our kids' futures more/in different ways than our parents did. Neither my mom or my mother in law cried when I or my husband left for college. I think to them, raising kids was a "job" and this milestone was a sign that in part, their job was done. Not that they did not love us or support us but it was just very different. I see this too in how much less our parents are involved in their grandkids' lives than our grandparents were in ours. Most of my friends have the same experience and it is not because of distance... their parents tell them that they raised their own kids and it is now our turn. I also think that we are going to grandparent very differently than our parents are.
I hope everything goes well! This is a huge change for your family, even with all those other identities you have. The other thing that’s interesting comparing our college going to our kids is how much less contact we had. I only called home every couple weeks and the calls were short because of the cost.. But you can have pretty much constant contact if you both want it!
Yes! Finding the right frequency of contact will be trial and error I think. I think 2 years of pandemic living with teens is also making this change hard.... I keep telling myself that this is the end of chapter, not the end of the book. Thank you so much for your well wishes!
It takes a little doing to find that balance with contacting your college kid. We have family group chat and also a Snapchat group -- I only joined Snap to hear from my kids. Basically whenever my daughter calls I talk to her, but we don’t have regular sunday calls like my parents and I did in college.
I can relate! Dropping off our oldest at college was a big deal. And then... our relationship changed! He's now graduated, self-supporting, and living on the other coast. I love chatting, sharing memes and music, talking politics, and visiting / traveling with him (and his lovely girlfriend). It's all very fun. Our middle kid starts college in a couple weeks. There was no drop-off: he chose to live off campus at a state school a couple hours away, and moved himself in a month ago. We took him out for lunch last weekend. I figure short take-him-and-friends-out-for-meals visits are the path for now, and providing practical support ("here's a Costco card") as he transitions to living independently. Each of our kids needs very different things, and as they each move on to their next stage, it's opening up new possibilities--also fun!
Wow. That really puts some things into perspective for me--thanks! I'm a cis-het, married, mom of three. I've always worked, and been the sole breadwinner since our middle kid was born (19 years ago this week!). I got SO MUCH CRAP from so many directions (my mom, friends who had kids and were at home with their kids, random acquaintances) when the kids were little about how "sad" it was that I was not able to be home with my kids. So very many comments! Sure, it would have been great to work less and travel less for work back then, but I had a mortgage to pay, we needed health insurance, and we had three kids to educate, and so I worked and did my best on all the fronts. And now, at the other end of those chapters (one kid still at home), I'm seeing some of the people who didn't respect my choices and circumstances experiencing that empty nest loss. Your comment gives me a gateway to compassion and also helps to contextualize the "you're so lucky to have had a career" discussion: we all make choices, and those choices all involve tradeoffs, some of which are painful. Doesn't matter which path you take; what does matter is whether the tradeoffs are ones you can live with.
I'm childless, by circumstance; I found out I had POV at 37 after I got my fertility tested. Being childless, but wanting to have had children, I pay more attention to this stuff than other childless people might, especially because many of my friends had children around the time I found out I couldn't. Anyway, I was surprised at how much becoming a mother rocked their worlds, sense of self/confidence, and continues too. I think the ache for shared experience and community and need for validation is incredibly powerful. I know it is very much for me as I journey through early perimenopause. And these types of life transitions can be so lonely. If there had been the kind of "menoinluencer" stuff ten years ago as there is momfluencer stuff, who knows what (other terrible) rabbit hole I would have went down (and how mush STUFF I would have bought!). Anyway, I just wanted to empathize with what I think is sometimes the initial motivation of the content creation and the ultimate consumption - to feel less alone, to be better understood, and make sense of a massive life shift.
Oh, yeah, it's definitely here and going to grow. On one hand, I'm so grateful for the amount of information and resources that are available now, but at the same time, worry about the judgement and pressure, plus confusion that may come from it (re: natural vs "unnatural" approaches to symptoms, collapsing of experience into the one, right kind, the "best" way to do menopause). I'm so glad you're ok now. 😊
If a momfluencer and children weave their way into the golden rod fields and no one is there to photograph it, were [checks notes] solitude, silence, and privacy really had?
Such a thought provoking article, thank you!
It feels timely; my husband and I were recently comparing our Instagram feeds, which since the birth of our 15 mo have become terribly kid centric. We realized all of his feeds are fear mongering (don't slide with your kid!! Feed your kid fish or their brain won't develop!! Ah!) and all of mine are about the complex, need-an-advanced-degree-in-developmental-psychology dance of raising good, well behaved, thoughtful, independent, happy, and emotionally intelligent humans. I'm sure we've partially & accidentally self-curtated these different narratives... But damn are they gendered.
Anywho, thank you for the permission slip to NOT follow these accounts and embrace the dozens of toys strewn over my floors.
Yes social media becomes part of the mental load
So true!!! I think this is why I'm forever loving Pinterest. Not mom Pinterest but like yummy plant based recipes and tattoos Pinterest ha. The last frontier where my role & politics can be left behind.
Yes, and even the digital emotional labor - of sourcing the recommendations, hunting for items on local 'free stuff' groups, etc - is gendered. I've noticed that even if a dad does the physical picking-up of an item, it's almost always a mom who looked for it and typed yes on something that another mom posted. And the momfluencers are part of this recommendation ecosystem. On one hand, social capital and community spaces for new mothers. On the other hand, yet more gendered digital labor.
My husband and I both follow a lot of “comedy parenting” accounts but his are totally titled to “when you ask your wife if you can play golf” memes whereas I get all the “make sure your kids overhear you saying how wonderful they are!” “Keep exposing your kids to broccoli” even though we know almost child will touch broccoli between the ages of 2 and 18
Right?! It's so strange how that shakes out.
The gendered experience of parenting came as an unwelcome shock to me, I will say. Even tho my husband was the "at-home" parent, I still got the calls. Weird.
Ah! That's so wild. I'm so attuned to that stuff... My kid is so young we haven't even gotten to that yet but I know it's coming and am always wondering how to reduce it
Just keep repeating! In one memorable example, my youngest had a fever and needed to be picked up from day care immediately. I was like “I’m sorry, but I’m on a work trip in NYC. Please call my husband, and if you can’t reach him, continue down the list.” That solved it for the center’s director, but there’s always new staff, and they always need re-training on this.
Ugh, I feel that!! Having to train others = exhausting AND more mental load.
I'm officially adding this topic (being called first ab all kid things) to another pro for gender neutral parent labels & names 😅.
“I often think about how effectively aesthetics have been sold to me as a placeholder for personhood.” What a great line. This describes perfectly my unease with social media generally, particularly the momfluencer space. Can’t wait to read this book.
What a great interview! I’m an old, chronically online millennial with two kids, aged almost 10 and 6. Momfluencer culture surprisingly hasn’t flooded my feeds, though it’s there. I wonder if part of this is because of timing, as the interview points out—it was less of a thing a decade ago. The pushback / antidote insta account to aestheticized motherhood is @officialsadbeige which I’m sure many folks here will know. It started as Hayley (sad beige) doing a funny Werner Herzog bit as voiceover for niche children’s products, like white wooden everything and expensive potato sacks re-purposed as onesies, but it’s become a commentary on / forum for the difficulty and joy of parenting in 2023. It’s also made me laugh a lot. I love it.
I love @officialsadbeige! A friend of mine admitted she was just about to purchase a beige wooden “educational” toy just before discovering this account, then promptly realised how unnecessary it was. We all know kids love the rainbow plastic stuff...
I'm sharing this link to save someone else a little confusion. The Ruby Warrington book is "Women without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood." I went to look up the book and couldn't find it at first because I searched for "Women without Children."
https://bookshop.org/p/books/women-without-kids-the-revolutionary-rise-of-an-unsung-sisterhood-ruby-warrington/18423276?ean=9781683649274
Piggybacking on this helpful comment to also recommend WITHOUT CHILDREN by Peggy O'Donnell Heffington, which probably came up in your search. I haven't read Warrington's book, and it looks like they both came out this year, but I really enjoyed Heffington's.
Ruby Warrington's book is excellent, and she did a podcast episode for Sounds True's Insights at the Edge podcast that is absolutely fantastic. Well worth listening to if you don't have children, by choice or circumstance, and feel constantly and demeaningly othered for it.
Also Regretting Motherhood by Orna Donath
Fundie Fridays has a hilarious video about Kelly Havens.
The bit about book influencing about the end of this interview stopped me in my tracks, because a friend of a friend's wife pivoted to trying to be a "book influencer" after she left her MLM. Monetizing your life seems so exhausting to me.
I’ll have to grab a copy, since my clients keep hiring these folks. I’ve always suspected that they have spread the influence of upper-middle-class motherhood standards deeper than ever into the middle class...I can’t think of worse factory of needless anxiety. Proliferating needless moral alternatives is one of the more destabilizing effects of media. It causes self-doubt your own social network is not raising.
This is the modern day exemplification of domestic containment (Elaine Tyler May) and I have sooo many thoughts. Is our national uncertainty and terror of the near future what makes this so appealing? Why are we attracted commodified whiteness?
Ohhhh you’re right...I intentionally block out white male cults but they are definitely on the rise 😳
Maybe the most demoralizing thing about the North Idaho story is that a good slug of the people responsible for this won't be fazed by the certain and foreseeable increases in infant or maternal mortality. Something bad happens, it's the will of God.
Yep, this is true. As in : We can’t understand now in our grief why God called mom, baby, both home so soon but one day we will understand His Perfect Will. Meanwhile they are happy in the loving arms of Jesus.
In contrast, a whole bunch of other things that happen are because the will of God is being thwarted, by Obama, the damn libruls, trans-people, foreigners, pretty much anyone who disagrees with them.
Yes and these attitudes seem perfectly consistent to them, through the lens of their reading of the Bible, prayer, personal revelation, preaching, and church dogma. Many feel persecuted and discriminated against but take solace in the example of the early church martyrs. The political right has been extremely successful in identifying targets (eg predators and trans people) that can be used to manipulate these Christians.