How Momfluencers Shape Motherhood
Sara Petersen on why mom influencers are so popular and how they affect our beliefs and ideals.
Today I’m very excited to be running a Q&A with Sara Petersen, the author of the new book Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture, which just came out last week. If you're drawn to (or repulsed by!) mom influencer culture, I recommend the book as a thoughtful and fascinating exploration of how it works and the many issues surrounding it. You can buy it here, or anywhere that sells books. Sara also has a fantastic and hilarious Substack,
, and you should definitely subscribe.In our interview, which I’ve lightly edited for length and clarity, Sara and I discuss why so many moms are drawn to momfluencer content, whether and how momfluencers shape our expectations of motherhood, why some momfluencers spread misinformation and disinformation, and more.
Sara, what is a “momfluencer,” for readers who may not have heard the term before?
The simplest definition of a momfluencer is someone who has utilized their maternal identity to monetize a social media account. They're making money through sponsored content, so posting to Instagram stories and reels about a particular product in exchange for money. Or they can make money through affiliate links — if they're, say, wearing something in a post, and if someone clicks on it and goes to the external shopping site, they will get a small payment, and then they'll get more if the person actually buys the product.
But for the purposes of my book, and the work I do on my Substack, I really consider the definition of a momfluencer as anybody who performs motherhood on social media, whether or not you have 72 followers of your closest friends and family or you have 72,000 followers. Because I think we're all swimming in the same stew, and even quote-unquote lay people are making choices about what to post and why to post things based on the broader culture.
What inspired you to write Momfluenced?
The roots of the book sprang from my own personal preoccupation with this stuff. Specifically, the disconnect between the really beautiful, uncomplicated images of motherhood I was seeing online compared to the various shades of grey and messiness of my own experience of motherhood. I found most of the quote-unquote mommy bloggers that fed my obsession when I had a toddler and newborn. And by that point, my eyes were fully open — I knew motherhood was not a walk in the park. But I think I was still new enough of a mother to subconsciously hope that it could be more of a walk in the park than it was. And I think the cultural power of so many narratives — narratives that many of us socialized as girls and women are fed from early on — was contributing to my fascination-slash-longing-slash-confusion.
In your book, you do a great job of digging into why are we so drawn to momfluencers. You talk about how the appeal can be both positive and negative — we can have these feelings of disdain and self-righteousness, thinking, “Oh, my God, these women are ridiculous” — but then also these aspirational reasons that we enjoy the content, like maybe we think we can get information from them about how to be a better mother, or how to have an easier time as a mother. Can you talk a bit more about this?
I went in incorrectly assuming that many people were following [momfluencers] for the same reasons I was following [them]. But there are so many reasons. And of course, there are so many different kinds of momfluencers. But I do think many of us are parasocially intrigued by momfluencers we perceive to be succeeding in ways that we perceive ourselves to be failing.
I've always been really drawn to momfluencers who exude a sense of ease, a sense of effortless joy — momfluencers who seem to be completely fulfilled by motherhood. That’s largely because I see the things they're doing — that I perceive them to be doing well — as things that I'm maybe not doing well, or not finding easy to access. Like, I am not a chill mother by any stretch of the imagination. And often I struggle to find joy, or at least a sense of fun. I'm very much a type of person bound by routine. I was never the type of person who could be chill about a baby missing a nap, for example. So I would follow these momfluencers who were flying to Paris with their baby, and I just couldn't wrap my head around how that could be fun. So I think we look for things we perceive ourselves to be lacking in some way.
There were a lot of momfluencers I spoke to who referenced finding momfluencers who looked like them as a way into imagining themselves as mothers. I interviewed Rebecca Taussig — she's on Instagram, and she also has a book — she told me she found one disabled momfluencer, specifically a momfluencer who used a wheelchair, before she decided to become a mother herself. She said, “If I hadn't seen somebody doing it out in the world, I don't know if I ever could have imagined myself doing it.” This really highlights one of the central issues of momfluencer culture as the prioritizing of one type of mother, one ideal mother — and when this happens, so many other mother stories are just not visible.
I also think we now, more than ever, shop through momfluencers. It's a huge shopping destination.
I want to zero in on who you alluded to a minute ago — the traditional momfluencers, or “trad moms.” There are so many different kinds of momfluencers, but there are a subset who are these prototypically ideal, traditional moms. They’re living in pristine, beautiful homes and have seemingly perfectly behaved beautiful children. They always seem to do everything effortlessly. Can you talk a bit about how these kinds of momfluencers shape expectations for other moms as to what it is to be a good mother? Are they fueling sexist norms in ways that you think are worrisome?
I would be surprised if the vast majority of people with children are viewing those accounts and swallowing that messaging wholesale, without any sort of critical undertone. It's hard to find a parent who doesn't know, deep in their bone marrow, that parenting is hard, and that all parents have bad days.
That being said, I think many of us are so used to that type of mother being upheld as the best kind of mother — the mother in the home, the mother for whom motherhood comes quote-unquote naturally, the beautiful mother, the beautiful home, all of these cultural touch points. They are tapping into an ideal that most of us grew up with some understanding of, even if it wasn't explicitly handed to us as “You should be like this” or “This is the best way to be.” I think we see those accounts and are just like, “Oh, yeah, there's a pretty mom and her pretty home, in a domestic setting, at home with their kids loving every second of it.”
That can have a numbing effect, I think, if we don't think about which values those accounts are upholding and which identities they’re erasing. Because I think 9 out of ten of us, if asked to close our eyes and picture a perfect mother in a perfect setting — like, where is she? What is she doing? — many of us are going to see a mother in a home, even though that image does not represent most of our realities, or even most of our parents’ realities. The iconography of good motherhood is so enmeshed with the domestic.
So these momfluencers are basically reflecting and reinforcing something we already have internalized, deep down.
I think so. And some of them are causing direct harm. Some of them are peddling misinformation and explicitly saying things like, “I'm pro-femininity, anti-feminism.” I found one account that was talking about how it was her duty to always be down for sex, because that was part of the natural marital bond. And there’s all this “I'm choosing to be led by my alpha husband; therefore, because I'm making the choice, it's a feminist act.” There are also a lot of TERF-y accounts that celebrate the divine womanhood in terms of childbirth, or say that only quote-unquote real women give birth, and lots of toxic ideology about how if you give birth in a hospital setting, you will sever a healthy attachment between you and your baby. So they can become directly harmful. They're not only quietly insidious.
I’d love to talk more about the momfluencers who spread misinformation and disinformation, actually. You and I talked a while back for your newsletter about momfluencer Kendra Needham and the dangerous anti-scientific information she peddles. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on why some momfluencers do this.
There has long been this imperative that good mothers are apolitical. And I think for white mothers in particular, who might be primary caregivers, and who might be working solely in the home — there are very few avenues for either cultural respect or for earning money. That's why we see so many mothers targeted by MLM, for example. I think it's a very similar vulnerability that both MLMs and these alt-right or QAnon groups are targeting.
The labor of mothering is not respected and is not paid. I always think of, like, a dinner party. If you go around the table — “Oh, what do you do?” If somebody's like, “Oh, yeah, I'm a stay at home mom,” there's no follow up question. There's no “Oh, wow. What sort of training did you do?” There's very little curiosity about the labor of mothering.
I think all humans want to be seen and valued for what we do, especially in a culture which claims to value mothers and claims that we're doing the most important job in the world. It's very confounding to not get any meaningful respect or recognition for that work, especially in our capitalist culture. So I think it makes sense that when people are disenfranchised, they will be more vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation as a way to uphold themselves as authority figures. A lot of the rhetoric in the QAnon, anti-vax, alt-right momfluencers — like hashtag savethechildren — it's very much “We are truth tellers. We are maverick thinkers. We do our own research. We hold our maternal authority as sacred and we know our children better than doctors or so-called experts.” In this way, they are pointing to the truth that the labor of mothering is skilled, important, valuable work. That is the root of their messaging. But they pervert that messaging to become spokespeople for these really toxic, openly harmful ideologies.
I want to shift now to discuss society’s dismissive judgments of momfluencers. You talk in the book about the fact that momfluencing is denigrated and often not considered a “real” job, even though momfluencers work really hard and have to have lots of different skills. Can you talk a bit about that, and also about how much harder it is to earn money as a momfluencer if you’re a woman of color or another kind of marginalized caregiver?
Every professional momfluencer I spoke to for the book expressed lots of complicated feelings about the work. All of them pointed out how hard it was to maintain a clear line between their private and public lives. All of them are beholden to the algorithm of whichever social media platform they've chosen to monetize, which is constantly changing.
And, yes, it's a very specific skill set. They are writers, they're editors, they are artists, they are sometimes artisans, they're photographers. And I do think the fact of their womanhood and their motherhood is used to negate their work as less-than, in the same way that “mommy” is used as a pejorative.
I also think that the idea that this is easy — that you just need to take a few pretty pictures of your kids and the money will come rolling in — it's such a fallacy. There are so, so, so many people trying to do this and trying to make names for themselves. And from what I understood, talking to the momfluencers that I spoke to for the book, it's almost constant work. If you take a week off of Instagram, when you come back, your posts and stories will not be seen by as many people. The more you're on the app, the more engagement you're going to get.
It's also weird when engagement is driven by quote-unquote vulnerability, or sharing something really personal — that often will drive numbers up. If you can see that, and the people hiring you can see that, often they're going to ask you to be even more vulnerable, to include more vulnerability and authenticity in your content, because consumers really like that and gravitate towards that, and we want to sell them stuff.
So I would never, ever describe it as easy. And I think it's also really hard to be in that top echelon of influencers making a ton of money. I don't think there are very many of them. Brooke Erin Duffy wrote a book about all of this, and she estimated that maybe nine percent of influencers — she didn't write simply about momfluencers, but influencers across the board — are making enough to live on without any other external sources of income.
In terms of mothers of color and other marginalized mothers — it's often the people that you're trying to make deals with who have their own biases about what an ideal mother should look like, and how to attract a mainstream audience. So if you are trying to negotiate a contract with Dawn soap, and the person you're negotiating with is a white guy surrounded by other white people, and they're wanting to tap into what they view as a mainstream audience — chances are they're thinking white audience — and if you're a Black momfluencer, they're going to see you and immediately think you can't convert sales because you don't look like the mother in their head that they see as being the typical mother. The way that motherhood, especially in this country, is intrinsically wrapped up with whiteness — it's just everywhere. You can't look at any aspect of this culture without considering the huge role the whiteness plays.
How has your book research, and the process of writing your book, ultimately affected you? Does it make you view momfluencer content differently?
When I first started writing the book, I was recording all the follower counts for the QAnon moms and the antivaxxer and the white supremacist moms. And when I went back to the final edits, they had all risen. So things like that were depressing, for sure. But mostly, I now feel so much less controlled by the specter of the ideal mother. And I'm really hopeful that when people read this book — when they really see where all of these quote-unquote ideals stem from — they will feel released from aspiring towards those ideals, because almost every single one of them is rooted in something really nasty and toxic. It’s easy to let go of the desire to adhere to an ideal when the roots of the ideals are so openly bad for everyone.
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I’m commenting on this popular Instagram post from Gentle_Parenting:
Here are my thoughts.