Momfluencers: Getting Paid to Post About Motherhood Online
Momfluencers: Getting Paid to Post About Motherhood Online
Sara Petersen on the performance of motherhood across social media—while the actual labor of mothering remains hidden.
Despite the beautiful, picture-perfect moments of motherhood captured on Instagram, the actual act of mothering is, in fact, extremely hard work.
When I'm pushing a stroller up a hill, sweating profusely while carrying the crying child who refuses to sit, when I’m wrestling a car seat into a rental car after 14 hours of travel, all I can do is rein in my tears and try not to collapse. The sheer labor of parenting is like traveling with an animated thirty-five pound kettlebell in each arm while trying to engage in otherwise normal human tasks.
But there are no kettlebells on Instagram. Instead, Instagram motherhood is filled with glowing, idyllic images with a clear subtext—motherhood should be joyful, motherhood is natural and beautiful, and you should enjoy it. Picture-perfect motherhood—and it’s cousin, the faux display of “real” motherhood—have their tendrils deeply wrapped around our social feeds, with their soft, pastel-colored posts and relatable mommy content garnering millions of followers.
Motherhood influencers, aka “Momfluencers,” share snippets of their lives online, posing and staging and styling their lives into a square image for others—for us—to consume. And then we bathe in the feed, drinking the Momfluencer content sip by sip, ignoring the fact that we’re each alone at home with our kids, in our pajamas, bathing our kettlebell children by the light of our phones.
The sheer labor of parenting is like traveling with an animated thirty-five pound kettlebell in each arm while trying to engage in otherwise normal human tasks.
Why is this content so prolific, and why can’t I stop watching it? I reached out to
, a researcher and a writer fascinated with the online culture of motherhood influencers, and asked her to join me on the Startup Parent Podcast to do a deep-dive in explaining Momfluencer culture. Petersen is the author of Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture, and she has long been fascinated by the billion-dollar industry behind the public performance of motherhood.In her book, she examines how the private work of mothering has been transformed into a clever sales pitch “to make us want to forget that the reality of mothering in America is an exhausting, almost wholly unsupported endeavor.” The swarm of Momfluencer culture is both tantalizing and exhausting. The idea of motherhood that is portrayed online is often a far cry from the very real, grimy and gritty underbelly of the actual work of mothering.
There is a key difference between the concept of motherhood—that ideal which is splashed across our images and cultural consciousness—and the actual act of mothering, which is all of the largely invisible labor and monotonous, repetitive work of the domestic sphere. Mothering is all of the background work required that allows the performance of motherhood to shine. Below are five key highlights from our conversation and interview. The full interview will air on the next episode of the Startup Parent Podcast.
“The labor of mothering, it is necessarily private. When you see a beautiful image of a mother and child, that is not an image of mothering, that just an image. The labor of mothering is you in the dark at 1 a.m. in the morning, picking up your kid who just had a nightmare. That's the labor of mothering. That's the shit that ultimately matters. Your picture with the kid two days later? That has nothing to do with the labor of mothering. So just always remember that what we're consuming about other people's motherhood, it's only a picture of motherhood, it's not a reflection of mothering. [We need to] keep those two things really distinct.” — Sara Petersen
When did you first come across the concept of a Momfluencer? How did you stumble into this?
Sara Petersen: I didn't discover any mommy blogs or momfluencer content until my second was born, and I can't even remember how it started—but one of the first mommy blogs that I stumbled across were Taza's. Naomi Davis is her real name.
Her blog was just really aesthetically beautiful, at least to me. It had bright colors and this really gorgeous representation of living in New York City with kids, her photography was really great — these gorgeous close up shots of the kids and their freckles. And they just always seem to be going on like adventures, like tromping through the Upper West Side with one baby strapped to her and one in a stroller, and everybody's grinning ear to ear, and it was just the abundance of joy that really sucked me in.
At the time, I had a baby and a toddler and was feeling lost in terms of my vocation. I had obtained a couple of master's degrees, which sounds absurd, but I got a master's degree in literature, thinking that I was going to pursue a PhD and go into academia. However, I didn't do that. I found myself with a master's degree in literature that was essentially useless. So, I thought maybe I'd teach and got a master's degree in education. I taught for a while, and while I loved some parts of it, it just wasn't clicking. As soon as I became certified to teach, I had babies.
I felt lost in my career. I became a stay-at-home mom, and my sole work was childcare and domestic labor. Finding this person who seemed to derive so much fulfillment, joy, and pleasure from motherhood was so far from my reality at that point. On one hand, I didn’t think it was possible. It felt like a performance, and I thought it was mostly pretty pictures. But on the other hand, there was something so infectious and addictive about her performance of joy that I kept following her and thinking to myself, "I can have a more joyful experience of motherhood. I just need to change something about me, or about the products that I buy, or about my kids, or about my home." I didn't know what it was, but I kept following along and thinking to myself something's got to give here.
The aesthetic of motherhood online idealizes the labor of mothering.
What are momfluencers, and how has the concept evolved over the years?
Sara Petersen: The simplest definition of a momfluencer is somebody who has monetized their social media presence using motherhood as the defining feature. For the purposes of my research, I look at other ways that mothers on social media can wield their influence even if they don't have monetized accounts or platforms.
The original mommy bloggers made most of their money through banner ads. If Catbird jewelry wanted their ad on your blog, they would simply create the ad, send you the ad, and you would just plop it on the side of your screen. As somebody scrolled your blog, they would see a little square ad for Catbird jewelry, so it was really straightforward. The mothers didn't have to create content for the brand specifically, they just shared the ads that the brands were sending them. So that was the original monetization model.
Then brands started sending mommy bloggers products in exchange for product reviews or mentions. At first it was like, “I'll give you this stroller for free, you talk about how you love the stroller,” and it was just a swap situation. Then, as this became more widespread, the moms running the sponsored content were like “okay, actually you need to pay us because this is free advertising.” So now it's not so much mommy bloggers, it's more moms on Instagram, Tik Tok, or YouTube. But a brand will reach out to a specific momfluencer, depending on her audience and aesthetic, and say, “Hey, can you create one reel, one post, and one Instagram story about this baby swaddle?” The payment models wildly fluctuate according to brand budgets and the size of a momfluencer’s audience, but that's essentially how it works.
The simplest definition of a momfluencer is somebody who has monetized their social media presence using motherhood as the defining feature.
So when you're on Instagram, now they have to they have to be transparent about whether or not it's sponsored content. But if you're on Instagram, and you see a post, you know, mom is feeding her kid like a pouch of baby food. And she's talking about like, why she loves it. At the little at the bottom of the caption will say like hashtag #sponsoredcontent or you know, it'll hashtag the brand's name.
This has become one of the primary ways that we, as parents, are advertised to. Most of us, if we can fast forward through commercials on TV, we do, and print media is not nearly as just widespread and popular as it used to be. So we are getting a lot of our advertising through what are essentially small businesses — these individuals who partner with brands and provide marketing and advertising for them.
It’s impossible to become a mother without inheriting baggage around role expectations.
Beyond paid influencers, you write about how we are all momfluencers, even if we only have a handful of followers. What does that mean?
Sara Petersen: In a way, I think all of us — if we're mothers and we're on social media — we're momfluencing, even if we only have 50 followers of our closest friends and families. We are all, if we're on social media as mothers, performing our motherhood to a certain extent. I don't think we can ever present motherhood, and mothering especially, as something entirely unfiltered and true to our realities.
If you post about motherhood on social media, you’re influencing.
If you post about motherhood on social media, you’re influencing.
Can you say more about what it means to perform motherhood?
Sara Petersen: I think it is totally an individual thing, and we all have various reasons for how we're performing and why. It certainly is culture dependent, but I think in America, we place so much emphasis on a mother's innate ability to know what's best and do what's best. We place so much emphasis on a mother's moral goodness, and her supposedly natural abilities to nurture and care for children. I think it's really impossible to become a mother in this country without inheriting some of that baggage and internalizing it.
I don't post pictures of my kids anymore on social media because my account is not private, but when I used to, I would think long and hard about like, “in this one, the baby looks really sunkissed and super happy.” And while I wasn't consciously saying to myself, “me posting this will show others that I'm a good mom because the kid is happy and I have good taste because the background is well lit,” that's all in there.
I think the more we think about why we're posting about our motherhood, what we're posting about our motherhood, why we're consuming things about motherhood, and what the things we're consuming are doing for us — or not doing for us — we can approach experiencing our own motherhood in a much clearer way.
Mothering is all of the work that’s required for the performance of motherhood to shine.
But also, isn’t it kind of revolutionary — this idea that women can get paid while they’re at home?
Sara Petersen: Totally. And the labor is significant. I talked to so many women who walked me through what they have to do — sometimes you have to write the script, sometimes you have to come up with the whole concept of the ad entirely on your own. Oftentimes, because the quality standards are so high, you have to hire a videographer, you have to hire hair and makeup… it's a significant amount of work and it's skilled. You have to be good at these things and not everybody is.
I am constantly baffled as to why consumers are okay getting marketed to and fed ads by nameless huge corporations like Bounty, but they're not okay with a momfluencer who's trying to support her family getting money from a Bounty ad. It's rooted in misogyny, and if you really look closely at all of it, it's just absurd. Of course they should be paid for what they're doing.
But, momfluencers who have monetized their accounts are not being paid for the labor of mothering — they're being paid for content creation. They're being paid for their photography skills, their marketing skills, and their business skills; they are not being paid for the labor of mothering.
I think that's such an important distinction to make, because often we can get a little into MLM territory where it's like, “oh, but it's awesome, they're getting paid for the unpaid labor of motherhood.” But they're not. They are getting paid for something else, and they still, like all of us, have to figure out childcare and have to cobble together absurd paid leave situations when there's no universal paid leave.
Momfluencers get paid for content creation, not for the labor of mothering.
Tell me about the aesthetic of motherhood and what it communicates.
Sara Petersen: When you ask consumers of momfluencer content, “what's the stereotypical look of a momfluencer and her account?” most people, I think, would say a thin, white, conventionally attractive woman with long blonde beachy waves, who lives in a massive house with all white walls and all beige everything; she would be cis-het and of a certain financial class.
I think the general aesthetic of most successful monetized momfluencers is that most of them are white, and that stubbornly has persisted. Even though there are several super successful momfluencers of color, the ones that are still paid the most and given the biggest brand deals are white. So we cannot ignore how whiteness plays into American ideals of motherhood. It's all white everything, it's all blonde furniture. It's really rooted in what we think of as "pure" and "soft" — a lot of soft colors, a lot of beige, of course, and petal pink, soft ochre colors, rust colors, “natural” colors.
That's the general look and vibe of a lot of momfluencer accounts. They have huge houses free from clutter, communicating that cleanliness and organization are a moral good, and that mothers are “naturally good” at interior design because a mother is “naturally good” at creating a home and a domestic haven for her children. I think it's also communicating that good mothers are wealthy mothers and belong to a certain socioeconomic class.
It's communicating that a mom is good at everything, she has time to do everything, she has time to do it all herself, and she forking loves it.
We cannot ignore how whiteness and morality play into American ideals of motherhood.
What is this imagery or aesthetic not saying about motherhood?
Sara Petersen: What these images are not saying is that motherhood is really hard, it's sweaty, and it's constant motion. These images are so still and serene and quiet — they’re hiding that motherhood is noisy, it's messy, and it's labor. It's hiding that it's labor because so much of this aesthetic imagery is wrapped up in a feeling of effortlessness.
What your house looks like has nothing to do with whether or not you are a thoughtful, kind, empathetic, nurturing parent. Your kitchen design has nothing to do with whether or not your kid feels accepted, safe, and loved. Aesthetics are completely removed and separate from the actual labor of mothering.
I think the other thing is that the labor of mothering is necessarily private. When you see a beautiful image of mother and child, that is not an image of mothering — that's just an image. The labor of mothering is you in the dark at 1am, picking up your kid who had a nightmare. That's the labor of mothering, and that's the shirt that ultimately matters. What the kid’s room looks like and your picture of you and the kid two days later has nothing to do with the labor of mothering.
I think it’s important to always remember that what we're consuming about other people's motherhood is a picture of motherhood, it's not a reflection of mothering. Keep those two things really distinct in your head.
Social media captures pictures of motherhood, but does not reflect the labor of mothering.
Where does this idea of “ideal motherhood” come from?
Sara Petersen: It's interesting that these images of ideal motherhood were not created by women or moms, but because so many of us have internalized what like culture expects from good images of motherhood, I think we know what people want to see almost intuitively.
wrote this incredible book called Mother Brain, and it's about many things, but one of the themes that really spoke to me was how maternal instinct is a myth. She goes through the really dark genesis or history of what an ideal mother should be, and why she is supposedly equipped with all the innate nurturing skills and mothering skills.If we go back to the cult of domesticity, it was following the industrial revolution when the separate spheres were created: there was the market sphere where the men were, and there was the domestic sphere where the women were. It was really deliberately created to keep white upper class women in the home, and to idealize home as this moral center where a man could escape the filth of the marketplace and come home and be grounded by morality and by calm. The white upper class woman was set up as the angel of the house.
This deliberately left out many women of color and working class women who, for financial reasons and reasons rooted in racism, could not afford to spend all day at home teaching their children Bible verses and arranging flowers and providing respite for the husband when he got home at the end of the day.
So, from the very beginning — if we're going from the cult of domesticity to today — from that historical standpoint, white women of a certain class have been valorized and raised up on a pedestal, while being given institutional support or meaningful agency in the world. But they have been raised up as these paragons of virtue to aspire to, and this was done really deliberately to distinguish between white women who should be protected and idolized, and everyone else who should not. Then, it would be okay if the working class woman was working completely inhumane hours in inhumane factory conditions because she doesn't qualify to be a “good mom”.
The more we look at where these ideals of ”good motherhood” come from, it becomes really clear that it's always coming from white men in power, trying to disempower marginalized communities.
And it's very clear to see how this has carried on through today. Because if we view motherhood as this essentialist thing, that women are biologically meant to be mothers and they're biologically good at mothering, then we don't need to offer them support. We don't need to give them paid leave. We don't need to give them equal opportunities in the workplace because a good mom should be at home. Her unpaid labor should support capitalism. If you look at almost every aspect of the labor of mothering, it is not supporting the people doing it — It's supporting somebody else.
If you look at almost every aspect of the labor of mothering, it is not supporting the people doing it — it's supporting somebody else.
The consequences of the cult of ideal motherhood seem bleak. Do you have hope for what’s next?
Sara Petersen: It's so dark when you really look at it, but I also feel so much comfort in knowing that these ideals were created — they are not truths. They came from somewhere. Prior to the industrial revolution, women and men were both in the market and the home. It was created, and there's no essential truth that women are better suited to domestic labor.
What is true is that the ideals of motherhood were not created for you. They were created by (usually) white men in power who had a vested interest in creating those ideals — and they are creations; they are not innate truths, and everybody has to figure out their own ideal of motherhood. And that's really hard. I think that's why consuming momfluencer content is such catnip for so many of us because it's really, really forking hard figuring out like, what matters to you? What makes your day better as a mom? But we all have to do that ourselves.
There is no such thing as a universal ideal of motherhood.
Sara Petersen is the author of Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture. She also writes about motherhood, feminism, and culture in the newsletter In Pursuit of Clean Countertops.
Our interview has been lightly edited for clarity. This post is based on Episode #211 of The Startup Parent Podcast and will air on Wednesday, May 24th, 2023. Click here to subscribe to the podcast.
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