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Alison Stewart: You’re listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We are officially in back-to-school mode, which means your household calendar might be fairly crowded. It's that time of year when parents are asked to chaperone field trips and organize bake sales. Then there's curriculum night and fall sports. It can be overwhelming, but some parents seem to thrive on all of it, and document and post their successes along the way. Some do it for fun, some do it out of pride, some engage in what's called performative parenting.

Now performative parenting online can be lucrative. There are women on social media known as momfluencers whose Instagram and TikTok show well-dressed and well-behaved children, curated lunches, and suspiciously tidy kitchens. They make money doing this. For some, these accounts are aspirational. For others, annoying, and maybe a little shame-inducing. Recently, we've learned there are some frauds selling one thing but in reality, living a dark lie. Recently, a parent and YouTuber was arrested on child abuse charges.

Writer and mother of three, Sara Petersen writes about the intersection of parenting, feminism, and culture. Sara has said about her work, "I want to understand why our culture idealizes motherhood online and off, but fails again and again and again to give moms what they need to thrive like universal preschool, paid family leave, and subsidized childcare." Her book is called Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture. Sara, welcome to the show.

Sara Petersen: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Hey, listen to us. Help us tell the story. Have you witnessed performative parenting? Was there a time when you were made to feel inadequate as a parent? What workaround did you find to make you feel more comfortable in the parenting space? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, you can text to us or you can call up, and join us on air. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or maybe you want to share how momfluencers have impacted your view of yourself or view of other peoples you've seen. Maybe you have an account that you find useful or maybe there's one that just get your go. You can text us at 212-433-9692, and hey, if you want to remain anonymous, you can always DM us on Instagram @allofitwnyc.

I love the name of your substack newsletter, Sara. It's called In Pursuit of Clean Countertops. What is that title getting at?

Sara Petersen: It does speak to my own personal preoccupation with clean countertops and how hard they are to attain, but it's also, I think, a larger metaphor for how we in the US really idealize a domestic fantasy of motherhood. In momfluencer culture specifically, you often see the pretty white mom in her pretty white home, and I think gender essentialist ideas of what a good mother is are really important to understanding why we idealize some others and marginalize others.

Alison Stewart: What got you interested in writing about this subject?

Sara Petersen: Really my own consumption. I had a newborn and a toddler when I first started following mommy bloggers, which were the precursors to influencers, and I followed one called Love Taza. She eventually joined Instagram @naomidavis, and she wrote about her life in the Upper West Side with her three kids at the time. Everything was very colorful, very joyful, very vibrant, and most of all, she seemed so sure about herself as a mother and that was something I was really struggling with at the time.

I think throughout my research, what I found is often we’ll gravitate towards these accounts that present an idea of motherhood that maybe we feel we aren't reaching at that particular point. It really started from my own consumption, trying to understand why I kept gravitating toward this stuff even though I "knew better."

Alison Stewart: The first chapter in your book is titled “Performing Motherhood with a Hashtag”, what is your definition of performative parenting?

Sara Petersen: I guess I’d start with my definition of a momfluencer which is somebody who utilizes their maternal identity to monetize a social media account. I think it's important to remember that we're all performing our identities on social media, whether we're professional momfluencers or not. I think this idea that we can be our true, unvarnished selves on social media is a fallacy, and I also think we're performing our identities as mothers in various ways every day to various audiences. I'm performing a different version of myself at preschool pickup, and then I am when I'm at dinner with friends, for example.

Yes, I think looking at motherhood through the lens of performance is really instructive both in terms of what we idealize about mothers and also what we erase in terms of their labor.

Alison Stewart: It's that time of year when parenting kicks into full gear and the school mode, and there are so many demands on parents aside from keeping them alive. Once upon a time, we went to school, you had some club after, you walked yourself home, you got to snack. There weren't nearly as many activities and clubs and all. From all of your reporting or for your book and your reporting on parenting, when did parenting start to become so overwhelming in that way?

Sara Petersen: I think motherhood specifically not parenting generally has always, at least for the last 100 years, been a role in which the mother is supposed to excel in various, various ways. I think about growing up, I guess my mom played with us, but she wasn't consuming momfluencer content, giving her gentle parenting scripts, or teaching her how to create a color-coded bento box or snack time or whatever. I think the advent of social media has certainly given us so many more voices, whether they're experts or not, telling us how to "do motherhood correctly," and I think also motherhood is a really vulnerable position.

We all want to do the best we can. When we're given all of these resources that are just living in our phone 24/7, it feels like how can I not research best sleep training practices? How can I not research the best after-school club to sign my kids up for if the resources are there?

Alison Stewart: I keep thinking it's something about fall and out from the photo awkwardness of it all, like the pumpkin patch and the costumes, and this is a true story. A friend of mine, really a friend of mine, a Brooklyn mom who works outside of the home in a very demanding job and it was Halloween and someone asked her, "Well, what's your daughter going to be for Halloween?" She said, "A witch," and then the woman leaned to her over and said, "Do you have a costume yet?" My friend said yes. She goes, "Homemade?" [chuckles] Just dripping.

She told that story, and I think it gets at some of the difficulty of what are we supposed to live up to and all the judginess that goes into it.

Sara Petersen: For sure, for sure. I also think we're all looking for blueprints on how to be, and I think so much of this comparison stuff is really all of us just trying to understand our own maternal identities and values.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Allison calling in from South Orange, New Jersey. Hi, Allison. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Allison: Hi, Alison. Thank you so much for taking my call. I have been a fan of you since your MTV News days, so lovely to talk with you. Sara, thank you so much for everything that you are saying. I am a lactation consultant, and I'm just driving home from two home visits that I did this morning so I work with brand new families, and I say so much of what you said. There's this unbelievable amount of pressure on social media, and when you're awake in the middle of the night with a baby looking at Instagram, looking at TikTok, there's so much out there.

I tell parents all the time, it's all BS, it's all curated. These people who are telling you what you have to do are advertisers. A lot of times, they're getting paid for it, and it's just impossible to live up to it. I sometimes say to clients, "If it's stressing you out, what if you unfollowed those accounts?" It's like their minds are blown. They’re like, "Oh my gosh, you're right. I can just unfollow," and they'll say to me like, "I unfollowed all those slick people, and I felt so much better now." The last thing that I wanted to say is I have these little cards with my logo on one side and little sayings, what I say to parents on the other, and I let them choose the ones that speak most of them, and they get to keep the card.

The two phrases that they choose most often are one, social media is a liar, which I say all the time, and two, comparison is the thief of joy. That's not my saying, but if you are constantly measuring yourself against these standards that you can never measure up to, you're going to miss those moments, and you're not going to enjoy your time with your kids.

Alison Stewart: Allison, thank you for calling in, and thank you for the work you do. Sara, did you want to respond to anything you heard from Allison?

Sara Petersen: Yes. Thank you so much, and your clients are so blessed to have you talking to them about this stuff. We can unfollow, we can mute, and we have a lot of power in terms of asking ourselves like, "Is this making my life and my sense of well-being better? Or is it making me feel bad about myself?"

Alison Stewart: My guest is Sara Petersen. The name of the book is Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture. Momfluencers, how do they make money?

Sara Petersen: The two main monetization models are affiliate links and sponsored content. If a momfluencer posts a photo of her wearing an outfit from Nordstrom, for example, she will get a percentage of all the proceeds that Nordstrom makes because of people clicking through to Nordstrom to buy the outfit. Then sponsored content is if Nordstrom paid a momfluencer $10,000 for one story, one reel, and one post about Nordstrom's new diaper cleaning [chuckles] kit or whatever it may be. It really varies widely across the industry. Some momfluencers make a ton, a ton, a ton of money, and some are still just getting products in exchange for reviews. It really varies.

Alison Stewart: We've got a text that says, "The Instagram account of Libby Ward, @diaryofanhonestmom, is such a breath of fresh real air amongst the picture-perfect BS's of any other mommy influencers. She's completely blunt about the good and the bad of motherhood. Something I sorely needed as a mother of a very young kid." That's from Molly, from Chappaqua.

Listeners, if you want to get in on this conversation, we would love to have you. Have you ever witnessed performative parenting in real life or online? How did it make you feel? What kind of workarounds have you found to make yourself feel more comfortable in the parenting space? What's your take on momfluencers and the impact they have on parents now? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC is our number. You can text to us or you can give us a call, and join us on the air. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. I was going to ask you about aesthetics in all of this. What are some common visual cues that one sees in momfluencing?

Sara Petersen: If I were to describe a typical momfluencer I would probably describe someone who is white, who is thin, adheres to western beauty standards is cishet, has access to generational wealth, is non-disabled, and lives in a house decorated in mostly white and beige [chuckles]. There's a lot of minimalism, there's a lot of baskets, there's a lot of soft, muted colors, and it's very much an aesthetic that communicates ease, and again, taps into many of our cultures' expectations that a mother be rooted in the domestic sphere.

Alison Stewart: You wrote about one influencer, Ballerina Farm, and you made a very interesting point. You said for all of her posting, it's just assumed that she's a good mom, and that assumption is part of the problem. First of all, who is the woman behind Ballerina Farm?

Sara Petersen: Her name is Hannah Neeleman. She has seven children. She's married to one of the children of the founders of JetBlue, and she has a massive ranch in Utah. She also went to Juilliard to study dance, hence, the Ballerina part of the Ballerina Farm. When I first started researching the book and studying her, she had a hundred-something thousand followers, and she now has 6.3 million, and that's just risen exponentially in only a few years. I think her popularity really, really nails why ideal motherhood in the US is still so white, so domestic, and so adhering to ideals of femininity.

Alison Stewart: When you described tier three women in the studio, we all just shook our heads like, oh, no.

Sara Petersen: [laughs]

Alison Stewart: No, come on.

Sara Petersen: It's a lot.

Alison Stewart: I mean, that is a capital P, like three Ps before privilege. Back to the question though, why should we assume she's a good mom?

Sara Petersen: Oh, yes. Unfortunately, I think it is simply because she looks and presents the way we have been culturally conditioned to view "good mothers". Going back all the way to the cult of domesticity in the late 19th century when rich white men in power created this ideal woman, and again, she was white, she was upper class, she was rooted in the domestic sphere. We really like to presume maternal morality and authority when a mother ticks all of those boxes, if she's white, if she looks the way we want her to look, and that also has the flip side of denigrating and erasing mothers that don't adhere to those standards.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to leave the name out of this text that we got just because I just feel uncomfortable naming someone person specifically, but the point of the text is it's someone who has a lot of children, they post about them on Instagram regularly, and never shows any of the help that she has, and tries to make everything look very, very easy. That made me think of a quote that's in your book where you said, "I see a mom succeeding in ways that I perceive myself to be failing, and I still buy 'bleep' I don't need because I think it will help with whatever." How have these influencers, these famous people perhaps, who have their children and post about them a lot online, and you never see the help they have or anything like that? How have they changed expectations for moms and for parents?

Sara Petersen: I think we are supposed to love motherhood all the time no matter what, that makes us "good mothers", and our mothering labor is supposed to be a labor of love. If we want to be paid for that labor, if we want the labor conditions to be made better with structural support, we must not be "good mothers". I also think there's this expectation that good mothers have all the tools to succeed within themselves that we don't need external supports that our mother, maternal instinct is always right. Again, this is a myth. This is not real. This is a construction that was designed to deny us support from systems.

Alison Stewart: I got an interesting text. It says, "I would love to hear your opinion on the intersection between momfluencers and fertility. There are so many momfluencers pushing certain ideas about fertility and pregnancy, sometimes without any medical background. Would love to hear your thoughts."

Sara Petersen: It's a really tricky space for sure. There are a lot of momfluencers pushing a free birth agenda that's often rooted in gender essentialism that can often blur into anti-trans rhetoric. It gets thorny when they co-opt feminist language about bodily autonomy, which of course is very important, particularly during the pregnancy and postpartum period but use it to vilify hospital births or imply that fertility is a personal failing or something you are doing wrong, or something you are to blame for versus a medical condition. Those spaces can become really toxic really quickly.

Alison Stewart: Jacqueline texted us, "This segment on momfluencer is giving me life. I recently told my mom I wanted to buy a book on potty training, and her response was, "Why do you need a book?" I asked her what she used when she potty trained us, and she said, "My ideas." The culture of finding "the best way to do things is so overwhelming.""

Sara Petersen: I could not agree more. My mother used M&M's for potty training, and we're potty trained. So much of this stuff is not necessary, and so much of this stuff, we can opt to out of. We don't all have to hire a photographer in the fall for holiday cards, for example, but this is something that is shared on social media and becomes seen as a norm when in fact is all we can choose to do it and we can choose not to do it.

Alison Stewart: Are there dadfluencers?

Sara Petersen: Yes, but it is not a multi-billion dollar industry the way momfluencer culture is. Again, I think that speaks to how culturally heavy the role of mother is in our country as opposed to the role of father in our country.

Alison Stewart: You write in the book about trying to follow and be one of those-- follow some of the rituals and rites where you got up, and you had a serene on a meditation and drank the lemon water and had the gratitude journal. All good things and among themselves. What was that experience like for you?

Sara Petersen: I ended the day angry. I was mad at how much time and energy and effort I had put into keeping my house clean and fostering my children's imagination with Pinterest activities. I felt really unfulfilled at how none of what I had spent my day doing was for me, and was in service of anything in my autonomous life. It was instructive.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Sara Petersen: We can make a beautiful home. We're capable of that but at what cost?

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture. Sara Petersen's been my guest. Sara, thanks so much for being with us.

Sara Petersen: Thank you so much. This was great.

Alison Stewart: That's All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you. I appreciate you listening. I will meet you back here next time.

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