The world of momfluencers is, to put it mildly, a highly fraught one.
With the rise of trad wives like the beauty queen/rancher Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm, as well as the 24-year-old model and mother of four Nara Smith, there’s never been more pressure on moms on the internet to present a pristine, highly idealized image of motherhood.
But mothers who choose to post their kids on social media also must contend with an endless onslaught of judgment, as well as the risk of their kids being subjected to online predators.
Why are we so obsessed with moms on the internet—and what impact does parenting in public have on the women themselves and their children? This is the driving question behind Fortesa Latifi’s new book Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencers and the Cost of a Childhood Online, a deep dive into the thorny world of trad wives, family vloggers, and kiddie content creators.
Latifi, an investigative journalist, raises serious ethical questions about parents broadcasting their kids online, particularly when they may be too young to consent to do so. And some of the anecdotes she provides about parents pushing their kids in front of the camera—doing sponcon for a menstrual pad to capitalize on a young girl’s first period, for instance—are objectively horrifying.
“Parents are aware of the risks” of posting their kids on social media, Latifi tells me, citing the example of a mom who noticed her 7-year-old’s posts got the most engagement when she wasn’t fully clothed—but continued posting her child in dance costumes. “But in the end, it doesn't change their behavior.”
In a world where content is king, however, and 57 percent of Gen Zers in 2023 said they want to be career influencers, Latifi notes that the question of whether kids on social media are being exploited is not necessarily cut-and-dried. She also offers an empathic look at the very real reasons why many momfluencers might opt for this career path: It’s one of the few viable choices for women raised to believe their place is in the home.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
WIRED: What was the most surprising thing that you learned in reporting this book?
Fortesa Latifi: There were two things. One is that the Mormon Church has a hand in funding Mormon influencers, which was really surprising to me. And the other was that multiple family vloggers and parent influencers went on the record with me and told me that the content that does best is when their children are sick, sad, or injured. They were willing to admit it, that if their kid is bleeding or crying, a video is going to do well.
What is the most shocking thing that you heard about momfluencers exploiting their kids while you were researching this book? The thing that really stuck with me was the mom who used her daughter's first period as an excuse to do menstrual pad sponcon.
Yeah, and that's not even that rare, which is so wild. It’s not that rare for first menstrual cycles to be used in that way, or other milestones in puberty. To these families, the camera becomes part of the family. It's just normal to them. I've seen kids shave their legs for the first time on YouTube get millions of views, and I've seen kids saying bye to their grandparents' casket getting millions of views—things that are so intimate that I feel uncomfortable watching it.
What's an example of something else where you were just like, “As a parent, I don't understand this”?
I have a chapter about the risk of pedophiles watching this content, which we know is an actual risk thanks to The New York Times' incredibly harrowing investigation into it. And these parents would tell me, "Yeah, I've gotten those messages before, and I worry about it," but it didn't seem to really change the way that they showed up online. And so I don't know how, as a parent, if you got those messages about your child, it wouldn't change the way that you show them online, in a diaper or in a bathing suit or licking a Popsicle or things that these parents get weird messages about. I don't understand not drawing that line.
I want to pivot to the Mormon of it all and the tradwife of it all. How much of popular family content today do you think is influenced by religion or politics? Or how much of it would you say is intended to specifically promote right-wing conservative ideals?
I would say most of it is informed by right-wing conservative ideals, but it's not explicit. Even if you think about Ballerina Farm [the wildly popular lifestyle influencer Hannah Neeleman], she doesn't come out and say her politics, but she just had her ninth child and makes every single food from scratch. So I would say the majority of it is really conservative coded.
Why is that, and how does it manifest itself in these subtle ways?
I think that conservative families are just more well-suited for family blogging and for mom influencing because they tend to have a lot of kids. They tend to have kids young. Oftentimes, the mom is a stay-at-home mom, and so they're able to start this career.
You wrote about what makes Mormons such good influencers. I was curious, do you think they've been actually successful at recruitment? Because there’s actually been a decline in church membership numbers.
I have talked to Mormon vloggers who have said that 30 or 40 families have told them, “We joined the church because of you.” I will say that when I was talking to a Mormon mommy blogger about why the Mormon church paid her to post something where she was giving rotisserie chickens to unhoused people, she said, "Well, I had a million visitors on my website a month and that's better than two missionaries going out [and trying to convert people].” So I don't know that they've been literally successful, but they have entered the zeitgeist in a way that they were not.
How have shows like The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and the Taylor Frankie Paul story changed our view of Mormon motherhood?
On one hand, it's broadened it, I think, but I don't know that it's broadened it in the way that the church would like it to be broadened. I think they're much more likely to feel happy about the way that Ballerina Farm is showing her Mormon life. Whereas Taylor Frankie Paul is not the kind of woman that the church wants to platform. A couple years ago, we thought that a Mormon mom was a perfect mother who was a stay-at-home mother, who had a bunch of kids, who was incredibly beautiful and submissive to her husband. And now we have women like Taylor Frankie Paul who has been divorced, has had a child out of wedlock, and has been involved in these terrible domestic disputes but is the breadwinner in her family. There’s a scene in Secret Lives of Mormon Wives where one of the wives asks, "How many of you are the breadwinner?" And every single one of the women raises their hands. And that has not been the norm in the Mormon culture. It complicates people’s perceptions of Mormon women.
You write that you don't think momfluencers are necessarily feminist, which I think is true, but do you think that there is an element of momfluencer hate that is influenced by misogyny, and the fact that we resent these women for monetizing something that is considered unmonetizable?
Yeah. We want the labor of motherhood to be unseen and unpaid. I think there is this kind of misogynist, knee-jerk reaction of, “Well, she's just a mom. How come she's making so much money off just being a mom?” I think part of the reason people hate momfluencers is because they've found a way to monetize motherhood, and motherhood by definition almost is unmonetizable, but these women have found a way around it, and it's kind of like how you hate someone who wins the lottery.
When you talk to the kids of these influencers, what has been the fallout from their perspective? Are there kids who have gone no-contact with their parents as a result of being put online?
Yeah, there are. The first kid that I ever interviewed who was on a family vlog has gone no-contact with her parents because she feels that her entire childhood was spent working, and that was difficult for her. But on the other hand, there are kids that are like, "I have my own 630,000-subscriber YouTube channel." I think that's the point: We can't flatten the narrative and say that “Oh, every single kid influencer hates their lives.” Because that's just not true.
