The wild world of momfluencers (Q&A with Sara Petersen)

May 15, 2023

For this week’s newsletter, I have a Q&A with Sara Petersen, the author of one of my favorite newsletters, In Pursuit of Clean Countertops!

When I first discovered Sara’s newsletter last year, I was thrilled to find there was an entire corner of the internet devoted to critically dissecting the activities of Ballerina Farm, Taza, and all the other insanity that I saw from momfluencers on Instagram. The name alone caught my attention, as someone who wishes she had clean countertops and almost never does. Momfluencers fascinated me: they always had perfect outfits, hair, and makeup; they lived in gigantic, perfectly clean, perfectly decorated homes; their dids were happy and perfectly dressed in coordinated outfits. I would see those photos of their beautiful homes and wonder: where is all the stuff? Where’s the clutter, the paper, the dirty dishes? This cannot be how anyone’s real home looks like, unless they spend every minute of their day cleaning. How can this be reality?

Sara recently published a new book, Momfluenced: Inside The Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture, which is a fascinating deep dive into the world of momfluencers on social media. Sara pulls back the curtain on the seemingly picture-perfect world of momfluencers, and I so appreciated her work to puncture the veneer of perfection we see on Instagram. So much of influencer culture, and momfluencer culture, on social media is simply a performance, not reality. Sara’s book was an excellent reminder of that.

Here’s my Q&A with Sara.

How did you first get interested in the topic of momfluencers? What led you to write a book about them?

I had always unthinkingly wanted to be a mother, and as I approached the end of my rather aimless twenties, the idea of inhabiting some sort of domestic goddess ideal of motherhood really started to seem like an escape from my nebulous sense of selfhood and general cluelessness about what I wanted to do with my life. Once I became a mother, of course, I realized that motherhood would not be a shortcut to self-actualization. Motherhood as archetype and mothering as labor are two different things.

When I had a toddler and a newborn, I discovered Naomi Davis and her blog, Love, Taza (which is no longer! She deleted both the blog and her Instagram account a week or so ago, which truly marked the end of an era). At the time of my discovering her, she was a young, Mormon mother of three living her best life on the Upper West Side. She made motherhood look like a romp, like bottomless joy. She made it look easy. And despite the fact that I knew by this point that motherhood was NOT easy (at least not always easy), I found myself lusting after her appearance of ease.

You talk a lot in the book about Instagram, and with good reason: Instagram gave way to the rise of momfluencer culture as we know it. But these days Momfluencer content is all over Tiktok, too, and that's a different format: Tiktok is more suited to raw, unfiltered videos. In what ways do you see Tiktok changing mom culture online at all from the previous era when Instagram was king?

I will say that I’m not an expert on Momtok by any means. I have a Tik Tok account but use it only for lurking or research purposes and don’t have a regular Tiktok habit (like I do with Instagram, for example). But I do think Tik Tok seems better suited to targeted conversations about specific struggles mothers and caregivers face. I’m thinking of folks like KC Davis and Laura Danger, who use their Tik Tok platforms to educate and bring awareness about really specific issues (In KC’s case it’s the moral neutrality of care work and “how to keep house while drowning,” and in Laura’s case it’s the gendered division of labor within the home.)

One thing I noticed once I got sucked into Tiktok was that on Tiktok, almost every mom you see is a stay-at-home mom, and stay-at-home mom life is really put on this pedestal, and sending kids to daycare is treated as controversial (!). But in my real life, the majority of moms I know work in some form and needs childcare -- it's just not practical, affordable, possible, or even desirable for many moms to stay at home. Why do we see so few representations of moms who work outside the home in online momfluencer culture? And more broadly -- why is it that in online mom culture, there is so much pressure to show motherhood as one's entire identity?

This is SUCH a great question! You’re absolutely right that the “ideal mama” is rarely seen at her office or in front of her computer or any space not firmly rooted in the domestic sphere. I think part of this has to do with iconography. There are so many images of mother and child baked into our collective consciousness, and those images are all domestic. A mother rocking her child in a quiet nursery. A mother laughing with her child while they make cookies. A mother gently guiding a child’s hand as they plant pansies in a backyard garden. I guess there’s also the fact that we don’t envision a mother doing the labor of mothering away from her children, right? So if an identity is monetized through the depiction of maternal identity, the central images need to be closely linked to mothering. I also think we’re culturally conditioned to view mothers as background players, and background characters by definition lack specificity, agency, and subjectivity. Lastly, I think rooting an account in the domestic is good for branding. Most of the things momfluencers are paid to sell or promote have to do with domestic life (home decor, housecleaning tools and materials, toys, food, cookware, clothing, etc). I could riff on this question forever because I think it’s really critical to unpacking who we view as the ideal mom (and why) but those are some of the first thoughts that come to mind. OH! And also - a recent Pew poll showed that 60% of Americans think children are better off with one parent (I wonder which parent?!) staying at home. So despite the fact that the vast majority of us live in households where both parents (if it’s a two-parent household) work outside the home, the public imagination is still stuck on the idealization of the mother who centers her work within the home.

You talk about some of the most common mom tropes in your book: the cool mom, the minimalist mom, the unfiltered mom. But in many ways the "unfiltered" mom was supposed to be the rejection of all the picture-perfect unrealistic mom imagery on Instagram. The cool mom was supposed to show that you didn't have to lose your "cool" when you became a mom. Are these new tropes still perpetuating the same unrealistic ideas about motherhood, just in new packaging?

Hmmm - I mean, it’s easy to turn things into tropes, right? And really, tropes exist to remind us of norms. I think it’s human to make connections between what we see (someone’s hairstyle, car, clothing, whatever) and what we think we understand about their values. But this is (of course) not a great way of assessing people around you! I also think our cultural tendency to want to categorize moms is wrapped up in our limited understanding of what people inhabiting the role of mother can be.

You talk in the book about how to some degree we are all performing motherhood online. I feel that a lot — even outside of influencers, like when I see an acquaintance write a three-paragraph Instagram caption as a letter to her son on his birthday; but her son is one, and he's not going to be reading that Instagram caption. Who are we performing for, and why?

Ugh YES. And to be clear, I’m done this type of thing in the past too. I mean, in cases such as the above one, I really think the writer is performing for herself. As mothers, it’s so difficult to assess how we’re doing, and whether or not our labor is having the intended effect. I mean, I find tears springing to my eyes when an exercise instructor tells me (through a screen! Through a prerecorded class!) that I’m “doing a great job.” So when we’re performing our motherhood online, even if we only have a couple dozen followers, I do think we’re taking stock of ourselves and our work. I think this is very, very human, but it (of course!) gets complicated when consumers of your content find themselves feeling inferior, insecure, or further alienated by what you’re sharing. It’s such a strange symbiotic relationship.

Your newsletter is called In Pursuit of Clean Countertops, and you reference that in the book too, that these influencers, in every picture, always have these sparkling, spotless countertops. I love this name because I too am obsessed with clean countertops but I can never get mine completely clean. There's always more crumbs, there's always something, I could never take a picture of them. Why did you pick this name and what does the pursuit of clean countertops kind of represent, symbolically, to you?

Oh man. So I adore a clean countertop. The floors can be dotted with hot wheels and marbles and dog toys, but if the counter is clean, I feel a certain level of control/peace/groundedness/whatever. THAT BEING SAID, I almost never have clean countertops because they necessitate almost constant upkeep. When you live with kids, the countertops really feel like a life catch-all. I occasionally get in a cleaning groove and enjoy the labor of tidying and spraying and whatnot, but in general, it’s a struggle for me. So the clean countertop is this thing I will always want but which I know (because I’m me) I’ll rarely have. I also wonder how much of my idolization of clean countertops has to do with the hundreds of clean countertops I’ve consumed through cottagecore momfluencer Instagram, you know? I can’t really separate the objective fact of clean countertops making me feel a sense of calm from the imagery that has trained me to view clean countertops as a source of calm.

And I think aspirational motherhood has operated in a similar way for me. I’ve been culturally conditioned to want it for so long, but why? And at what cost?

Sara Petersen’s Momfluenced is out now.