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For someone who doesn’t have a marble island in their kitchen I spend a disproportionate amount of time staring at marble kitchen islands, slack-jawed, brain turned half off. That’s because I consume a lot of videos from mommy bloggers, mom influencers, and the like. In kitchen “closing shift” videos, they wipe down their islands and reset by lighting luxury candles, the glow accentuating their respectable cosmetic procedures. Other times I watch them waltz through their morning routines: getting kids out the door, sweating it out in boutique fitness classes, showing off Amazon hauls, or explaining their children’s matching holiday photoshoot outfits.
For better or worse, this is how I have chosen to spend my one wild and precious life: consuming blissfully low-stakes motherhood content on my phone. It is domestically competent ASMR that also satiates my desire to peek into everyone’s bathroom cabinets. I nod in unsolicited approval as a TikTok mom I follow shares her green juice order. Fascinating. I should drink something like that. Another posts timestamps of her baby’s night-time sleep schedule. I, who lives between walls that have never heard the wail of an infant, ingurgitate the entire video.
But occasionally, when my cerebrum is not completely smoothed over by a beautiful woman beckoning me to “get ready” with her, an anxiety starts to creep in. What, I wonder, are this woman’s politics? Has she ever given us a hint? Is she registered to vote? Is there any chance she, like me, is outraged by ICE raids, book bans, our government’s comparatively dismal maternal support system or slippery slide into fascism? Does she know there are midterms this year? Mama, blink twice!
In my ideal algorithm, I would get served posts to assuage my doubts. I would watch nursery hauls of a mother whose progressiveness I did not doubt. I would know that she dreads the realities of the climate crisis. I would listen to a parent describe her weekly meal prep for a family of four and not wonder if she was politically aligned with the men in government stripping food safety regulations. Maybe tips on how to get your daily steps in with a newborn would include showing up at protests or delivering mutual aid groceries. Because in real life, I was raised by and hope to be a mother who is both fluent in the chaotic and comforting mundanity of domesticity and enraged by the systems that diminish and destroy families and livelihoods. I just don’t see that much of it in my online spheres.
Instead, the most popular motherhood and lifestyle content lands somewhere on the short spectrum between conservative tradwife propaganda and extraordinarily apolitical, considering the paralyzing polycrisis we find ourselves in. I’m increasingly suspicious: was that sourdough starter “how to” video actually funded by the Church of Latter-day Saints? Hannah Neeleman AKA Ballerina Farm, one of the most-followed motherhood lifestyle content creators across platforms, has not ever explicitly divulged her political views – but do followers know she graced the cover of Evie magazine, described by one of its founders as “conservative Cosmo”?
“The right in the United States has really won the family,” said content creator Kate Glavan. This past summer, Glavan posted a TikTok saying she would “happily watch ‘stay-at-home mom’ content if it emphasized the reality of being a mom in America”. More than 1,200 commenters chimed in on her video, captioned “We need leftist mommy blogger content”, in agreement. Some politely promoted their own accounts, or offered reasons they felt leftist mommy blogger content doesn’t lend itself to virality. “Leftist moms are often working,” one commenter wrote. “Every time I even HINT at my true political beliefs on here I get absolutely destroyed in my comments section,” wrote another. A number of people also expressed their unwillingness to put their children on camera due to privacy concerns and big-tech mistrust, which undoubtedly does not please the algorithmic gods.
I asked Glavan, who does not have children of her own, what led her to make the video. “I don’t see enough examples of how I could do [motherhood] as someone who is left of center and advocates for certain politics,” she said. She believes that “being a mom is so political”, with the realities of motherhood in the US overwhelming even the twentysomething child-free influencer. “You are navigating through the healthcare system, you are probably not getting paid leave. You’re probably not getting any sort of benefits, the cost of diapers …” she lamented before trailing off.
Glavan is pretty much right about, well, the right. The Venn diagram of anti-feminist Trump administration officials and hangers-on, and pronatalist enthusiasts – a movement concerned with women having more babies – has a worryingly chunky midsection. In an NBC poll from this past summer, women aged 18-29 who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 prioritized “having children” as a six out of 13 in their definition of personal success. Women of the same age who voted for Kamala Harris ranked it 12 of 13, prioritizing instead certain financial goals, community building and emotional stability.
The left’s skepticism or outright rejection of the traditional nuclear family – you know, white picket fence, two-and-a-half kids, general suburban phantasma – is not unique to this presidency. Throughout history, women’s domesticity has been held in tension against their autonomy. Marxist feminists in the 1970s demanded “family abolition”, arguing that the bourgeois family structure upholds the patriarchy and exploits wives as “instruments of production”. Around the same time, the grassroots campaigns Wages For Housework and Black Women for Wages for Housework aimed to raise the visibility of the economic contribution of women’s domestic labor, the latter movement asserting that welfare is a wage, not a charity.
No need to dive into complex social theory though, just visit any gift shop and pick up a magnet, greetings card or wine glass satirizing the lobotomized housewife and you will get the gist. But with motherhood content sitting at the crux of domestic life, gender politics, and consumerism (many creators aim to monetize views via sponsorships and paid product placement), it simply is not an ideal breeding ground for left-leaning thought leaders. (Though, could one argue that current-day monetization of the performance of labor in momfluencing is an extension of these mid-century feminist crusades? Perhaps!)
Must I reckon with the reality that good politics and pilates arms routines might be at odds with one another? Motherhood content can and is often aesthetically aspirational, but can it also be ideologically so?
If you buck the algorithm and go searching, you will find creators whose identities fall outside the cookie cutter content farms both in makeup – queer moms, solo moms by choice, blended families – and substance. Moms who focus on gender-imbalanced workloads, like She Is A Paige Turner, or how special needs parenting is impacted by politics, like Eres_rara, or the dissonance of parenting at a time when ICE is separating children from their families and communities, like Bri motherhood. YouTuber Tiffany Ferg has a vlog titled: Why Motherhood Should Radicalize You. It’s all informative, it’s engaging, and it doesn’t quite scratch the itch because it can feel more like a lecture (albeit one I fully endorse) than the habitual mom content I tend to seek out.
Early attempts to ideologically curate my feeds and rid them of conservative-coded creators also led me to following mothers who romanticize their humble, though devotedly aesthetic, homes and natural fiber-forward lifestyles in back-to-the-earth settings like Mendocino or mid-coast Maine. But I was hoodwinked by their Democratic zip codes and unkempt curtain bangs. Handsome walnut cutting boards might have replaced antiseptic marble islands, but I was also increasingly watching haul videos not of Costco-sized tubs of Tylenol but raw milk to treat preventable illness. What did I expect? It’s Maha-mania out there, and mom influencers are all in.
Around the time I watched Glavan’s video, I also watched a TikTok in which fashion and trend analyst Mandy Lee felt the need to clarify to her followers that her preconception health journey, which she chose to discuss online, was not going to lead her down the Maha or “alt-right” pipeline. Later she clarified she planned to rely on “real science, not Facebook science” in her fertility journey. She did not want to risk that wanting “a child and to have a family would make people assume that [she is] conservative”, which “could not be further from the truth”.
Her disclaimers reminded me of another motherhood movement turned toxic: the forum Mumsnet, which provided moms in the UK with community and support but quickly veered into anti-trans rhetoric and Terfiness.
Last year, motherhood and lifestyle content creator Lisa Miller started incorporating her political beliefs into her videos, after making the move with her family of five from eastern Tennessee to Brooklyn. “With the climate of politics now and having this major platform that I do – really it’s not a major platform compared to some creators, but to me, it is – it’s so important for me to speak out on things that I’m passionate about and that matter,” she said. That wasn’t always the case. Miller was raised by a Mexican American mom with left-leaning views in Detroit before being put in foster care in conservative parts of Virginia. “I just learned very early on to keep my opinions to myself and I didn’t want conflict.”
But the idea of conflict became less daunting as she witnessed a handful of parenthood creators, such as New York dad Jose Rolon (whose bio pitches his content as “relatable parenting to all families”), seamlessly incorporate politics into their platforms. Between family vacation vlogs and his recaps of his kids’ sports games are videos endorsing Zohran Mamdani and calling on fellow Latino creators to speak up about ICE raids.
Now Miller posts videos that begin with her saying: “Get ready with me to lose a bunch of followers,” in which she discusses her thoughts on gun violence, ICE raids and raising a child on the autism spectrum in RFK Jr’s America as she does her multistep makeup routine and fixes up her hair. I find the series to be an ingenious blend of comforting daily ritual – like your typical momfluencer video – and straightforward political candor. The itch – it’s scratched!
Miller’s defiant stance is common among the minority of mom creators who are vocally left-leaning – an acknowledgment of the apolitical or conservative mommy content they’re competing against. Many will use meme formats to clarify that they are not a tradwife SAHM (stay at home mom) but a “household who believes in science and equal rights”-type SAHM. (Bread and crosses emojis indicate the former, microscopes and rainbow flags the latter.) I’ve also seen a number of videos along the lines of this one, which reads: “POV you’re a progressive mom trying to figure out someone’s [presumably a new mom friend’s] vibe.” (Another way to check a TikTok creator’s politics is to peek at who they’re digitally endorsing in the “reposts” tab.) I have scrolled past many that share a sentiment along the lines of “I might not get invited back to book club, but at least they know where I stand on Palestine.” Since federal agents shot and killed VA nurse Alex Pretti and mom of three, Renee Nicole Good, and detained five-year-old Liam Ramos in Minneapolis, my feed has seen an uptick in videos of moms, some self-proclaimed “wine moms”, posting about how they are engaging with their children or shielding them from the enormity of these indignities.
It’s corny, but there is some pride that comes with being a conscious content consumer. “When you find out that someone is not a Trump supporter, you’re like, ‘OK, now I trust you, and I want to support your paid brand deals and comment on them and say, get your bag,’” Glavan said. It goes two ways. For Miller, being clear where she stands politically has helped a new and appreciative audience find her. “I found it so freeing and really healing to find like-minded people,” she said. “It certainly was empowering to connect with a community that believes in things like human rights and equality and women’s rights and Black Lives Matter.”
Miller, who has worked with a number of lifestyle brands popular among moms, hasn’t seen a dip in deals with them since sharing her political views. “I’m not using my platform in a negative way and I think that would be different if I were, you know, being negative or being ugly or being hateful,” she said.
I know that watching “day in my life” routines, hoping they will reflect on ways to look out for your neighbors or speak out against the current administration, is sort of like hoping the NFL might pause the Super Bowl to meaningfully address violence against women. But occasionally, you stumble upon something close. And though it might not be aspirational the way a perfectly sliced toddler snack plate is, it is aspirational in the sense it showcases my reality: not only do motherhood and left-leaning outrage coexist, the former often informs the latter.
To loosely and lazily (my favorite way to scroll) bastardize Marxist theory, there might not be any ethical consumption under motherhood content, but there are certainly some creators I’m hoping “get their bag”.
