When our blog project started, Mary got slightly offended about Child(ish) Advice being conveyed as a “mommy blog”. I told her, “You are a mom. You have a blog.”
Child(ish) Advice the blog is obviously a type of long-form media and we have multiple social media accounts; so regardless of our following, I guess we qualify as “influencers”. And today, even though this is a book review, it is also a bit of a meta moment.
I picked this book knowing that it wasn’t going to be a parenting how-to or a treatise on child development. This was definitely more of a psych/social analysis. The author dipped her toe into the world of mom content creators when she was pregnant. She confesses to mindlessly scrolling the social media accounts of mommy influencers, liking how pretty they were, how perfect their life seemed, and how effortlessly they took on the role of being a parent. But as she dived deeper into the world of influencers, she uncovered a lot of shady sh*t.
From MLM influencer moms, to trad wives, to influencers with a hidden evangelical, far-right agenda, it’s a scary world out there. The book doesn’t have a lot of practical takeaways, more like a general warning. Be very, very careful about the type of media you are consuming.
Is this the real life?
I think we’ve all been reminded that everyday life isn’t featured in the highlight reel. All of those daily stresses and tantrums and hectic schedules that go hand-in-hand with parenting do not typically get shared in IG feeds and stories. So we convince ourselves that some people just have perfect lives, and we just don’t fit that mold.
Obviously, that is not true. Digital literacy goes beyond just knowing that you can’t trust Wikipedia as a valid source. It is a skill that we hone in order to consume online media with a discerning lens, to weed out the actual information from the fake news.
There are many reasons why content creators build platforms other than just showing off one dimension of their lives. They may be really into fashion or plants or home renovation. My feed is very book, food, and travel driven. But the platforms in the high millions of followers are usually promoting their brand or someone else’s.
The book goes into how MLMs use social media to recruit women/moms in vulnerable states. It says particularly military wives who have just moved to a new area tend to be the biggest group for MLM recruiting.
There is a whole chapter on trad wives, or “traditional wives”, that reverted back to a simple way of life after the pandemic. While baking your own bread and living on a hobby farm seems quaint, there can be a hint of anti-vax and anti-school sentiments floating in the subtext.
I won’t get into Rachel Hollis and how much I didn’t like her from the get go, but the book also includes a significant chapter about her and her entire problematic Girl, Wash Your Face empire.
It is definitely hard to imagine that the nice lady showing her cute chicken coop might have ulterior motives, but I do wonder how much of what we see is performative and what is genuine. Does she really want to be my friend (Hey girl!) or is she just trying to sell me a product?
Lifestyle blogging versus everything else
When it started, Childish Advice was an occupational therapy blog. We wrote articles specifically on development milestones, sensory processing, and applied skills. However, we saw that the biggest audience we reached were not the moms and dads we we were writing for. Instead, our consumers were occupational therapy students. We were happy with the affirmation, but we knew we were not going to be able to grow if we stayed in this subject pigeonhole. Our blog naturally grew into parenting by sharing what we experienced with our own children; and yes, there is a little bit of consumerism every now and then.
This past summer, I noticed a handful of accounts that I have followed for years all started promoting the exact same product. The same puffer coat or the same pair of Chelsea boots or the same nap dress from Hill House. I don’t know if the algorithm really has me figured out or if I need to diversify my following because I think I scrolled my way into a rabbit hole. Now, I can only see the product promotion and not the authenticity of the influencer. This is a huge red flag for me and I can guarantee that I don’t need anything else from J.Crew.
Yes, lifestyle influencers are a different breed. You don’t see many entertainment influencers or outdoorsy influencers or history/science influencers sharing random thoughts, OOTDs or GRWMs. From my point of view, lifestyle influencers encompass so many different categories (shopping/décor/fashion/food/travel) that the bleed into parenting and baby stuff seems like a natural progression once they get pregnant. Now I want to do a quick search on if there are any equivalent Dad lifestyle accounts.
Does this mean that lifestyle influencers are parenting experts? No, but they have the platform to talk to about it and be taken seriously.
Can the lifestyle influencer normalize a lot of topics that moms wish would be more mainstream? Yes. These creators are relatable and that’s how they were able to build their brand.
But keep in mind that usually their advice is tailored to their brand, and you need to consume that with a grain of salt.
Hate-scrolling
One interesting habit Petersen brings up is the concept of hate-scrolling. Perhaps we aren’t following these influencers because we like them, we just want to hate on them a little bit. Just like in My Best Friend’s Wedding, maybe these moms are just annoyingly perfect. And maybe when we’ve had a stressful day and we feel like a goblin, it just makes us feel better to create an entire false narrative about how this woman is secretly a troll just like us and everything on her feed is fake.
So why do we follow? Does it really help us feel better, or is it just a way to turn our brains off at night? Do creators really give us ideas/hacks/affirmations? And with the vast number of subjects that creators share, are we micro-learning or is it the modern-day equivalent of channel surfing? What are we really getting out of it?
The Good Place
The good part is that there are now hundreds of accounts that can actually be helpful. Mary still doesn’t feel comfortable calling Child(ish) Advice a mommy blog, but it does fit nicely as a parenting blog. We also follow other blogs/sites/influencers in the parenting, child development, child psychology, OT/PT/SLP, and social work space. These are the posts that I’m more likely to save, reference, and re-post.
It can’t be overstated that social media gives almost everybody some sort of access. And one demographic that has benefited from this access is minority mothers. Traditionally, most influencers in the motherhood realm are white, married, most likely Christian and upper middle class. Instagram now allows for Black moms, Hispanic moms, Middle Eastern moms, Asian moms untigering, single moms, LGBTQ+ moms to all create a representative community and share their own resources. If you have a question and you need to find a specific type of mother to ask, you could find one very easily. And from these groups, I don’t mind clicking links and earning them commissions because they’re most likely going to give me recommendations that they themselves have tried and approved.
Overall, this was a long book and a bit redundant. I appreciated the humor but it didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know (besides the cult of trad wives). I love the Buyer Beware sentiments, as well as the this-is-crap-but-I-can’t-quit-you of it all. We can pretty much add mommy influencers to our Real Housewives addiction category. Keep it surface but that’s it. If you want to read this book, I suggest audiobook format to keep it light.
The Millennial Mom in the Mirror
To conclude this post, I’m gonna talk about myself and Mary. From the beginning, it was really important to us that our content was educational. Mary takes real pride in doing hours of cross-cultural research and I take real pride in making it practical for parents. Do we still find it hard to be a parent? Absolutely, but I can tell that my kids are genuinely happy and I have a much better relationship with them than I had with my own parents growing up. Working on this blog has enabled that, and I hope it helps you on your parenting journey as well.
If our content isn’t directly helpful to you, then I at least hope that it has given you a moment to pause for context and helped you reaffirm your own decisions. We wanted our blog to come from a place of acceptance with an informed perspective.
Happy Reading!
Browse here for more Child(ish) Reads.
Child(ish) Advice 