your favorite mom influencer has a nanny

and a cleaning person and a house manager and an assistant

your favorite mom influencer has a nanny. and a cleaning person. and probably a household manager and an assistant.

how do I know? because I’ve interviewed them.

I wrote a book about family vloggers and mom influencers (called LIKE, FOLLOW, SUBSCRIBE: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online, which you can pre-order here or anywhere books are sold) and the things I’ve found out in the reporting of this book……!!! are changing the way I think about the creators I’m researching.

one of those things? that so many of the mom influencers and family vloggers that millions of us follow, emulating their lives and dreaming that ours could be as spotless and picture-perfect, have nannies and cleaning people that they don’t talk about –

which, listen. I get it, kind of. there’s absolutely no shame in hiring help. I do it myself – I have a part-time nanny and a cleaning person who comes once a month because if I tried to do all of this myself, I would be even less sane than I am right now.

so no shade on having help. but what I do have a problem with is hiding it. there is shame in is building a brand and a platform based off the idea that you ~do it all~ and look beautiful and perfect and only gentle parent while you do it when really, behind-the-scenes, there’s a full-time nanny and a weekly cleaning person and a household manager and an assistant who are making the wheels turn. that’s just bullshit because it exacerbates the problem I have with mom influencers and family vloggers and parent influencers in the first place – that they platform a version of parenthood that makes regular parents feel like shit. regular moms are watching mom influencers and family vloggers parent their perfectly coiffed children in their perfectly clean houses and wondering what is so wrong with them that they can’t even come close to that perfection. and the truth is that there is nothing wrong with you, normal moms. you just don’t have a staff behind you.

it’s also, often, perpetuating really uncomfortable dynamics where the nannies, who are often people of color, have their labor erased by the people they work for, who are often white women. one nanny I talked to said about her employer spreading lean in girlboss 2010s feminism online about doing it all herself while erasing the labor of her nanny of color: “what in the white feminism?”

I don’t think mom influencers are going anywhere – and I don’t think they should. they truly serve an important purpose – they help new moms like me feel less alone and they give us tips on baby-led weaning and which breast pump to buy (though they’re often #commissionable so take that as you will) and they make us think that we’re not totally out to sea with just ourselves and our babies. but they’re also, according to the nannies I talked to for my book, sometimes just full of shit. like "selling courses based on parenting challenges they didn’t face because the nanny did it for them” full of shit. (seriously. this one really fucked me up.)

every time I scroll and find myself feeling jealous of a mom influencer or family vlogger who has a picture-perfect house and beautifully curled hair and matching children standing nicely behind them, I think about the nanny who is just outside of the picture, urging the kids to smile.

Anyway. I could go on and on – and I do, in my book, which I truly hope you pre-order.