This story was originally reported by Jasmine Mithani of The 19th. Meet Jasmine and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
There’s only one career where having a baby can boost a woman’s career: influencing. Other women in the workforce have to contend with the motherhood penalty, but moms-to-be making a living on social media can rake in cash with sponsorships that continue well past their due dates.
Individual brand deals can go for $25,000, while the most popular family vlogging YouTube channels earn an estimated $200,000 a month. It’s no wonder young mothers are clamoring toward the profession.
“Influencerdom is the new American dream,” journalist Fortesa Latifi proclaimed earlier this month at the launch of her book “Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online.”
Latifi’s book delves into the world of family vlogging, the vein of internet fame centered around the daily lives of parents and their kids. The most popular accounts post videos of their kids on platforms like YouTube that can pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. She interviews kids whose parents cut brand deals tied to their first menstrual period, asking them about what it is like growing up in front of an audience of millions.
But there’s no way to examine this ecosystem without exploring the impossible standards mothers are held to — and forces like religion that shape those expectations.
The influencer economy is booming to a tune of $250 billion, and it’s dominated by women. Latifi says social media algorithms favor momfluencers because audiences love watching young, beautiful people online, especially if they are mothers with impossibly cherubic children.
But these influencers are often dismissed as frivolous, Latifi says — and the gender breakdown has a lot to do with it. “Misogyny leaks into every conversation that we have about mom influencers and family bloggers,” Latifi said. She pointed out the relative scarcity of dad bloggers, which she contrasts with the relative ease of being a working dad — a situation employers tend to reward.
While Latifi leaves readers to make their own conclusions about the ethics of family vlogging, she takes a hard stance on the seriousness of her subject: “It’s not silly, and it is work.”
Latifi, who gestated the book alongside her firstborn, argues that becoming an influencer is the modern pitch to mothers that they can raise a family without sacrificing their careers.
“I love my daughter, I would do anything for her. I would give up my job for her, but she was not a positive in my career,” Latifi said in an interview with The 19th. “She didn’t make my career better or make it easier to do my job. But if I were a family blogger or a mom influencer, not only would I not really need child care for her in the same way, because she would be part of my job, but I would get basically a bonus for having her.”
According to Latifi’s book, if a momfluencer hits the “viral lottery,” she can make an income generally matched only by C-Suite executives. The families she interviewed make money from ad revenue on YouTube or Creator Reward Program from TikTok, in addition to brand partnerships. The latter can range depending on the size of the influencer, from $10,000 to $100,000. Experts Latifi interviewed estimated millions of dollars in brand deals for the top influencers.
Bethanie Johnson of The Garcia Diaries told Latifi she makes $500,000 a year, which she says is incredible for a mom of five without a college degree. Her main platform is Instagram, with 308,000 followers as of April.
But a lot of times, the image of motherhood these influencers are hawking isn’t exactly the full story.
“The most popular mom influencers and family vloggers are White,” Latifi said. “Many of them are Mormon or Christian in some way and so there really is this lack of diversity.”
Despite only making up 2 percent of the population, Mormons have a large presence on social media. The most popular trad wives, like Hannah “BallerinaFarm” Neeleman, are members. It makes sense that proselytizing religions would see the potential of the algorithm.
Latifi charts out how Mormon doctrine perfectly aligns with the influencerdom: a focus on record-keeping, emphasis on beauty as an expression of divinity and a belief in material wealth as a reward for faith. Making money through the accounting of daily life fits perfectly within these pillars, she writes.
One of the biggest scoops Latifi reports is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — widely known as the Mormon church — financially backs influencers. A few weeks before the tome hit shelves, Latifi didn’t think enough people were paying attention to that news.
But that was before production of the fifth season of the wildly popular reality show “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” was put on hold and #MomTok star Taylor Frankie Paul’s “Bachelorette” season was canceled due to new domestic violence allegations.
Latifi shared her reporting on social media shortly after the news broke, and quickly received pushback. She has been accused of bearing false witness with her assertion that one of the wealthiest religious organizations in the world is savvy enough to literally invest in influencers.
It makes business sense, she argued, and the Mormon influencer she interviewed agrees. Family vloggers have more reach on TikTok and Instagram than missionaries will ever get knocking on doors or handing out pamphlets on street corners.
Of course, Mormons aren’t alone in selling this “ideal of perfect White motherhood.” Top momfluencers don’t necessarily show the reality of domestic labor. The fantasy is propped up by nannies — often women of color — who exist only behind the scenes. Latifi interviewed the former weekend nanny of a prominent influencing family who never saw her work acknowledged online. Any mention of hiring help was actively avoided as influencers gushed about how they balanced kids and content creation, selling a false dream of having it all.
That’s part of the reason the visible success of family vloggers isn’t always replicable. Plenty of parents are grinding on social media with little cash to show for their efforts. The hope persists, though: Latifi interviewed several teen moms who are trying to make it big to provide for their young families.
“In the reporting of this book, I talked to so many women who were in these incredibly vulnerable situations,” Latifi said. “There are so few options for women in this country, and there are even fewer options for mothers in this country.”
It’s for this reason that Latifi has concluded that on the internet, women just can’t win. People want her to come down hard on one side or the other about family vloggers — with many snarkers wanting to be vindicated for their hatred — but she has resisted.
“I just think it’s so dishonest for people to be like, ‘there’s nothing that could ever be offered to me for me to do that,’” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Well, what if you had to choose between waitressing 60 hours a week and taking home $200 a month after daycare costs, and becoming a mom influencer?’”
