sara peterson is the author of "momfluenced" inside the maddening picture-picture world of mommy influencer culture and she's written aboutin motherhood and feminism for "the new york times" "harper's" bazaar the "washington post" and elsewhere but she also writes the newsletter innws pursuit of clen countertops where she explores the cult ideal motherhood. something is a humorous and podcast are. visit your newsletter where the s is my happy ending?

and find her podcast don't ruin this for me in her me in your podcast out. adrienne received an mfa in creative riding from the university of oregon in her first novel is forthcoming from grand central publishing in the summer of 2025. you can purchase her book right outside fromsi the bookstore and we will be doing a signing after the event. [applause] >> rehello. they are life. hi. you are live, if you are live alive. welcome to chicago. >> thanknk you. i'm so excited to talk to you i've a lot of time with her booku and you are everywhere right now. you were in and holland peterson subsecond isa saw you on ladyli. they put you out this week you are everywhere. whether we start with talking about what is a mom influence

or. >> the simplest definition is somebody who has utilized their motherhood to monetize it socially. in my book at focus on instagram that you could be a mom influencer on youtube tik tok wherever but that's the simplest definition. >> one thing i wanted to start with was if he could give us a sense of how big this industry really is like how much money is coming in an out of it because we think mansoor and instagram posting mom stuff and that's that and it's no biggie but buts is like a lot of money. it's a multibillion-dollar industry. it's really largely taking the place ofg e traditional advertig on both tv and glossy women's magazines. it's really where mothers are learning about new sleep sacks, best ways to -- baby maternity wear rugs home decor.

you can buy anything that has a two with mother which is one of the reasons it's such a lucrative industry. >> how much would someone get paid for it posts like someone, i mean they are obviously canerent influencers and we talk about some of the want to get into in the book so if you're a top-tier mom momfluencer how much are you getting paid to to post to sleep sacks like. >> it does vary d widely. an academic wrote a book and a couple of years ago that only 9% of influencers primarily female influencers make enough to live on. into similar two compared to the mlm in terms of the structure. there are few at the very top that make a ton of money thank you make $50,000 for one real, two stories in one post about an amazon product for example. if you are partneringg with

amazon you are more likely to be in a top-tier. if you have 30,000 followers and your partner with a start of potential oil company you will make $5000 for those same things so it varies quite widely. >> why do you give us a picture, i've been asking my friends which momfluencers do you follow? i think their kids are a little bit too old and it's like they had kids a little too early. tell us who ballerina farms is. >> is any here from familiar with ballerinane farms? when i first started researching this industry a couple of years ago she had 100,000 followers and she now has 6.3 million. she is a mormon.

she has seven children and she lives on a ranch in utah and married to one of the founder of jetblue. she clearly comes from enormous wealth and privilege so it's not a big part of her platform. her platform is really homesteaderll, pulled herself up by her bootstraps, homeschool the kids, feed the kids all homemade meals and make my own sourdough. she recently won the miss america beauty pageant which isn't it just a little twist in the narrative. yeah she has risenen astronomically and i think itnt points to our persistent expectation that the good mother be routed in fear that she be then nondisabled, adheres to conventional beauty standards. i think the popularity of ballerina farm shows that we stilly are living in a midcenty

maternal ideal era. >> yeah. all those momfluencers and can beyou tell what life is like wax that's a whole genre of content. >> you could describe ballerina new wife is adhering to traditional genderet norms. she could go to target and drive a minivan that prioritizes having the house clean and her children quiet when her husband rk work.e from or she could be somebody, cover somebody in the book who really if you look at her photos it looks like they could be taken in 1872 and she wears floral dresses. she espouses to evangelical, theism? that is not a word but they are

people whoof are often denouncig feminism and argued that a woman's natural places in the home and being a wife to her husband. >> right. [laughter] >> do have a sense of how these accounts grew so quickly and so big? >> i mean i do think during the pandemic a lot of moms became deradicalized. we became really angry and really fed up. the most privilege of us saw how unfairly the system is stacked against mothers. some of us are privileged by the holes and if the structure. a lot of mothers became angry and outspoken about the systemic lack of support from others and while thatd was happening we sw backlash. a lot of these momfluencers

argue their attacks on the nuclear family and an attack ond traditional values so i do think anytime we see progressive steps forward particularly when it comes to feminism we will see those steps backwards. >> yeah suthers is really interesting dichotomy about this women that industry making lots of money and spending a lot of time on motherhood but there's an aspect that's about maybe not shaming of their mothers but it's like aspirational. you were not doing these things then you aren't doing motherhood right. so can you talk a little bit about that and our own ideas of what being a mother is. >> i first started researching this because of my own personal relationships with the culture. i followed somebody named diane

davis if anyone remembers her. she lived on the upper west side of new york. all of her photos were bright vibrant colors and she really performed a fun type of motherhood and a joyful type of motherhood that i have the time was bailing within myself. i do think many of us glom onto momfluencers who we perceive to be perceiving ourselves is doing. i think that's a symptom of the cultural pressures they put on mother specifically. as long as there's any notion of an ideal mom -- momfluencers and thema influencer thing will prosper. >> there's this thing that's

like like mom searching out content that will make them feel bad about themselves. what is that about? >> also comes from a sense of hope like i know from myself i was looking for a way to embody motherhood that may be feel better. like you know maybe if i buy the products she recommends for toddlers i will be checking some sort of good mom box and they'll be able to sleep better at night. it's not intellectually when you tear it apart it doesn't make any sense in light ofat this operates on a more subconscious level. and we are conditioned to believe that ideal motherhood is attainable and it's not real and it doesn't exist in their is no such thing but we are culturally conditioned to believe that it's

possible and we should aspire to it. >> when did you realize when you are looking at these accounts i mothers that perhaps they were affecting you and weren't making you feel better or giving you solutions to some of your mom problems. >> i think when i had a second kid and was thoroughly disabused of any notion that motherhood could be this magical identity that transformed me. i think with my second kid i knew intellectually that was not the case. i also carried a lot of rage about the state of institutional motherhood in this country and i found myself gravitating towards thesee archaic notions seep than traditional femininity and that's where i was like where's the disconnect? site no better on paper and yet i'm still feeling the pull. >> obviously there is a bout of racial issues at hand i here.

can you maybe talk a little bit, you talk about michelle obama in your book and the way she presented herself and the way that sheas was received was different. i was wondering if you just talk bit. that a little >> i know that -- i owe that analysis to kareem mitchell who wrote a book and a nap book she analyzes how people perceived michelle obama. she should have checked most boxes of ideal motherhood. she's in a heterosexual marriage but she's and motherhood in america has been defined by for hundreds of years. and in her book she points to the mass of popularity of the movie the help they came out when mrs. obama was first lady

and she posits that many americans,s, americans because f racism were uncomfortable with the idea of a black first lady. in the help of course the black women in that movie are upholding a woman's domestic space. because of his this racist discomfort with a black woman in our nation in the visible domestic state to help provided a relief to that racist backlash against michelle obama. i included in the book. >> i thought it was interesting the way that michelle called herself the mom in chief. the culture was not accepting as it should have been in there all these momfluencers and the biggest accounts are dominated by women. and you talk a lot about the

cult of. >> in the late 19th century after the post-industrial revolution preindustrial revolution both women and men were inside the home and outside the home. once they move toward factory work there was a moral tenet. we really wanted to preserve the moral center within the home. so the construct of the ideal woman was created. and the woman was pious and she was domestic. she was self-sacrificing and of course this idea was only attainable for mostly wealthy women, women being sexually assaulted in raped. they were not pious so they were not ideal women. middle-class women working outside the home which is unseemly were not ideal women and really the construction ofon this ideal also served to vilify

anyone who did not fit it. so as much as it upheld a certain type of women it also was created just as much to marginalize and disempower women of that ideal. >> do you feel like they momfluencer culture is a strong parallel? >> yeah unfortunately i do still see the most popular lucrative accounts are still very much rooted in domesticity and rooted in rooted in traditional tenets of femininity. and i talked to several black moms specificallyal who said whn we aree' making deals with brand companies these brand companies are owned by white people are imagining the ideal customer is white. so there is several corners of the market that is not

considering where they partner with a momfluencer. there's no oversight in this industry andin. there's no resources department so pay disparity inequity is a huge issue. >> on our walk over here we were talking about joe jonas -- are getting divorced. all the headlines immediately were about her having a cocktail in london and what a terrible mother she was. tell me your reaction tote that. >> so i talked to somebody from the "washington post" two days about this -- two days ago about this and she had a question about this. the "max first of all their specific rove "marks and one of them is something like he's a home body and she likes to party they have very different lifestyles. what does that mean?

what does that mean? 's is completely ludicrous in the idea of socializing with friends would prevent them from making their children feel loved and respected and supported and cared for. they have nothing to do with each other. because she's a mother she supposed to be home doting on her children and being self sacrificial. >> all directions are immediately and the headlines obviously specifically that she was aba bad mom and he's at home taking care of the children. i' reality she is doing a movie on tour so someone is caring for the children but they don't know thatgh it's joe. she was vilified for having a cocktail. it's a bombery. obviously. >> i had a cocktail last night.

i'm a bad mom. >> from your book i understand you don'tt mind traveling withot your children. >> traveling without my children right now. >> unseemly. >> another thing that's interesting about your book and the work that you do is the para- social relationship which i was in a very intense prayer social relationship with a gal from "sex and the city." every time i watched and just like that i was getting very upset. f i feel that these are my friends or can youtl talk about para- social relationships and that nearec norm thing? that's fascinating. >> i thought so too. para- social relationship mimics psychologically how we feel with their relationships with people we know in our real lives except

the course we don't know these people so we form emotional attachments to celebrities. i know i have dreamt about momfluencers before and it occupied my life which they don't but it's a one-sided relationship. but it does have a powerful effect on our consumer habits because if we follow a momfluencer and we saw her give birth in a at her house and we have all these vulnerable picturesbl of her life and it makes us feel like her so when she recommends the best way to wean a baby we are more likely to trust her and by the guidebook or were never does. so it does have a real impact on money. >> you put in the book some of the things you bought.ou [laughter] can you tell us some of the things you felt like oh it was

for a m. on instagram and i go back to sleep for about an hour. >> is before i'm fully caffeinated.de i bought a wooded marble run for my children because julie had one. she really got me. it'sve a 2-dollar marble run and i'd have bought so many beauty products and skin care products. but i think the marble run was the most. >> you want a plastic one. >> of course not. >> that would not be good. when you are receiving products in the mail rehabbing emotions about it? when i receive products that i bought on instagram allotted times it's like well this is not great. that was a mistake and that i

feel i go through my life thinking i'm smarter than instagram bu' in reality i'm not necessarily at all. >> i wish i could say i felt more about it. i also do think that's the way we shop now. it's so enmeshed in how we shop. yeah. i set it up for my kids and i said magic takes place and they played with it maybe once. >> speaking of magic it's interesting talking about consuming other people'sl magil moments versus making sure we are on the floor during the marble run having her own magic. >> a marble run is a perfect example of that. i talked to a psychologist about why it was that i was so eagerge

to consume strangers tender moments rather than deal with tender moments in my own life and she talked about -- which basically hearkens back to the missing limb syndrome. when they were studying missing limb syndrome which is to say i lost my arm but i felt or itching. essentially they found out that they held up a mirror and had the patient it's this arm. held it in a way that it looked like that itching would go away. she posited that maybe when you are buying the r marble run you psychologically are saying to yourself like you are a good mom because you bought this thing. even though the kids didn't play with it and you didn't see them play with it. you didn't laugh with them all you played it. you didn't experience a moment in your real life but the act of

purchasing that marble run told your subconscious that you did something good for your kid are you and acted the role of the good mother for a moment. and i s think the same could go for looking at some of theses newborn photos are looking at a photo of the mother curled up reading to her children by candlelight or whatever it is. there's something that happens in the brain that convinces us that we a are looking at this image and we are saying this is a good image. it checks the box for us in her own mind even though we didn't experience it. >> when you recognize consuming other people's moments was giving you this sense that it was fulfilling u.n. away did you pivot or did you make adjustments to make those moments with your kids. >> i don't think i ever consciously thought of code i'm really nailing motherhood because i spot something. i do think more holistically

after the book i'm just not attracted to other performances of motherhood. it doesn't hold the same emotional powers it onceow did. i think when you know the roots of maternal ideal in the country it's hard to continue to romanticize that ideal. it just doesn't feel, doesn't feel fun to me. it's not something i aspire to anymore i guess. it's loosened its grip on me. >> and ut talk about and he it a little bit here and there are spaces on social media and instagram that are serving women in the marginalized community. >> yeah. i have a whole chapter in the book about many incredible accounts that are featuring maternal advocacy, activism that are seeking to mother's real

needs. people like casey davis. her whole account is basically getting people through the slog of every day in the home. if you are drowning in dishes or laundry and something you can't get through that she has practical step-by-step guides. shes. talks about things like creating beautiful laundry on is not an act of good motherhood. ed aesthetic hobby and making the connection between aesthetics, hobbies an actual mothering. it's really a useful framework thatre she's one of the many momfluencers but there so manys momfluencers providing recourses or otherwise they'd be hard to by. mia o'malley is an influencer and crowdsourced hundreds of

positive health care providers which is a huge problem especially when it comes to fertility treatment and birth trauma. these are like real concrete ways to make mother's lives better that would not be equally accessible were it not for social media. >> can you talk a c little bit about the ethics of commodified your children on thehe internet? it's a pretty broad topic. >> i don't covered aou ton in te book because i was more interested about the maternal experience but i do interview, i talk to every momfluencer in the book about how they felt about it in every single onesi of them had thought about it quite deeply. many of them explicitly asked their kids, is this still fun for you and they don't include their kids anymore. i was heartened to see ill and i

pass one of the first bills to protect children of influencers to legally require parents to put a good amount of money into savings accounts. their laws in other countries. it's called the right to be forgotten so the kid grows up and wantsng everything deleted. they can legally request that. yeah i think consent is almost impossible because how can a 5-year-old fully consent to having her likeness broadcast to 2 million people on youtube? she doesn't know what that means and what the ramifications could be. so i think it'ss a really ethically murky area for sure. >> he's only now just like don't post that. you talk about how any mom on instagram is a momfluencer in performing motherhood.

what do you mean by that.t. >> i i think every facet of our identity for various audiences, i perform a burst of myself at preschool pickup that's very different from the first of myself that had cocktails last night. but i think when we are emerged in momfluencer culture we are absorbing so many aesthetics and images about having to lookpr ad present as a mother that it's impossible not to replicate that on our own feet. i think particularly for millennial mothers we have been taught to equate our value with their ability to aesthetically curate a life. part of that becomes complicated in motherhood. >> i've have some questions and you'll be able to come upet to e mic but i have a pretty important question which is i'd love inhi the book how you

contextualize the way you are doing these interviews like moms are hiding in the bathroom to get on the phone with you for driving to play dates and people are trying to get their kids to watch a show. how are you managing your own writing life and time to deal with three kids. it's difficult. >> i always differ to a poet. she asked this question a lot and she says the same thing which is childcare. it's the same everybody does. at this time in the book there wasn't childcare so when i was writing if i couldn't conceive of writingit at without providig that transparency because every mother i talked to for the book we were all doing our own version of trying to work all also raising her kids.

it became a clear through line as i was readingri it. >> now it's waning to you find you carve outut your time and yu have a schedule where you are writing? >> i don't have a system. i'm kind of a chaotic worker but i can only actually write and use my rain. it has to be when they are at school. >> it's impossible riding a book during a pandemic. it's just a total nightmare. do we have questions about mom influencing? we have got to have some moms in here. [laughter]r] >> do you think there'ski a --

[inaudible] >> has the bubble burst yet zero?? >> i mean unfortunately i think there will always be an audience for that because the rich white then mom is still what consumers think and that's what marketers think are the prototypical mother in what media thinks of the prototypicalhe mother. there will always be an audience of that fantasy. that being said i do think there's so much about the pretty white mom and her white house particularly it doesn't feel like escapist fun in a way that maybe it did pre-pandemic.

but for sure i think there's fatigue and theree so many great accounts that follow that don't make you feel as though you areo failing. i do think maybe the bubble is burst a little. >> is a follow-up to that there is a comedy on it. i don't know if you talk about this in thet book. totally making fun of that and i don't know if you have anything else to say. >> i interviewed haley not for the book. yeah there so many satirical accounts and earthy crunchy momfluencers and in the earthy crunchy community is supposedly bad to breathe through your at night. accountstons of parity to follow. >> why do you tell if about it

now that you brought up the page. what is the nap dress. >> it kind of looks like a less structured dress you'd see on "bridgerton" or in a jane austin novel like elastic smocking here. >> i think it again taps into nostalgia for a time when gender roles were sharply delineated and tap into the fantasy of godomestic earth goddess these motherhood. >> where does the napa parts come from? it's just so versatile. >> it started out as a nightgown they tried to sell pajamas and it took office address. it does look comfortable. i shockingly have one and i'm

shocked. >> is it for much taller person? >> this is very illuminating. but the earthy crunchy are they getting corporate support to. >> yeah, yeah, yeah. any type of mother can partner with the brand and make money. maybe a company selling baby slings want to partner with a momfluencer who lives in the foothills of california and you know only where's shades of light teal. there's a type of momfluencer for almost every type of product so yeah for sure.ng .. okay. and i remember from when i was

first a mom and the things you feel bad that the ideal you know i had a c-section i didn't breastfeed perfectly blah blah and in a way all this social medi i didn't breast-feed. as on socialbl media it was horrible. i know you cared. she's nesting right now. i was hoping looks like this, it makes you think about it from different angles hello inevitably but he has to go through that. i want to be the best, theyth think all my god, i failed but it will give her a little. >> i really didn't want purpose but would you read them and feel free for their own somebody else's idea of perfect so i said

my goal of the book. >> i think he mentioned in the beginningg but this book explors roles of collision particularly mom being perfect and they are doing great, did you talk about that? >> i don't talk about it a ton, i will say the perfect stage of the culture they prioritize family and motherhood and white hood. they prioritize their body being a reflection of god so they are more likely to look a certain way and they are taught to record keep, it's a big part of

their base, talk to journal and scrapbook so flogging became a natural shoot of that about one reason they populate the space and a lot of kids doesn't hurt because every pregnancy and newborn engagement goes way up. n the book though do we have any questions? well, i have one last question. yeah. i have to ask you, what are you reading? do you like excited about? like, you know, obviously nobody should follow ballerina farms. what should they follow. what do you what do you liking right now. um i'm, currently reading a book about the history j.crew i'm i'm obsessed with john giants like obsessed. and i just read a book about, the cultural legacy of the american girl. i'm really interested in how. her girlhood was marketed

towards millennials and and yeah what is a book though that i really really loved recently. oh i maggie ships head circle great circle the circle circle the great circle. i loved it so much. so that's another recent. really, really loved. yeah. well, thank you so much for being here sarah is going to be right over there signing books for you and enjoy the rest of your time in chicago away from your children. ♪♪ father talk to calls about the u.s. supreme court. resideial power supports the trump administration more putting crisis in command, defender and chief in

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