The Power of Rude was the title of Rebecca Reid’s nonfiction book, so it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that the liberal novelist attacked a mom for having too many children.
Hannah Neelman is a ballerina-and-beauty-queen-turned-momfluencer whose Instagram account, Ballerina Farm, documents her life raising a passel of children on a farm. It’s apparently riveting content because she has 10 million followers.
Neelman announced Feb. 25 that she was expecting No. 9. That’s when Reid rudely chimed in, “You cannot give nine children adequate time, attention and connection. … I am pro natalist, pro kids, pro family. But there is no good reason to have nine children, especially while running a business.”
Reid’s comments were premised on the modern norms of intensive parenting.
“Stay-at-home moms used to just tell their kids to go out and play,” parenting author Bryan Caplan noted, “Now, moms and dads tag along with their kids as supervisors, or servants.”
These norms may help explain the collapse in birth rates over recent decades. Of course, you can’t have more than one or two children if you need to drive them to travel baseball, check their homework, and make sure they never fall and skin a knee.
A similar critique of today’s expectations graced the pages of the United Kingdom’s Spectator in January: “How to solve the birth rate crisis: lower standards.”
“If you’re making your own organic baby food, attending baby massage classes and holding them for every single one of their naps,” burnout is inevitable, the article states. “But with lower standards, it doesn’t have to be that way. Write names in the back of their clothes instead of sewing them, let them get bored and find an activity instead of planning something intellectually stimulating.”
“Low-standards parenting is so genuinely enjoyable that I’m entirely willing to do my bit to solve the birth crisis,” the author concluded.
Here’s the odd part: This sensible author was none other than Miss Rude herself, Rebecca Reid.
It may seem inconsistent to write in January that mothers should be less intensive and then have more children, yet write in February that a wealthy mom who can afford the help is wrong to have another kid, since her attention will be spread too thin.
But if you dig a tiny bit beneath a double standard, you’re bound to find an unstated single standard. The constant line between the article and the tweet was disdain for momfluencers.
The homemade-organic-baby-food expectations Reid was bucking were the sort of thing peddled by Ballerina Farm and her likes. “Mumfluencers,” the British Reid calls them.
Check out these momfluencer accounts, and you see an obnoxious perfection made more obnoxious by an omnipresent affect of ease: Sure I may need a multimillionaire husband to live this lifestyle, and I’m a literal beauty queen, and we spent all day lining up this photo shoot of our children in matching clothes, which also happen to match my blue eyes, but the rafters are exposed, the toddler is goofing around, and the boys are all barefoot, so this is obviously just some candid moment in our wild but loving home!
This internet spat, then, brought us a too-precious momfluencer and a bitter momfluencer hater. They may both make their audiences less pro-natal, but at least they both have children.