Sharenting and the Tradwife Aesthetic: The Challenge of Public Motherhood
Monday, June 23, 2025.
It usually starts with something sweet.
A baby’s first wobbly step, recorded on a phone. A photo of a child asleep in the car seat after a long day at the beach.
A TikTok with a pretty piano track and a soft-focus toddler meltdown. These moments feel private—but they’re not.
Welcome to sharenting, the modern art of broadcasting parenthood.
And right next to it, making sourdough and arranging little flowers in milk-glass vases, we find the tradwife—a woman who’s not just choosing domestic life, but doing so with intention, aesthetic elegance, and sometimes a ring light.
These two trends may seem different, but together they raise important questions: what happens when motherhood becomes a performance?
Who benefits when domestic life is publicized? And how do we honor both privacy and choice in a culture that rewards constant visibility?
Sharenting: Love Meets the Algorithm
Sharenting isn’t new.
It’s just parenting in public, enhanced by likes, shares, and the occasional brand sponsorship.
A 2022 study found that over 75% of parents post about their children regularly—often before those children are old enough to say, “Hey, could you not?” (McCormick, 2022; Parents.com, 2024).
To be fair, it most reliably comes from profound love.
But those aren’t the only things floating around online.
Three Risks Hiding Under the Hashtags:
Identity Theft: A baby’s full name, birthdate, and location might seem cute on Facebook, but it’s also data that bad actors can use (Katz & Berg, 2024; Amon et al., 2021).
Unwelcome Attention: Parents might think they’re posting for friends. But the internet is porous. Videos of children are frequently downloaded, reshared, and misused—often without parents ever knowing (Stephenson et al., 2024).
Relational Fallout: Oversharing can damage trust later. Children are growing up and asking hard questions: Why did the world know about my meltdown before I did? (Siibak & Traks, 2019).
Sharenting, at its best, is a unusually durable form of storytelling. At its worst, it’s storytelling about someone else’s life—without their consent.
The Tradwife Aesthetic: Softness with a Spine
Now, to the tradwife.
This movement, often misrepresented, centers around women who find purpose, creativity, and clarity in home-making, full-time mothering, and traditional family structures. For some, it’s about escaping hustle culture.
For others, it’s about faith, beauty, ritual, or ancestral rhythms. And yes, sometimes it’s just about the sourdough.
On TikTok, the #tradwife trend showcases a highly stylized version of this life: crisp linens, woodstoves, blushing cheeks, and table settings that look like they were arranged by angels with matching placemats (Wikipedia, 2025; Vogue, 2024).
But there’s also an undercurrent of empowerment here—not in rejecting modern life, but in choosing something else.
The Trouble Comes with the Framing
When critics raise concerns, it’s not usually about homemaking itself. It’s about the ideological baggage that sometimes sneaks in:
Who has the Choice? Not every woman can afford to stay home. When the tradwife ideal becomes aspirational media, it can obscure class privilege (TIME, 2024).
Whose History is Being Romanticized? Some viral tradwife accounts inadvertently echo racialized, nostalgic visions of the 1950s that were safe only for a few (The Guardian, 2023).
Who Controls the Narrative? Researchers have found that some communities use the tradwife aesthetic as a gateway to promote restrictive gender roles or even far-right ideology (Mel Allen et al., 2025).
But to be fair—and I would insist on fairness here—not every vintage-loving homemaker is part of some cultural regression. For many, this is a spiritual or aesthetic commitment, not a political one. And for those women, there’s real meaning in choosing to nurture, slow down, and beautify the domestic world.
Where the Aesthetics Collide: Public Motherhood
Sharenting and tradwife culture often merge at the point of performance. That’s not a moral judgment—it’s an observation.
We live in a time when the home is no longer private. Whether it’s a post about your child’s fever recovery or a timelapse of vacuuming to Vivaldi, domestic life is increasingly staged, filtered, and shared.
Monetization: Many sharenting and tradwife accounts are, quite literally, jobs. Affiliate links. Sponsored aprons. Discount codes for educational toys. The line between family and brand can become blurry (Wikipedia, 2025).
Aesthetic Pressure: When everything becomes content, the home becomes a set. Children become props. Joy becomes a product.
Loss of Consent: The child doesn’t get to choose. And neither, sometimes, does the exhausted mother behind the scenes who feels compelled to "show up" online, even on the days she'd rather not.
None of this means these mothers lack integrity. In fact, most are doing their best in a system that quietly demands public proof of private love.
Final thoughts- Choose Privacy Like It's Homemade Jam
Motherhood is hard enough without turning it into a marketing campaign.
And domestic life doesn’t need to be justified to the world in sepia tones or hashtags.
So here’s a proposal: celebrate the jam.
Post the sourdough if it brings you joy. Wear the apron with pride.
But let the child have a say. And let the home—at least some of it—stay sacred.
Because love doesn’t need an audience. Unlike a really good sourdough.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Amon, M., et al. (2021). Sharenting and children's privacy: Parenting in the United States. CSCW21.
Katz, V., & Berg, V. (2024, April 3). ‘Sharenting’–exposed to ID theft before they’re born. New York Post.
McCormick, L. (2022, October 31). The impact of 'sharenting': How much info is too much? Verywell Mind.
Parents.com. (2024, July 29). What to know about the dangers of sharenting.
Stephenson, E. N., Page, C. N., Wei, M., Kapadia, A., & Roesner, F. (2024). TikTok sharenting patterns and privacy violations. CDis UW.
Siibak, A., & Traks, K. (2019). The dark sides of sharenting. Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies.
Mel Allen, O., Zu, Y., Trujillo, M. Z., & Welles, B. F. (2025, May 7). From flowers to fascism? Cottagecore to tradwife pipeline. ArXiv Preprint.
TIME. (2024, June). The truth about the past tradwives want to revive.
The Guardian. (2023, May 31). Frilly dresses and white supremacy: the world of tradwives.
Vogue. (2024). The real problem with tradwives.
Wikipedia. (2025, June). Tradwife.