The Ridiculous But Totally Predictable Rise Of The Niche Mom Identity

I don’t TikTok that often, but when I do, the platform sure knows how to send me down a rabbit hole. Last week it was videos about one-and-done moms. Suddenly, I was served dozens of clips of women making declarations like: “I feel like being one and done is so chic. One is an accessory and two is a lifestyle.” In these videos, very elegant women are shown dining out and toasting with zero-proof mimosas, each with an equally elegant small girl.

This is the opposite of my life. I have three children. I am not elegant and am far from chic. My children are less designer accessories and more mismatched luggage that won’t fit into the overhead compartment. Around the time I had my first baby eight years ago, I had begun to notice that the identity of “mom” was becoming a public-facing qualifier for a lot of ladies my age. Very accomplished women were leading with it everywhere: on Instagram, sure, but also in professional bios and embroidered sweatshirts. Founders and bestselling authors were introducing themselves first not by what they had built or accomplished, but by who they had produced.

The shift feels inevitable, thanks to, for starters, generational whiplash. I came of age in the #girlboss 2000s, when embracing motherhood as part of your professional persona was viewed as a self-imposed limitation — far from a virtue. Children were liabilities and pregnancy was something you hid under slouchy sweaters for as long as possible. The goal was to prove that caregiving could never soften your work ethic or compromise your ambition.

When I insert “mom of three” into a professional setting, it’s not just a declaration of identity but a proffering of evidence of everything I’m managing at once.

The pendulum swung, as it does, and now, at 45, with three children under 9, I find myself mentioning that I’m a mom of three earlier than I mention being a novelist, a journalist, a triathlete, or a wife. Without intention or conscious consideration, my own author bio adopted a new ending: She lives in Philly with her husband, Nick Aster, and three feral children. Emphasis on the “three.” It’s as if I need people to understand the level of logistical warfare underway in my life at any given moment and in turn, bow down — or at least quietly respect the sh*t out of me.

“For some of those disillusioned by girlboss feminism, hustle culture, and the idea of work as a primary identity, ‘mom’ can become a kind of alternative identity,” Stephanie O’Connell, author of the forthcoming book The Ambition Penalty, told me. “The ambition, hustle, and consumption behind a Home Edit-style container queen mom, for example, rivals even the most dedicated, swagged-out girlboss of the 2010s. Motherhood provides a very tangible structure to reorganize an identity around [whereas] careerism can be far more challenging to maintain in the face of constant uncertainty, upheaval, and disruption.” She continued: “And it can give all the burnt-out girlbosses a socially celebrated place to channel all of their hustle and ambition.”

The cliche exists because it’s a fact: motherhood is the hardest job I have. And these days, because of the precarity of the job market, and the world generally, I have about 19 jobs. When I insert “mom of three” into a professional setting, it’s not just a declaration of identity but a proffering of evidence of everything I’m managing at once.

The fragmentation of motherhood into thinner and thinner subgroups is recent, a mushrooming of the credit-demanding mom label. What used to be simply “mom” has been atomized into boy moms, girl moms, one-and-done moms, moms of three, moms of multiples.

You can find T-shirts, sweatshirts, and tank tops emblazoned with all of it on Etsy:

Girl Mom.

Girl Mama.

Girl Mom Club.

In My Boy Mom Era.

Outnumbered Mom of Boys.

Mom (Cubed).

I Was Normal Three Kids Ago.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Each subcategory comes with its own implied personality, aesthetic, and moral code. But also, doesn’t each one sort of answer the question we’re all constantly asking about ourselves and each other: What kind of mother are you? Or rather, what kind of mother do you aspire to be?

“You can’t go viral these days without having a hyperspecific talent or dominating your own narrow niche,” Ej Dickson, author of the new book One Bad Mother, told me. “And anything to do with motherhood is magnified, given how constantly scrutinized mothers in the United States are.” (Exactly no one is surprised that this splintering of identity has not taken hold among dads.)

Online, aspirational images of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore or Gwyneth Paltrow and Apple Martin frame motherhood like an outfit that must be styled correctly, as if children are accessories signaling your taste, aesthetic, and personality.

There is truly no more surveilled identity than American motherhood. “In the age of social media, where maternal policing is taken to the ultimate extreme in the form of snark subreddits and comment sections, labeling yourself a ‘boy mom’ because your house is messy, or a ‘mom of three’ because your kids are unruly, is definitely a reaction to that,” she said.

Take the viral video, viewed more than 7 million times, called Girl Mom Going to a Boy Mom House. The boy mom screams at her kids not to pee outside while the girl mom laments another American Girl doll store visit and her packed schedule of hair and manicure appointments.

Or the countless TikToks declaring that “having one daughter is so chic,” often paired with aspirational images of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore or Gwyneth Paltrow and Apple Martin (despite the fact that Paltrow also has a son — sorry, Moses). These memes frame motherhood like an outfit that must be styled correctly, as if children are accessories signaling your taste, aesthetic, and personality.

Did I mention that I am a mom of three? It’s OK that there’s a stain on my shirt and that I forgot our meeting. My friend with one daughter projects much more elegance and restraint. As with everything else on Instagram, this has nothing to do with reality.

Katherine Goldstein, author of the forthcoming book Neighboring: A Deep Casual Guide to Building Community You Can Count On, describes such online sandwich-boarding in terms of what we’ll call the magnet theory. “When we are looking for people to find something in common with or be in community with, we are basically looking for magnets. What are the things that draw people together, or in the online context, what are the things that draw people to us? I would say, online identities around motherhood and fragmenting them and making a big deal about being a boy mom or a twin mom is really about a small bid for connection around a shared experience,” she explained. “In some ways, it's also a bid for attention in that we live in such a hypercrowded online landscape, and that people are looking for something that makes them a little more niche in drawing close other people who are like them.”

Recently, one of my kids grabbed an elephant costume from the costume trunk, told me she was a koala, and asked if I would like to be a panda. We’re all trying on different things and searching for people to join our pack. Who’s to judge if the labels and the self-sorting make it all just a little easier?

Jo Piazza is the national and international bestselling author of The Sicilian Inheritance, Everyone is Lying to You, We Are Not Like Them, You Were Always Mine, Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win, The Knockoff and How to Be Married. Her work has been published in ten languages in twelve countries and four of her books have been optioned for film and television. Jo's podcasts have garnered more than twenty-five million downloads and regularly top podcast charts. An editor, columnist and travel writer, her work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, New York magazine, Marie Claire, Glamour and many other publications. She lives in Philly with her husband, Nick Aster and three feral children.