To be an expectant parent is to be confronted with an endless series of decisions: Breast milk or formula? Should the baby sleep in our room or her own? What kind of stroller should we buy?
Now, in addition to all the practical considerations that go into preparing for a newborn, there’s one that’s slightly more philosophical: What kind of parent do I want to be — on the internet?
In a world where some babies have Instagram handles before they’re even born, deciding how you want to portray yourself as a parent online has become, for some, almost as important as parenting itself. On TikTok, content creators have been coining terms for their different approaches, turning motherhood into one more aesthetic to brand while also giving themselves a creative escape from the drudgery of parenthood.
A “butter mom,” for instance, rejects diet culture and aims to curate a vibrant, ’90s-style life for her children, complete with analog toys and primary colors. A “cozy mom” might coordinate sweater sets with her newborn, and prioritize Montessori-style practical play.
Destiny Carrion, a 26-year-old mother of two young daughters, often posts videos on her TikTok page meant to represent her parenting aesthetic, which she described as “whimsical.”
“I find it beneficial for moms, especially new moms, to lead this journey with an aesthetic in mind,” said Carrion, who lives in Las Vegas. “It’s easy to get lost in the world of pediatrician appointments, bedtimes, soccer games. Somewhere along there you can lose your style and run on autopilot and let the magic of motherhood fade a little.”
Carrion said she found plenty of parenting aesthetic inspiration on TikTok, where her For You page is filled with content advertising styles like “Tuscan Mom” and “Clean Girl Mom.”
Perhaps the best known is the “sad beige mom.” In 2022, Hayley DeRoche, a writer and librarian, was looking online for a set of stacking cups to buy for a friend’s baby shower when she noticed something strange.
“They were all in shades of beige and incredibly monochrome,” DeRoche said. “But the thing that really tipped it over the top for me was that the marketing images that went with them were these children just kind of looking at the cups, no joy. There was no laughter. They were just staring somberly at them.”
DeRoche surmised that the images were meant to suggest the idea that “your child will be wise beyond their years if they play with this toy,” she said. “But the way it translated was they just looked really sad.”
DeRoche decided to create a TikTok account dedicated to the phenomenon, which she coined “sad beige,” and began creating videos satirizing the aesthetic, often using a Werner Herzog impression. Her videos took off online, and she eventually parlayed them into a book, “Dress Your Baby in Sage and Taupe: A Handbook for the Sad Beige Parent.”
For DeRoche, who has two children of her own, parenting aesthetics have to do with telegraphing class and beliefs.
“It’s virtue signaling, essentially, who you are as a parent,” DeRoche said.
She said she had observed the ways marketing could be wielded against parents who are desperate to “do everything right” and let the world know “that you’re buying the right things, subscribing to the right curricula and ways of rearing a child. And it’s all tied to class.”
Despite being curated for digital consumption, most of these trends are united by a nostalgia for a pre-internet childhood. Embraced both by millennials who grew up before iPads and by Gen Z parents who have never known a world without cellphones, the parenting aesthetics that break through online are largely those that embrace creative, outdoor play and are unburdened by the concept of screen time.
According to DeRoche, at the heart of the parenting aesthetic debate is also a desire for control over something — anything! — related to raising a child.
“I think parenthood drops people into a place where you suddenly lose control,” she said. “You can have your entire life very much under control, and then this baby arrives, and suddenly you could have read 800 books and you still don’t know what you’re doing.”
For Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a new father who described his parenting aesthetic as “oatmeal baby,” there is also something aspirational about the way we dress and present babies.
Though new parents may suddenly have less time to dedicate to their own personal appearances — and little energy to do anything with their free time but mindlessly scroll social media — at least they can dress their babies in clean, minimalist outfits, and hand them a tasteful beige block set instead of plopping them in front of a screen.
“Babies are representatives of our personal tastes since they can’t make any decisions for themselves,” he said. “So I think we outfit them with the things we aspire to, the way people also fancy up their dogs.”
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