The Ballerina Farming of America: How JD Vance, Elon Musk, and the Entire GOP Want to Trigger Mommy Mania

Never mind the dirt-road pirouettes and egg-apron micro-scandals. Above all else, Hannah Neeleman wants us to know that life on Ballerina Farm makes her happy. “The greatest day of my life was when Daniel and I were married thirteen years ago,” she said in a July video. “Together we have built a business from scratch, brought eight children into this world, and have prioritized our marriage all along the way. We are co-parents, co-CEOs, co–diaper changers, co–kitchen cleaners, and decision-makers. We are one, and I love him more today than I did 13 years ago.”

To those who are mere observers, Neeleman’s social media accounts can come across like Little House on the Prairie cosplay, prizing aesthetics over ideology. Still, Megan Agnew, a British journalist with The Sunday Times, showed up to the farm where Daniel and Hannah live with their eight children and suggested in her reporting that Hannah’s options might be limited. (Neeleman did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.) Agnew reported that Daniel had pursued Hannah despite her disinterest, and even that the space she wanted to use as a dance studio had become the children’s classroom. Daniel reportedly told Agnew that his wife sometimes takes to bed for a week at a time, out of sheer exhaustion. As in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier world, a big part of reality has been filtered out.

The “tradwife” trend has become politically charged enough that Neeleman tried to distance herself from it when Agnew asked. But tradwives are a handy fantasy for the quotidian conservatives who push “family values,” the intellectualized “pronatalists” (an appropriately tech-y sounding group that includes Elon Musk and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn), and the outright zealots who want (almost) everyone to have babies. For a group of politicians, writers, and activists, the apparent idyll of Ballerina Farm and her ilk are sending the right message at the right time. And some of those thinkers and writers have begun to be louder in their argument that embracing those ideals—even if you arrive there by shame or coercion—is a matter of saving Western Civilization.

From a certain perspective, the birthing fanatics are absolutely killing it in 2024. Billionaires are on board, and even Musk has said he now identifies as a “cultural Christian.” Columnists, academics, and think-tankers are proselytizing in books meant for the mainstream. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s second-term blueprint for Donald Trump, made “the well-being of the American family” their number one priority, adding that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” And one of breeding’s biggest advocates, the author turned senator JD Vance, is gunning for a big promotion.

It’s obvious that these efforts focus on getting certain types of babies raised by certain types of parents—they’re not trying to make life easier for, say, the youngest immigrants. Vance’s fellow travelers might argue with that characterization, but by tethering birth to marriage to traditional gender roles, they arrive at that result without having to say something overtly uncouth.

Yet, the big push to birth is falling flat in the wider culture. For one, Vance, a historically unpopular VP pick, has repulsed people with his fixation on “childless cat ladies” and musings about the purpose of the “postmenopausal female.” Project 2025 is unpopular among most people who have heard of it. And there’s Neeleman. When the don’t-call-me-a-tradwife tradwife isn’t interested in becoming a part of your public push for childbearing, you have a branding problem.

The contours of today’s mommy mania have their roots in earlier strains of American politics. News that the US had the world’s highest divorce rate can be traced back as early as 1889, and in 1987, televangelist Pat Robertson told his audience that an uncertain future for Social Security was a reason to restrict abortion rights. Though Vance is not really saying anything too different from his forefathers when he claims women without children are “miserable,” his views are borne of a more contemporary strain, which like so much of today’s political divides emerged from the wreckage of the Great Recession. In 2008, birth rates began to drop and they have not recovered. Scholars are in near universal agreement about this reality, but whether it’s an aberration or a tragedy is debatable.

Some people might be amenable to believing the latter because it would be good for the economy if our birth rate went up. But Vance’s fundamental argument—women are making a choice against their own best interests when they pursue child-free lives, or even when parenting outside of wedlock—makes him a bad messenger of a different message.

The best pronatalist arguments touch on a few good points. In Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be (April 2024), American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and conservative columnist Tim Carney presents the gentlest case. He argues that the intensive, 21st-century approach to childrearing has caused many people to avoid becoming parents when they might otherwise enjoy it. He also advocates for pro-parenting policy perks, from zoning reform to expanded parental leave, and an economic market that promotes family-friendly cultures and provides cash bonuses along with enhanced salaries to workers who are breadwinners.

Carney takes a breezy tone and offers tips for making parenting less stressful, gleaned from his own experience as a father of six. “Overly ambitious parenting, often unchosen or unconsciously chosen, is one big reason that parenting seems so hard and so costly,” he writes. “The first prescription for curing our national parenting headache and making a more family-friendly America, then, is convincing everyone to have lower ambitions for their children.”

He also surveys the culture of momfluencing, arguing that it might make parenthood seem more intimidating than it needs to be, citing Ballerina Farm’s videos as an example of this trend. “The devious genius of a great momfluencer is the exquisitely crafted details that make the scene look less crafted,” he writes. “I call it the affect of ease.”

But when his scope widens, the recommendations become Vance-like advocacy for conservative gender roles. Carney understands that a woman might be fearful of relying on a man in case a marriage ends. “Does it ever go wrong? Often. That’s why divorce law, alimony, and child support law need to be strict,” he writes. But he also advocates for more social pressure to enforce traditional marriages. “More importantly, social stigma needs to be greater for men who leave their wives or who are unwilling to marry the mother of their children if she so desires.”

The internet stars most well-known for their explicit pronatalist advocacy couldn’t be further in appearance from the tradwife internet, though they agree that it should be easier to have more children. After founding a pronatalism foundation, Pennsylvania-based “nonprofit entrepreneurs” Malcolm and Simone Collins appointed themselves standard bearers for the movement. The couple, who have four children, wear stylish glasses, and make kooky appeals to rationality in their parenting choices (their children’s names, Octavian George, Torsten Savage, Titan Invictus, and Industry Americus, originate from learnings in the “heavily studied field” of nominative determinism, for example). They believe in physical discipline—please don’t mind the AR-15 on the wall.

The Collinses attract mainstream attention because they are open about their atheism and tend to put their arguments in secular terms. Though we associate “family values” with the religious right, progressive thinkers have spent the last two decades trying to seize the mantle of “pro-family policy.” So where a previous generation of religious thinkers and psychologists might have appealed to Bible verses or human nature, some pronatalists appeal to data.

Sociologist Brad Wilcox has spent his career studying the elements of successful marriages, and he is now the director of the National Marriage Project, a think tank that funds survey research to identify the best way to be married. (Pro tip: “frequent date nights.”) Wilcox’s book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization (February 2024), is aimed at a younger generation of men raised on the manosphere and Andrew Tate, a cohort who might not appreciate the upsides of the institution. Wilcox argues that conservatism and family go hand-in-hand when it comes to a happy life, making the case with stats to argue that data from the 2021 General Social Survey shows conservative men and women are much likelier than liberals to say that they are “very happy” with their lives.

As the book’s overheated subtitle implies, Wilcox attacks the “elites” who, according to him, understand the value of marriage in their own personal lives but promote a “family diversity myth.” He argues that The New York Times puts out an “anti-nuptial message,” and that feminists on social media have reduced the pressure people feel to get married, with economic consequences for the working class. In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Vance argues (speciously, it seems) that his grandparents’ intact marriage helped them succeed financially, and Wilcox cites him as a promoter of the idea that strong marriage norms matter.

Vance, an acolyte and onetime employee of tech billionaire Peter Thiel, sits at the nexus of Silicon Valley space-age pronatalism and Wilcox’s traditionally conservative case for the nuclear family. There is more exchange between the two groups than you might expect, and their arguments are oddly compatible. Religious conservatives have long argued that effective and accessible birth control disconnects the sex act from its natural consequence: babies. Thus, Carney and Wilcox treat it as a given that the pill set off a race to the bottom of the birth rate (though some economists disagree). Musk has adopted a twisted version of that, with theories about internet addiction and the limbic system. Musk told Tucker Carlson in 2023 that people are essentially getting too much pleasure from their phones to know the joy of real sex.

With a colleague, Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, an economics professor at Catholic University of America, did qualitative surveys of more than 50 mothers with college degrees who fall in the 5% of American women who are raising five or more children. She collects her conclusions in Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth (March 2024), which paints a picture not dissimilar to the Ballerina Farm feed. The title references the biblical story of Hannah, a barren woman who prayed for children and was blessed with six, and the book has become a sleeper hit among conservatives, in part thanks to reviews in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Slate.

Pakaluk, a mother of eight and stepmother to six, aims to explain why educated women choose to have big families even as national fertility rates have dropped. She makes the point that decisions to have children are rarely made on the grounds of pure economic rationality, arguing that social norms and the subjective personal value of children instead play a central role. (See also: the red-state pandemic baby boom. As Carney puts it in his book, “Pregnancy is contagious.”)

Pakaluk’s 55 subjects, 54 of whom spoke about religion, tell her that parenting gets easier once you have four or so. Like Neeleman, many put their family planning at least partly in God’s hands, and are “open to life,” as a few interviewees put it, meaning they will adjust to another child regardless of how inconvenient the pregnancy might initially seem.

Though there are variations in doctrine, Catholic, evangelical Christian, Mormon, and Orthodox Jewish women who speak to Pakaluk express similar views about the spiritual importance of childbearing. They put heavy emphasis on their children’s spirits and see the value of children in both practical and metaphysical terms. Women with more than five children, according to Pakaluk, “valued childbearing—and children—more than the other things they could do with their time.”

It’s practically a mathematical equation: cultural pressure to marry plus religious enthusiasm for children equals happiness. In Hannah’s Children, Pakaluk goes so far as to suggest that having more babies in a family just might be a natural antidepressant. “While many will point to our broken economy, divided politics, declining religion, or social media as causes of our mental health calamity, it is well worth examining a cause that nobody seems to have considered: Is the absence of babies in our midst partly to blame?” She writes. “We’ve already tried everything else—exercise, therapy, new diets, and fancy medicines. The women I interviewed for this study thought we should try children.”

In a certain way, I am the target for this push. I am in my early 30s, Christian, married, and—surprise!—childless, at least so far. I got my college degree, found a job that I’m passionate about, and acquired political commitments my father might call “woke,” but am still less fulfilled by my career as a writer than I thought I would be. There were moments in these books when I nodded along—workism is bad! Helicopter parenting sucks!—but when the proposed solution to a morass of problems is a return to a maybe imaginary social order, I feel less inclined to have any kids, never mind many of them. There isn’t any room for the inevitable messiness of life in the mommy-mania plan, and to make their case, these writers have to ignore some pretty obvious evidence.

“Anytime you’re trying to prop up a fundamentally flawed ideology, shame always enters the picture as a way to make up for what the ideology lacks,” says Samantha Shelley, a Utah woman who has charted her experience leaving the Mormon Church on a YouTube channel with nearly 48,000 subscribers. “When the demand is to stay married no matter what, you get married young and never individuate. So much of that is relying on shame and repression to keep the operation running.”

Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives follows a group of social-media-famous moms in and around Provo, Utah. All eight of its main cast members married fairly young, but by their mid to late 20s, four had divorced. The show was hatched after its star, Taylor Frankie Paul, went viral for divulging that her fellow TikTok moms and their husbands were hooking up with one another’s spouses, which came to be known as a “soft swinging” scandal. Her marriage ended soon thereafter, and in the show, she is trying to pick up the pieces—a paradigmatic example of marrying young not always working out.

The schadenfreude of #momtok during the Mormon wife meltdown might explain why many of the biggest social media creators feel uncomfortable yoking their personal brands to tradwife politics. It might seem like a paradox that “motherhood” is becoming a lucrative career right as the birth rate is plummeting, but going viral requires a lot less planning than an 18-year investment in another human.

In Family Unfriendly, Carney is emphatic that we can change our parenting culture without shaming people who don’t have children. Nevertheless, the success of the breeding frenzy depends on the rest of us forgetting how we got here in the first place and redefining what “normal” means. In Vance’s worldview, “normal people” don’t want to send their kids to daycare, and normal women want to stay home with their young children. It’s not a coincidence that the more Vance speaks about these ideas, the angrier he seems to get.