Note: This article has been updated by semi-popular demand to include three additional categories, listed at the bottom.
Have you ever noticed that, before you have kids, the world is basically divided between your own kind (childless, fun, free!) and the poor souls straddled with tiny humans and big responsibilities? Turns out, it’s not quite as simple as it seems. Once you procreate and commence the parental mingling process, you begin noticing that there are actual sub-categories of parents, defined by their approach to both the task at hand and life itself. Two years into the game, I’m here to present to you the mothers I have most frequently come across.
The Pro Mom. I’ve written about her before and I’ll write about her again, because she is everywhere and she is terrifying. She is the woman who would have excelled at a high-pressure corporate career but has invested the same vigor and competitive spirit into mothering. She does four different Mommy and Me classes a week, she is a master at arts & crafts, she starts the preschool tours a year in advance, mapping out the “feeder preschools” to the “feeder prep schools” to the three Ivy League colleges her crayon-eating tot is allowed to attend in fifteen years. Once one kid is in school, she usually just pops out another one, because she is nothing if not ambitious. Oh, she also practices “gentle parenting,” yet vets each nanny like a CIA officer interrogating a convicted criminal.
The Assisted Mom (i.e. the Rich Mom). She “loves being a mother,” mainly because there’s a magic little lady living in her 5th bedroom, eager to take away her kids if they’re being life-sucking pains in the butt (also, because each kid comes with a 20K push gift). She has a few Pro Mom traits about her, but she is also very much focused on herself, her wardrobe, her social life and the condition of her abs in preparation for the next Capri season. She has traveled without a nanny twice and was “humbled” each time. She has a “person” to call for everything, which is why I highly recommend keeping her on speed dial for when you need a lactation consultant, a Mandarin tutor or an at-home collarbone acupuncturist (all at top dollar, of course). You can thank her with “likes” and giddy comments, because she’s trying to ramp up her engagement for when the 50th season Rich Housewives comes calling (because that’s her path to “financial independence,” of course!)
The Wine O’Clock Mom. This mom is a bit of an Internet cliché, but I have come to realize that she exists and can often be encountered at your local Mommy and Me (to which she is usually five minutes late). Like the Pro Mom, she has made child rearing her full-time job, and yet she lacks the Type A personality (and, often, the resources) required to be Insta-perfect at the whole endeavor. She has an athleisure uniform, an overflowing diaper bag and zero fucks to give – her goal is merely to get through the day and hide in the bathroom with a glass of wine when her husband walk through the door. Her idea of heaven is not a trip to the Maldives, but a weekend of binge-watching Hulu shows in an empty house. Which sounds quite nice, come to think of it.
The “How The F Does She Do It” Mom. This is the superhero mom who I want to wake up as, because she somehow manages to have a child, a full-time job and an independent social life – and make it all look easy in the process. She is usually somebody who had a successful career before kids, which allowed her to integrate them into her life rather than creating a new one where a twenty-pound human is the sun that the entire family orbits around. We have the same number of hours in the day, but she manages to utilize hers efficiently via “time blocking” and “prioritizing,” rather than spending hours sucked into the yuppie Dark Web that is Zillow. It is only when you give her two glasses of wine that she confesses that, underneath it all, she’s actually burnt out, exhausted, and occasionally daydreams of a second husband in the form of a tech billionaire (one who cashed out before the grand collapse of 2023, that is.)
The “One With Nature” Mom. She had a doula who somehow convinced her to have a natural birth (“I was an animal woman!”), breastfed her kids until they could speak in full sentences and carried them around in an Artipoppe carrier everywhere she went. She picked co-sleeping over sleep training and never put them on a schedule, because her life is unpredictable and all the breathwork and ayahuasca she’s done have given her the patience of a monk. Her kids are beautiful hemp-clad additions to her idyllic otherworldly life and they never really seem to annoy her, although she does occasionally leave them to do shrooms at a New Moon ceremony in Malibu (hosted by her doula and Kate Hudson, of course). She usually comes with a long-haired new age hippie dad who owns one pair of shoes and forages his own coffee beans. How these people pay their bills, I have no idea.
The Fashion Mom. She is style, she is taste, she’s got money on stupid things to waste! This is the Row-dressed woman who either works in fashion or is industry-adjacent, therefore priding herself on her excellent eye and penchant for making her “world” look like something out of an EyeSwoon moodboard. Her child is a “reflection” of her and therefore their wardrobe has been a masterpiece-in-progress since T-6 months before birth, when she first started curating its oatmeal-centric color palette. All “pops of color” are carefully selected and must have an overpriced indie brand label for validation. She disposes of all “ugly” gifts and plastic toys in fear of screwing up the kid’s playroom Feng shui. Her biggest nightmare involves a Target bag, a polyester princess costume, or anything that isn’t made of virginal organic cotton – although she will give an occasional hall pass to Zara Kids. As long as it’s beige, of course.
The Momfluencer. I’ve never actually encountered her in the flesh, but learned a lot about her via Jenny Mollen’s City of Likes, where she was presented as a sociopath put on this earth for the sole purpose of making other moms feel bad about themselves (and convince them to buy useless baby food processors). She lives in a perfect world where all problems occur in the past tense, the husband doesn’t mind being styled as Ken Dad in Todd loafers, and the kids are somehow sedated into filming product placement ads on a weekly basis (God bless their future therapists). Her IRL counterpart is that playground mom who tells you about her child’s no-cartoon record and Montessori playroom, making you feel like the scum of the earth for all the plastic sh*t in your house, only to then explode on her shrieking tot the minute they round the corner.
The Gentle Parenting Mom. I realize that some of these categories are crossing over, but I would be remiss not to mention this one, given the gentle parenting mania sweeping over the nation (and, supposedly, some demographics in Europe). This mother takes the current obsession with not f*cking up her kid to a whole new and completely inappropriate level, i.e. trying to psychobabble them through an airplane tantrum in lieu of just sticking an iPad and a fruit gusher in their face. She worship the ground her crayon-throwing tyrant walks on and is fully convinced that, one day, under the apt guidance of Doctor Becky, they will wake up as a well-adjusted, respectful teen with perfect control over their emotions. While I myself have listened to the pods and even occasionally defer to some of the techniques, I’m also quite interested in seeing what kind of egomaniacal snowflakes this approach will yield ten years from now. Which, coincidentally, is around the same time that I plan to flee the continental US.
Anybody I missed? Should I do one of these on dads? Let me know in the comments!
I loved this even though ive only been a mom for a split second. Cant wait to read the sequel on dads
I’ve seen each of these in the wild! I wonder which one I am, ha! Fun read