Ballerina Farm is Pregnant With Baby #8

Plus a #Tradwife primer with Anne Helen Petersen

About a decade ago I swore I was finished with reporting on celebrities. And yet, here I am writing about an influential person’s baby bump. I hate myself a little for this headline and yet so many of you sent me this reel about Ballerina Farm’s pregnancy announcement that I can’t ignore it.

I say this all the time, but it is worth saying again. We have to cover influencers the same way we cover celebrities and be critical of them in the same way if they are going to have the power to broadcast their lives to millions of people.

And so here I am telling you……..Ballerina Farm is having a baby. As of this writing this post had nearly 400,000 likes in about six hours.

ballerinafarm

A post shared by @ballerinafarm

That will bring the tally to eight kids. No judgement on that. I love being a mom. I would maybe even love more kids. But frankly they are expensive. We are not rich people, my eggs have all left the building and my husband FINALLY got his vasectomy.

Hannah Neeleman and her husband Daniel Neeleman are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It is not uncommon for Mormon women to have incredibly large families by today’s standards. It is also worth noting that even though the pair are independently wealthy they do make a lot of their money from social media engagement and experts have cited many times that multiple children on social media platforms bring on more engagement, more likes and more followers. This is an excellent business decision for Hannah and Daniel.

It was also kind of Ballerina Farm to so clearly time her birth announcement to #TradWife Week over here at Over and Under the Influence. Even though Hannah doesn’t explicitly call herself a #tradwife she very clearly espouses the kind of traditional values of motherhood and wifedom that they put forth.

If you want you can catch up on Tradwives in Their Own Words and Is This TradWife Trolling Us before continuing down this primrose path.

I will be interviewing Lex Delarosa tomorrow afternoon and I cannot wait! Leave me some questions in the comments.

I am going to be releasing FOUR Under the Influence episodes this week exploring the world of #tradwives, #softgirls, #pilateswives and so much more. We are kicking it off with an episode with the brilliant Anne Helen Petersen.

Anne Helen is an incredible journalist, author, and creator of the Substack Culture Study, as well as the host of the podcast, Work Appropriate.

Much like I do, she has thoughts on hashtag tradwives, and we're here to lay out a primer for what this world of tradwives actually looks like right now and why they get so many followers and so much attention.

The following is an abbreviated interview that we have compiled for paid subscribers (because it genuinely does take a lot of work!)