Broadcasting the good mom: a cross-national analysis of mom vloggers and their audiences

With the rise of social media, mothers around the world publicly share their experiences with raising children, shaping broader notions of what motherhood is and should be. While scholars have documented this phenomenon’s importance, we know little about the values this online discourse expresses or how it varies across cultures. Addressing this gap, we compared the values invoked by moms in morning routine videos on YouTube. Using a novel codebook for value analysis, we analyzed 100 videos from the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea, and Italy and 1,000 associated comments. We found that mom vlogs bring together values from three primary domains: social media (aesthetics, authenticity, affiliation), motherhood (care, rationality), and local cultures (with distinct value emphases). Together, these values construct and celebrate two models of motherhood: the entrepreneurial neoliberal mom who monetizes multi-tasking and the publicized traditional mom who displays hardship to foster solidarity among mothers. The former builds affiliation through inspiration, the latter through relatability–both key to engaging audiences and generating profit. Ultimately, this affiliative feedback loop encourages personal coping over structural change.