“I’m picking up all the dirty diapers I have around my house right now,” Hannah Hiatt, a Utah mother of two, says in an October TikTok. “I kid you not — my guess is probably 15.” Hiatt, who’s known as Nurse Hannah to her 493,000 followers, explains that she has been solo-parenting for 24 hours and hasn’t had time to clean up. By the end of the video, she has picked up 17 diapers.
The post immediately went viral as commenters attacked her for being a lazy, neglectful mother, even accusing her of child abuse. Hiatt tried to take control of the controversy by appearing on Tamron Hall’s talk show, partnering with a Hydro Flask–esque brand to do a “17 Diapers” product giveaway, and attempting to launch an anti-bullying campaign about “moms supporting moms.” In the cultural climate of 2024, however, this goal was perhaps too lofty. Mom-shaming has returned with a vengeance as commenters flock to snark sub-Reddits to criticize influencers like Hiatt, dox them, and even report them to Child Protective Services for various parenting faux pas.
This is exactly what ended up happening to Hiatt: People started scouring her TikTok for evidence that suggested she might be mistreating her son. They found a video of her family at the grocery store in which her toddler appears to reflexively flinch when his dad hands him a package. (The video has since been deleted.) On December 14, local police announced they were investigating Hiatt after TikTok users had reported her. (She’s denied the allegations of abuse, and said in a November 30 video that her children are “happy, healthy, and well-nourished.”)
The Nurse Hannah saga marked the apex of a growing trend of commenters appointing themselves hall monitors for moms on the internet, who they attack for a wide range of wrongdoings, both large and small. In January, the mob turned its ire on a single mother named Alexandra Sabol, who regularly posts videos of herself cooking for her kids, after she posted one where she fed her one-year-old powdered donuts for breakfast. In March, commenters targeted KC Davis, a momfluencer who admitted she doesn’t like playing pretend with her children. (Davis later clarified that she does, in fact, engage in recreational activities with her kids, but that didn’t stop commenters from lambasting her. “I had a mom who didn’t play. We don’t talk now that I’m an adult,” one commenter sniffed.) And in September, Abby Howard, one half of the TikTok-famous couple Matt and Abby, faced backlash for an Instagram Story she posted from a cruise ship, which made it seem like she and her husband had left their kids in their staterooms while they went out to dinner. (The Howards later clarified this was not the case, and that their kids were never alone on the ship.)
It’s not like publicly shaming women ever went away. But — especially in the early years of the pandemic — there emerged something of a consensus that moms have it really hard, and that we’re trying our best. (Who doesn’t remember seeing the endless “moms are not okay” posts cross our feeds in 2021?). It’s like we agreed to, however briefly, cut moms some slack. That’s over now. There’s a general feeling of mothering in a panopticon, and any woman who chooses to post publicly about her experience of motherhood is subject to withering and unrelenting critique from an audience that is more like a jury, assessing the defendant using standards that can change at any given time.
Celebrities aren’t exempt from this trend, either. This past summer, commenters attacked Lindsay Hubbard of the Bravo show Summer House when she posted a photo of her baby bump on Instagram, taking her to task for continuing to shoot in her condition: “Nobody wants to see a pregnant girl partying,” read one representative comment. Tori Spelling was shamed for admitting she dresses her son for school the night before, Jessica Simpson for sticking her tongue out during a family photo, and Sophie Turner for doing shots at a pub following her divorce.
Often, the mom-shaming carries with it an undercurrent of racism (as evidenced by the backlash against Graca Walters, a TikTok chef who was harassed for feeding her 13-month-old daughter lamb curry and other African and Caribbean-inspired dishes) and classism (as was the case with Sabol’s video, which prompted an outpouring of supportive comments from low-income women and moms of kids with special needs, who tend to have more restricted diets: “It’s 2024, and the one thing we are not gonna do is MOM SHAME,” one commenter wrote).
But sometimes the allegations of being a “bad mom” or committing child abuse are prompted by nothing less than a mother having the audacity to document her parenting publicly. Jamie Otis, a reality-TV star turned influencer, is a frequent subject of criticism on the snark sub-Reddits, where haters gather to gleefully comment on everything from the shoe store she chose to visit on an impromptu shopping trip to her breastfeeding selfies. But the primary critique appears to be the fact that she posts herself, as well as her children, online at all. “She’s got no shame,” reads one Reddit post responding to an Instagram Story showing Otis with her daughter and flaunting her postpartum body — a sentiment that seems to reflect the way many people feel about moms who post in general.
Not all of this criticism is without merit, of course. There are legitimate questions about whether the children of momfluencers are able to consent to having their images posted online, and states like California and Illinois have passed laws to protect children from exploitation by requiring their parents to put a percentage of their earnings in a trust. And given the well-documented dangers of the internet, it’s certainly worth asking if it’s ethical for a parent to share images of their children online in the first place.
There have also been instances when internet commenters flagged actual child-abuse cases for the authorities, as was the case with family vlogger Ruby Franke, who spent years dodging such allegations from commenters before she was finally arrested and charged in 2023. (She eventually pleaded guilty to four counts of second-degree aggravated child abuse and was sentenced to four consecutive one-to-15-year terms in prison.) Now some followers see it as their duty to prevent another such tragedy.
“The fact that I’m even being compared to Ruby Franke is absolutely comical,” Hiatt says in a recent TikTok following the backlash to the flinching video. “It’s hilarious, really.” The video is admittedly disturbing, but the TikTok trend it inspired — of mothers pretending to strike their children to prove they would not flinch in response — was perhaps even more so. Hiatt denied that her children were being abused, but that didn’t stop people from posting videos encouraging people to report Hiatt and her husband to CPS, racking up millions of views and presumably leading to the current police investigation. (Hiatt and her husband didn’t respond to a request for comment).
From a certain vantage point, it’s easy to view the people reporting the Hiatts not as mom-shamers, but as concerned citizens trying to prevent another Ruby Franke case from unfolding in plain sight. The trouble is, however, that on the internet there is no such thing as plain sight: there is just the tiny sliver of reality that a content creator chooses to publicly put forth, one that must be increasingly tweaked and sanitized in order to garner maximum engagement or prevent further scrutiny. Even those who do seemingly live up to the idealized standards of motherhood are unlikely to escape critique, as anyone who has read the comments on @ballerinafarm’s account can attest.
There’s a quote from the late mom blogger Heather Armstrong (also known as Dooce), that I have had stuck in my head since her passing last year. She complained that thanks to the commodification of the momfluencer space, mothering on the internet has devolved from a community of women sharing the unvarnished truth about the complexities of motherhood to something more “aspirational and put-together. No one shows the dirty side of the room anymore.”
But it isn’t just that it’s no longer profitable to show the dirty side of the room — the stakes are now simply too high for any mother to do so.
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