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What it’s like to be a trad kid
Growing up in a “traditional” home means your future can feel predetermined.
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Anna North is a senior correspondent for Vox, where she covers American family life, work, and education. Previously, she was an editor and writer at the New York Times. She is also the author of three novels, including the New York Times bestseller Outlawed.
In one of Sara Doan’s earliest memories, her mom is asking her to sort laundry. She’s about 6 years old, and as the first child in her conservative Catholic family, she’s already stepped into her role as manager of housework.
Soon she’ll be cooking, doing dishes, and homeschooling herself while her mom takes care of her seven siblings and her dad works six-day weeks at his auto-body shop, occasionally popping in for elaborate home-cooked lunches.
“It was unrelenting drudgery,” Doan, now a professor of experience architecture at Michigan State University, says of her childhood.
I reached out to Doan because I wanted to understand a group I haven’t heard as much about in discussions about tradwives and their role in American politics and culture: the kids who grow up in ostensibly “trad” homes.
On social media, tradwife influencers (think Hannah Neeleman, who posts on Instagram as @ballerinafarm, or Kelly Havens Stickle) are engaged in a “performance of ‘traditional’ femininity,” Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University who studies gender and religion, told me. That performance includes a highly aestheticized vision of motherhood — “it’s beautiful, it’s soft, things are orderly, there’s plenty of time to knead the dough and to gather the flowers from outside,” Du Mez said.
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