They say not to speak ill of the dead, but I can make an exception for advertising’s trope of “the new mom.”
“The new mom” we’ve known for decades is a caricature. She is confident, freshly showered and running on a solid eight hours of sleep. Sometimes she is nothing more than a pair of disembodied, manicured hands changing her smiling baby’s diaper. She may formula feed, but she is unperturbed by internet mom-shamers who insist “breast is best.” If she breastfeeds, it’s only in private, on a rocker in a sunlit nursery, far from the eyes of judgmental strangers. She never questions her ability to grow her tiny human into a healthy adult. “The new mom” bears no resemblance to most real mothers on their very best days. But still, she is the mom all moms want to be.
Ads have always sought to portray an ideal. But savvy, skeptical millennials and zoomers have long since proven their resistance to idealist storytelling—in favor of authenticity in all its unpolished, unshaven, unretouched glory. They respond well to diversity in casting and storytelling, yet parenting brands have been slow to react to this cultural shift. Only in the past couple of years have we started seeing spots featuring queer parenthood, or fathers participating in the “dirty work” of child-rearing.
As millennials and zoomers begin having children of their own, they crave honest depictions of parenthood: more honest than when your little boy sprays your face while changing him. They want cracked nipples. Cluster feeding. Pumping at four in the morning. Crying over spilt milk. They want the truth and they want the community that comes with it.
Parenting brand Frida aired a spot for its Mom line of postpartum care products during Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards (albeit truncated and censored to satisfy NBC). Frida loudly and proudly shatters advertising’s “new mom” trope and welcomes real moms into its arms by giving voice to the many taboos of new motherhood—especially those around breastfeeding.
The full version of the spot, by Mekanism in San Francisco, has earned enthusiastic press for featuring uncensored nipples of nursing mothers, with all the leaks, squirts and cracks breastfeeding often entails. Garden-variety pearl-clutchers aside, consumer chatter has been less about the bare breasts and more about the honest storytelling.
Where were these products and their support when I had kids two decades ago! I felt so alone.
— Lorna Cohen (@MrsLornaCohen) March 1, 2021
Parenthood is beautiful and rewarding, but it is also messy. Why have brands assumed for so long that we’d rather they pretend it’s not? Who does it serve? Certainly not the brand, when they’ve been tasked with earning the loyalty of this new generation of parents who see right through “the new mom.”
As brands begin embracing the uncomfortable and unglamorous parts of parenthood, it seems that Frida’s spot represents a tipping point in storytelling for the parenting category. Brands can either cling to the old “new mom” and the safe, whitewashed fantasy she represents—or they can push this fresh conversation further. We have a chance to put her in the ground for good. I’m sure she’s a perfectly nice lady, but I think we’d all be better off without her. And so will our children.
