Nara Smith Shows Why The Tradwife Trend Is Changing

If we’re going to save the trend, we need to introduce some realism. 

“I don’t prioritize being a homemaker,” Nara Smith, ensconced on an oversized pink couch, told Alex Cooper against the oddly bookish set of the Call Her Daddy podcast. “I’m a working Mom.” 

That announcement might have come as a bit of a shock to a certain number of her nearly 5 million followers on Instagram. Smith, after all, is probably most famous for doing things like rolling out individual peanut butter and chocolate puffs or making Froot-Loop-esque cereals by hand instead of just buying the box from the store like the rest of us do, or posting videos of her tending a thriving garden while trying to find a use for her surplus of zucchini — all while occasionally hoisting a baby on her hip. Given appearances, you would be forgiven for assuming that Smith, like Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, is a tradwife. 

But no. Despite the aesthetic, she insists she’s not. 

Tradwife, like all social media trends, is dying a slow death. It was popular; then the people who made it popular came under fire; now they’re renouncing it, and the rest of us are talking about how fake the whole thing felt in the first place.

Our feminist-steeped society has so many problems with the tradwife vision. First, they determined that the thing was clearly MAGA-coded, never mind the fact that Donald Trump has hired any number of young women whose lifestyles look nothing like those of the stay-at-home Instagram moms. 

Additionally, can you imagine someone actually celebrating women staying out of a corporate office so that they can love their kids and maybe cook a meal or two in 2026? Don’t these women know that the problem with this lifestyle is that their grandmothers and great-grandmothers were forced to live this way? Hasn’t society progressed past this? 

To be fair, conservatives have embraced the whole tradwife trend; after all, there’s a lot of good in it. We’ve been sold the lie that men and women are practically interchangeable. The tradwives seem to recognize that women are just better suited biologically to do certain necessary tasks like bearing and raising children, especially when they’re younger. Women are better at multitasking than men, which makes them better at tracking and handling the multitude of small tasks necessary to run a household. Women, by and large, enjoy making a home beautiful and cooking a diverse array of foods. Men appreciate those things, but the stereotypical bachelor pad and Domino’s Pizza exist for a reason. 

It may not be perfect, but the tradwife trend has proven itself to be an excellent vehicle for opposing the feminist narrative women have been inculcated in since we were handed scrubs and a plastic stethoscope as toddlers and told that being a doctor was a wonderful thing. It seems reasonably effective at getting women to question whether the instinct they feel to stay home and care for their children is really the remnant of some deep psychological damage done to them by a shadowy “patriarchy.” It certainly has done a good job portraying motherhood and family life as beautiful and fulfilling in their own right. 

Of course, being a homemaker isn’t all sourdough bread and homemade cereals. It turns out that we pay people to watch our kids, clean our house, and make our meals for a reason: it’s actually difficult. Life with kids — especially toddlers — usually looks more like chaos than aesthetic. 

Additionally, the idea that at some point in history the majority of women stayed home, didn’t bring in any income, and homeschooled their ever-growing brood of children while singlehandedly managing a massive garden and a flock of chickens simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Historically speaking, embracing God’s blessing to be “fruitful and multiply” doesn’t usually correspond to being able to live well on a single income. As a result, plenty of women have managed a household, part of their husband’s business, and a side gig all at the same time.

Ironically, the modern tradwives we see on social media are doing precisely that: even though they’re promoting a lifestyle that is ostensibly defined by not having a job, they’re doing so on social media. Like it or not, social media is a job that is more than capable of providing income in the 21st century.

So perhaps, as the tradwife trend seems to die, it’s worth redefining our terms a little. Yes, it’s unrealistic to expect families to live on a single income. There are all sorts of reasons for that, and feminism is one of them. Instead of promoting a lifestyle that’s almost impossible to attain anymore, we should celebrate the real tradwives: the women who choose their children over a career, but who also don’t hesitate to earn a buck in a million creative ways in order to help sustain their families. 

Perhaps a little realism will resurrect the trend. If it does, maybe it’ll also make it that much more difficult for feminism to take down.

READ MORE from Aubrey Harris:

Zohran Mamdani’s Socialist Grocery Stores Ignore Boris Yeltsin’s Lesson

When Homer Meets Hollywood

A Gay Couple Wanted to Abort the Baby. Now They’re Suing His Surrogate Mom.