Never mind the dirt-road pirouettes and egg-apron micro-scandals. Above all else, Hannah Neeleman wants us to know that life on Ballerina Farm makes her happy. “The greatest day of my life was when Daniel and I were married thirteen years ago,” she said in a July video. “Together we have built a business from scratch, brought eight children into this world, and have prioritized our marriage all along the way. We are co-parents, co-CEOs, co–diaper changers, co–kitchen cleaners, and decision-makers. We are one, and I love him more today than I did 13 years ago.”
To those who are mere observers, Neeleman’s social media accounts can come across like Little House on the Prairie cosplay, prizing aesthetics over ideology. Still, Megan Agnew, a British journalist with The Sunday Times, showed up to the farm where Daniel and Hannah live with their eight children and suggested in her reporting that Hannah’s options might be limited. (Neeleman did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.) Agnew reported that Daniel had pursued Hannah despite her disinterest, and even that the space she wanted to use as a dance studio had become the children’s classroom. Daniel reportedly told Agnew that his wife sometimes takes to bed for a week at a time, out of sheer exhaustion. As in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier world, a big part of reality has been filtered out.
The “tradwife” trend has become politically charged enough that Neeleman tried to distance herself from it when Agnew asked. But tradwives are a handy fantasy for the quotidian conservatives who push “family values,” the intellectualized “pronatalists” (an appropriately tech-y sounding group that includes Elon Musk and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn), and the outright zealots who want (almost) everyone to have babies. For a group of politicians, writers, and activists, the apparent idyll of Ballerina Farm and her ilk are sending the right message at the right time. And some of those thinkers and writers have begun to be louder in their argument that embracing those ideals—even if you arrive there by shame or coercion—is a matter of saving Western Civilization.
From a certain perspective, the birthing fanatics are absolutely killing it in 2024. Billionaires are on board, and even Musk has said he now identifies as a “cultural Christian.” Columnists, academics, and think-tankers are proselytizing in books meant for the mainstream. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s second-term blueprint for Donald Trump, made “the well-being of the American family” their number one priority, adding that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” And one of breeding’s biggest advocates, the author turned senator JD Vance, is gunning for a big promotion.
It’s obvious that these efforts focus on getting certain types of babies raised by certain types of parents—they’re not trying to make life easier for, say, the youngest immigrants. Vance’s fellow travelers might argue with that characterization, but by tethering birth to marriage to traditional gender roles, they arrive at that result without having to say something overtly uncouth.
Yet, the big push to birth is falling flat in the wider culture. For one, Vance, a historically unpopular VP pick, has repulsed people with his fixation on “childless cat ladies” and musings about the purpose of the “postmenopausal female.” Project 2025 is unpopular among most people who have heard of it. And there’s Neeleman. When the don’t-call-me-a-tradwife tradwife isn’t interested in becoming a part of your public push for childbearing, you have a branding problem.
The contours of today’s mommy mania have their roots in earlier strains of American politics. News that the US had the world’s highest divorce rate can be traced back as early as 1889, and in 1987, televangelist Pat Robertson told his audience that an uncertain future for Social Security was a reason to restrict abortion rights. Though Vance is not really saying anything too different from his forefathers when he claims women without children are “miserable,” his views are borne of a more contemporary strain, which like so much of today’s political divides emerged from the wreckage of the Great Recession. In 2008, birth rates began to drop and they have not recovered. Scholars are in near universal agreement about this reality, but whether it’s an aberration or a tragedy is debatable.
Some people might be amenable to believing the latter because it would be good for the economy if our birth rate went up. But Vance’s fundamental argument—women are making a choice against their own best interests when they pursue child-free lives, or even when parenting outside of wedlock—makes him a bad messenger of a different message.
Republican vice presidential nominee U.S. Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) speaks to supporters during a campaign event at the Northwestern Michigan Fair grounds on September 25, 2024 in Traverse City, Michigan.Scott Olson/Getty Images.
The best pronatalist arguments touch on a few good points. In Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be (April 2024), American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and conservative columnist Tim Carney presents the gentlest case. He argues that the intensive, 21st-century approach to childrearing has caused many people to avoid becoming parents when they might otherwise enjoy it. He also advocates for pro-parenting policy perks, from zoning reform to expanded parental leave, and an economic market that promotes family-friendly cultures and provides cash bonuses along with enhanced salaries to workers who are breadwinners.
Carney takes a breezy tone and offers tips for making parenting less stressful, gleaned from his own experience as a father of six. “Overly ambitious parenting, often unchosen or unconsciously chosen, is one big reason that parenting seems so hard and so costly,” he writes. “The first prescription for curing our national parenting headache and making a more family-friendly America, then, is convincing everyone to have lower ambitions for their children.”
He also surveys the culture of momfluencing, arguing that it might make parenthood seem more intimidating than it needs to be, citing Ballerina Farm’s videos as an example of this trend. “The devious genius of a great momfluencer is the exquisitely crafted details that make the scene look less crafted,” he writes. “I call it the affect of ease.”
