We’re All High-Effort Moms, Actually
Every few months, another momming trend rips through social media. The tradwife, the almond mom…the now-outdated “crunchy mom” (there are actually now 527 different subcategories of crunchy mom, ICYMI.) If there’s one thing the internet is good at, it’s creating arbitrary labels to describe the daily gauntlet that is modern parenting.
I’ve been doing my best to limit my social media to about 30 minutes a day (using an app that locks down my phone, because I am a toddler), so the newest term in the great mommy wars almost missed me: The High-Effort Mom. Once I came across it, I was perplexed. Many of the superlatives we slap before “mom” on social media make sense—but not this one. After all: parenting in general is a high-effort sport.
“Mothers are already expected to carry the world on their shoulders, and the ‘high-effort mom’ label suggests anything less than total commitment is inadequate.”
As I watched more videos and polled parents on social media, I found that this term struck a nerve with other moms, too. One friend told me she does a lot of the things the moms in these videos do, but it doesn’t stress her out. She’s naturally crafty, and it brings her joy. She also doesn’t judge those of us (me) who failed the Pinterest course in mom school. Another friend told me she knows she goes overboard, but her own childhood was lonely and chaotic — so she’s breaking cycles. Dozens of mothers responded to my query with the same central message: We are all putting in a lot of effort, dammit.
The label “high-effort mom” often celebrates visible, aesthetic, social-media-friendly effort while missing the invisible labor that drains moms in particular: disability advocacy, IEPs, medical logistics, neurodivergence support, work, caregiving, money stress, and simply surviving.
The Internet Loves Effort You Can Document
We can’t discuss an internet trend without noting that it’s all for show: These mothers are producing content, and many of them are making a living off of it. As a person who also makes my living on the internet, I don’t fault them for this. The issue with the 24/7 content machine we’ve created, though, is that you always need a fresh angle.
Once someone found a way to package effort for content, the topic became a runaway train.
For purposes of hashtags and search terms, social media defines “high-effort moms” as those who go big for every holiday, create cutesy lunches, throw epic themed parties and volunteer at every activity. That’s my local friend, Danielle. She loves to tuck notes and trinkets in her kids’ lunches, focuses on intentionally spending 1,000 hours outside each year, and celebrates even smaller holidays like Earth Day with flair. “I am really intentional about it,” she told me. “I always try to go the extra mile.”
When framed that way, I love it. She has the time, skills, and bandwidth—but I am wired differently. We certainly spend 1,000 hours outside as a family, but I’m bad at tracking things. We have many holiday traditions, but we also bought a random cake last week to celebrate Michael Jackson’s birthday. Is it a tradition? That depends on if we remember to do it next year. Our kids are having different experiences, but both Danielle and I are putting in a lot of effort. I help at our school often, but not as much as some moms. But this? Two friends who parent differently but respect each other? That doesn’t garner views.
That’s why our feeds are flooded with videos of moms showing us their star-shaped sandwiches as they go into a lunchbox (and why the link to buy that sandwich cutter is in their bio, too). Once someone found a way to package effort for content, the topic became a runaway train.
A Lot Of High-Effort Motherhood Is Invisible
The other issue with the term “high-effort mom” is that effort is not always something you can physically document. A cute lunch note or a themed first-day-of-school backdrop makes for great content, but there’s a good chance I forgot to write it, or order it, or execute my well-intentioned plans. With four kids in a myriad of activities, IEP meetings, my job, the appointments for myself that I forgot to make time for…sometimes the highest-effort parenting is the stuff no one sees at all.
The problem is not that some moms are doing “too much.” Instead, the problem lies in the framing that confuses visible effort with meaningful effort—and meaningful effort with our worth as a mom.
I know moms who spend every ounce of energy battling the school for accommodations, or calling 15 therapy practices to find help for her kid. What about the mom who spends hours on the phone trying to get insurance to cover her child’s medication or in-home nursing? Or the mom battling depression in a country that does not support mental health care (or women and mothers at all, really), whose barely visible effort may be all she can manage without a village.
Shannon Brescher Shea, a Maryland mom, says the term “high-effort mom” fits her, but not in the glossy Instagram sense. “I think I’m definitely a high-effort mom, but that’s driven by a combination of my kids’ neurodivergence (which includes both a lot of executive function support, advocacy, and a lot of anxiety) and my own and my husband’s neurodivergence. This comes with anxiety, plus just having to work harder to get ‘normal’ stuff done.”
Beyond a hashtag intended to fuel views and affiliate sales, the high-effort mom trend neglects to acknowledge that some parents are working twice as hard to get to what looks like everyone else’s baseline. From the outside, it may look like being late, overwhelmed or scattered. Shea puts it plainly: “We are absolutely not the ‘have it all together’ people, even if I desperately want to be. I forget shit and mess up all the time.”
Catherine Smith, a mom of one in New Jersey, told me, “Parenting is hard enough with all the actually hard things.” She says the last thing she (or any mom) needs is something else to make us feel inadequate. “The number of times I have stressed myself out planning an amazing family day, only to be reminded that my kid would be perfectly happy to go to a playground with me and get a $2 icee from Wawa on the way home.”
The problem is not that some moms are doing “too much.” Instead, the problem lies in the framing that confuses visible effort with meaningful effort—and meaningful effort with our worth as a mom.
What If The Goal Isn’t High Effort, But High Intention?
Laura Danger, internet expert extraordinaire on domestic equity and author of No More Mediocre, sees the “high-effort mom” trend less as a harmless internet label and more as part of a larger system that keeps asking mothers to give and give.
“The concept of the ‘high-effort mom’ reinforces the status quo and shames people into working beyond their limits, then selling products and services as solutions,” says Danger. “It reflects a cultural mentality that equates how hard someone works with the quality of their life, a myth of meritocracy.” She says this makes moms feel like no matter how special they make childhood, it’s never enough.
That matters because the line between meaningful effort and overextension gets blurry quickly, especially in motherhood. “When we equate overextension with goodness, we end up in a constant deficit,” Danger says. “Mothers are already expected to carry the world on their shoulders, and the ‘high-effort mom’ label suggests anything less than total commitment is inadequate.”
That’s what Vee Vargas, a mom in Beaver County, Pa., takes away from the whole situation. “Mom social media is hard for me,” she tells me. “It reminds me of all of the aspirational body stuff from the 90s, this constant comparison of ‘Am I performing motherhood to the adults around me properly?’ instead of asking, ‘What does my child need? How can I meet that with the resources I have?’”
Danger’s point is just that. It’s not that parents should not care, or that the little extras never matter. I love surprising my kids with Slushee Tuesday, a thing I made up on the spot. Some friends really love making balloon arches, and that’s okay too. It’s more that visible effort alone is a bad measure of love, care, or outcomes.
“You don’t have to go above and beyond to still be engaged, caring, attentive to your family’s needs, and thoughtful in your decisions,” Danger says. “Using discernment in how you invest your time and energy is part of the equation. Healthy boundaries are better for well-being than consistently running at full speed.”
That feels like the part the internet keeps conveniently skipping, though. “There’s no evidence that pushing yourself to the limit makes you a better person or that more effort in parenthood translates into a well-adjusted child,” Danger says. “Not all parents have the same resources, so the time, energy, and money it takes one parent to create individual goody bags for the class is not comparable to another parent’s. This creates a false standard that only serves to make some people feel superior.”
Maybe we’re all high-effort moms, in our own ways. If you’re taking the time today to sit and read a parenting article like this one, you’re trying, right? Some of us are making themed lunches, some of us are fighting insurance companies, and some of us are just trying to get everyone to school with shoes on. I care less about what it looks like from the outside, and more about whether my kids know I’ve always got their back. That’s the effort I care about.
Meg St-Esprit, M. Ed. is a journalist and essayist based in Pittsburgh, PA. She’s a mom to four kids via adoption as well as a twin mom. She loves to write about parenting, education, trends, and the general hilarity of raising little people.