It’s become an unfortunate yet well-documented truth that having a baby can impact a woman’s career. A 2025 survey found that 87% of working mothers say they’ve missed promotions or opportunities due to becoming a mom, while 90% of mothers said they had to adjust their career path because of parenthood with 59% changing industries altogether.
Enter: family influencing, an immersive and sometimes lucrative career path that is surging in popularity among women post-baby. According to a 2025 review published in Sage Journals, over the past five years, there has been a 101.6% increase in mom-influencers on social media. Journalist Fortesa Latifi explores the phenomenon in her new book Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online. She told Fast Company that, given so much is stacked against women who have children when it comes to their work, the baby to influencer pipeline makes sense.
“I think women are drawn to influencing because it’s so difficult to be a working mother in this country,” the author explains. “Statistically, many women return to work within weeks of having a baby and childcare costs can often outpace an entire salary. Mothers have lower salaries than women without children, on average,” she adds. (One study found that mothers see their incomes decrease by an average of 50% after having children.)
Aside from costs, which are crushing (families report that around 23% of their paychecks go straight to childcare), working and child-rearing can leave parents, particularly mothers, feeling pulled in two separate directions.
Women’s careers suffer disproportionately after a child comes into the picture. Just last year, around 400,000 women with young children left the workforce—the largest exodus in about 40 years, according to a report from the University of Kansas’ Care Board. Meanwhile, the same report found that fathers’ labor force participation has remained consistently above 95% for decades. According to Pew Research, while women do more household chores and childrearing, men spend more time on leisure activities.
As such, influencing can seem like “a dream career,” Latifi says. “It promises that your career can unfold alongside your family life as opposed to in contention with it. Ideally, you can stay home with your kids and make more money than you were making before. It’s a decision I can understand why people make,” the author adds.
Influencing can bring in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands in earnings each month. Latifi says she found that the “highest strata of mom influencers & family vloggers make millions of dollars a year.” One family she interviewed for her book, who goes by the name Family Fun Pack online, makes $8 million yearly. And according to a 2026 report from the digital marketing agency Influize, popular influencers can earn $7,000 for a single Instagram reel.
Regardless of how tough it is to juggle work and family, influencing is hard work. Setting up phones or recording devices, not to mention staging and lighting, to meticulously editing content, takes time. Like anything, you’re bound to be more successful the more you do it. But being constantly online can be draining and it can damage your happiness. According to the 2026 World Happiness Report, life satisfaction is highest among those with low rates of social media use and vice versa.
When it comes to having your kids online sharing everything from pregnancy announcements to birthdays to personal milestones, comes with a heavy emotional cost. In her book, Latifi highlights one influencer who says she became utterly burned out with negative comments and online cruelty. “It all just kind of freaks her out and it’s even made her have fleeting moments of wanting to stop being an influencer altogether,” the author writes.
Latifi also questions whether kids can really give meaningful consent when they don’t fully understand the gravity of having their entire lives documented online. And in a recent Yahoo post, she explained that many parents are countering the influencer trend by deciding to take their children offline altogether.
Still, the influencer in Latifi’s book who was burned out was torn about quitting because she was supporting her family from the comfort of her home and the paychecks kept coming. “But how else could she make $500,000 a year?” Latifi asks. Because the truth is for most working mothers, especially in the U.S. where so many women feel utterly unsupported post-birth, that kind of money is life-changing no matter how you earn it.
Latifi says that in order for women to have a fair shot, we need the essentials. “Let’s start with generous and federally mandated maternity leave,” she says. “Let’s stop forcing working moms to work as though they don’t have children and then mother as though they don’t have jobs.”
She continues, “Let’s lower childcare costs (while paying workers well for the incredibly important job they have). But mostly, let’s start with generous and federally mandated maternity leave.”
