The Rise of a New Kind of Parenting Guru

There is an art to laying down a newborn baby. Or, rather, a science. The American Academy of Pediatrics will tell you that babies need to sleep swaddled, on their backs, in an empty bassinet. But what if your infant abhors a crib? If you buy a newborn course offered by Cara Dumaplin, the former NICU and labor-and-delivery nurse who bills herself as a baby and toddler sleep expert, as I did when my daughter was 6 weeks old, you will get a video demonstration of how to make the dreaded chest-to-bassinet transfer. In it, a swaddled baby lies across Dumaplin’s forearm, head resting in her palm. Dumaplin’s thumb holds a pacifier in the child’s mouth. Dumaplin doesn’t rock the baby to sleep but rather moves her wrist to subtly jiggle the head back and forth. When the child’s eyes begin to flutter, Dumaplin slips her into a crib. She then removes her forearm like a spatula from beneath a pancake.

Dumaplin, a mother of four, likens what she does across her platforms to the work she did translating medical jargon for new moms in the hospital. “When the doctor comes and says, ‘I think we have a prolapsed cord and need a C-section ...’ I’m putting it in layman’s terms, like ‘Your baby is telling us he’s in trouble. But I’ve got you. I’m going to walk you step by step through this,’” she says. “I just took what I had been doing for years in the delivery room and did that online. Like ‘These are the recommendations that your pediatrician is telling you in the office. Let me show you how to do it practically.’”

And many, many people would like to learn: Dumaplin’s Instagram account Taking Cara Babies now has 2.7 million followers. But she is hardly the only mom on social media using her professional know-how to share—and sell—parental advice. She’s part of a wave of women marrying the authenticity of a fellow parent with the credentials of a Ph.D., RN, or other distinguished degree, and leveraging Instagram and TikTok to launch newsletters, podcasts, video courses, products, and books. There’s registered dietitian nutritionist Jennifer Anderson (Kids Eat in Color, 2 million followers on Instagram); former kindergarten and first-grade teacher Susie Allison (Busy Toddler, 2.3 M); Kristin Gallant, who has a degree in maternal and child education, and licensed marriage and family therapist Deena Margolin (Big Little Feelings, 3.5 M); clinical psychologist Jazmine McCoy (The Mom Psychologist, 848 K); pelvic-floor physical therapist Sara Reardon (The Vagina Whisperer, 607 K); pediatrician Mona Amin (PedsDocTalk, 343 K); pediatric speech therapists Carly Tulloch and Katie Sterbenz (Wee Talkers, 132 K); postpartum and neonatal nurse and lactation counselor Karrie Locher (786 K); registered dietitian nutritionist Megan McNamee and occupational therapist Judy Delaware (Feeding Littles, 1.8 M); and more. Several have achieved fame offline as well: Becky Kennedy, the clinical psychologist better known as Dr. Becky (2.8 M), was interviewed by Oprah. Brown University economist Emily Oster (402 K), who authored the best-selling pregnancy-data book Expecting Better, appeared on The Daily Show.

Read More: How Dr. Becky Became the Millennial Parenting Whisperer

If that list feels overwhelming, imagine them all in your feed, giving you tips on everything from dislodging boogers to negotiating over screen time. “When you’re a new mother and exhausted, the last thing you want to do is read a 325-page parenting book,” says Sara Petersen, author of Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture. “It’s really tantalizing to believe that if I just spend five minutes on an expert’s account, that could make a difference.”

But it’s never just five minutes, is it? And when it comes to the high-stakes job of raising a tiny human, it’s never just a mindless scroll. For an anxious generation already trying to optimize every aspect of their lives, like reading dozens of reviews before purchasing the best air purifier, it’s easy to fall down a dizzying rabbit hole of advice and wind up feeling more exhausted than enlightened. “Our parents could go to the library or get a referral from your pediatrician for a specialist. That’s it. They didn’t have thousands of experts living in their back pockets at all times,” Petersen says. “The immediacy and availability of the information encourages us to believe that we’re negligent if we don’t pursue it.”

The mothers wielding professional expertise mean well. They want to help fellow parents for whom answers are elusive—even if in the aggregate, it can be a bit much. But stressed-out parents are also a major market. Dumaplin, who began streaming her classes in 2015, now has a website full of courses and a team of 40 to help answer parents’ questions. When I ask just how big her business is, she sighs, emphasizing that her Will I Ever Sleep Again? newborn class still costs $79, despite the rising cost of living. “I will tell you we have over 500,000 families at Taking Cara Babies,” she says after a moment of hesitation, a figure she later corrects to 700,000. “You can do the math.”

For at least the past half-century, there have been two key sources of parental advice: the Experts and the Moms. Pediatricians like Dr. Spock published best-selling books that parents treated as childcare bibles—outlining how much weight a baby should gain and what to do in case of a fever. For slightly squishier problems, like which noise machine to buy when you’re tired of shushing, friends and, in more recent years, internet-famous moms offered solutions.

But those two sources of information existed largely in separate spheres. Sure, the pediatricians would sometimes tout that they were dads too (and they were almost always dads). They might even invent products like the Snoo, a $1,695 smart crib from the doctor behind Happiest Baby on the Block. But they were not answering questions in real time via Instagram stories. They didn’t make lists of products to add to registries or write out scripts of what to say to a toddler during a tantrum.

Mommy bloggers and later momfluencers—terms that can feel dismissive and are not universally adored by those grouped into these categories—shared stories about picky eating or the isolation of motherhood. They offered a window into their own (often beautiful, sometimes messy) homes as a way to establish a relationship with their followers, but their advice was typically rooted in experience, not professional training.

The rise of the Mom Expert speaks to the desire for both credentials and connection. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of these accounts saw their numbers skyrocket during the pandemic. “Parents felt so alone and like they were going crazy,” says McCoy, the Mom Psychologist, whose YouTube channel offers guidance on concerns like aggressive or clingy behavior. She still hears from parents who sign up for her Positive Discipline Academy as a stopgap while their children wait months to see a therapist in person. “The system is completely broken,” she says.

Even doctors who kids see more regularly have to rush through appointments. “How much time do you get with your pediatrician? Six minutes?” asks Dumaplin, who is married to a pediatrician. “You better have your questions listed. God forbid that baby cries in the office, and four of your six minutes are cut into, right? But here I’m accessible on your phone. And relatable like ‘Oh, OK, so when Cara’s babies were young, she didn’t have it all together. She’s a nurse, and this was hard for her. Maybe it’s OK that it’s hard for me.’”

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Big Little Feelings, another pandemic breakout, began after Gallant herself became exasperated by what the Instagram algorithm was feeding her. “It was a lot of perfect little sandwiches cut into shapes and matching outfits,” she says. When she Googled for tips on handling her small kids’ big emotions, “it was really high-level, really clinical, really buttoned-up. There was nothing that was fast and actionable.”

She began texting questions to her best friend Margolin, who studied under Dan Siegel (the famous professor of psychiatry who wrote No Drama Discipline). They turned their conversations into social media posts, courses, and, last year, a podcast called After Bedtime that debuted at No. 1 on the iTunes charts. The goal is to present science-backed parenting strategies in a way that feels digestible. “In order to have access to this type of information, you needed to have at least a college degree, maybe a master’s degree,” says Gallant. “You needed to have hours at the end of your day to read this information. You couldn’t be walking off a long shift at Walmart and have no help and be a regular person and have access to this information. They don’t necessarily need to hear about the amygdala firing off ... though there is a neuroscience section in our course, if you really want to know.”

On an early After Bedtime episode titled “My Marriage Sucks After Having Kids—Deena’s on the Brink of Divorce,” Margolin vented about her husband’s working during his parental leave and mused on whether they should separate. “Showing that we are human is so important,” Margolin says. “My husband and I went into it feeling like we are a team and can tackle anything that comes our way—and then, surprise, we’re on different pages at times. We had to really work through the struggle of how to parent together, which a lot of people go through but nobody really talks about. All you see on social media is the happy, smiling photos of couples.” Lately, she’s been posting about trying to get pregnant again. Gallant, meanwhile, recently shared a picture of a pill in her hand to reveal she’d started taking an antidepressant.

Every Mom Expert must decide how much to disclose about her life—some show their kids, others emoji-out their faces—but given that motherhood is key to their social media presence, and there’s a premium on authenticity online, it must be at least enough to build trust with their followers. As a result, people form parasocial relationships with them, feeling like they’re friends even though they’ve never met.

Such perceived intimacy can be lucrative since brands want to work with figures who have devoted followings. Not only have almost 215,000 kids potty trained through Big Little Feelings’ course, which costs $34 a pop, Margolin and Gallant have partnered with companies like Fisher-Price. At one point during our conversation, they start singing the praises of Boll & Branch sheets. “My husband literally won’t sleep in anything else,” gushes Margolin. “Well, he is a Virgo,” Gallant replies, as if recording an ad for one of their sponsors. She adds that they would never work with a brand they weren’t “obsessed with.”

Different Mom Experts set different standards when it comes to sponsorships. Dumaplin, who posts affiliate links to items like sleep sacks and blackout curtains, gets a small cut every time someone buys something. But she draws the line at creating sponsored content, which is how most influencers make their money. “I don’t want to say this, but I was offered basically a $1 million contract this year for a baby product. And I turned it down,” she says. “If I took money from a brand, how does a parent know that I think this is the best swaddle if that company paid me?”

Amin, who goes by Dr. Mona, now sees patients one day a week and spends the rest of her time producing social media content, YouTube videos, and a podcast. She lists 38 products, from baby clothes to breast pumps, on her site along with discount codes. “I only will partner with a brand that has a product that I would recommend to my patients,” she says.

But the downside of having so many people feel like they know you is that quite a few also form opinions about both your child-rearing philosophy and your life choices. There’s an entire forum on Reddit called r/parentsnark dedicated to mocking mothers in this space, complaining when their tactics don’t work, and venting about the sometimes unrealistic practices they espouse. A weekly thread devoted to the Big Little Feelings women dissects their lives, accusing them of manufacturing drama for the sake of content and questioning how they spend their money. They also receive some pushback in the comments on their Instagram account. “It’s usually just like ‘Wow, your eyebrows look really sh-tty today’ or ‘Wow, your voice is just really annoying,’” says Gallant. “It’s just one of those things that comes with the territory that isn’t the most fun thing. But the good news is it’s rarely about our work.” As Petersen wrote in Momfluenced, some of this criticism is rooted in anger over mothers’ monetizing the traditionally unpaid labor of parenting. Some of it is the unfortunate cost of being a woman on the internet.

Anderson, of Kids Eat in Color, started her account in 2017 after her son wasn’t gaining weight and “fell off the growth chart.” She was making adorable bento-box lunches to get him to eat, cutting fruits into star shapes, and a friend suggested she post the pictures on Instagram. “It turned into a really time-consuming hobby,” she says. Eventually she created courses like her Reverse Picky Eating Program as well as recipes and printable meal plans. Now she finds herself the target of criticism from two factions. “I get people who say, ‘If you give your kids sugar, you’re going to give them cancer,’ and people who say, ‘If you tell your kid they can only have two pieces of candy, you’re going to give them an eating disorder,’” she says. “My life’s ambition at this point is to figure out how to run my business without social media. The comments are not as nice as when I started.” In June she became the subject of a thread on the subreddit when she posted watermelon in her Instagram Stories on Juneteenth. “I clearly had not done all my research about Juneteenth and was 100% unaware of the historical piece. I thought I was pulling a food out of a list of foods from a book I read to my kids about the holiday,” she says. “It was a complete mistake on my part.”

A certain corner of the internet also flew into a tizzy when it was unearthed, in 2021, that Dumaplin had contributed—about $1,000 total from 2016 to 2019—to Donald J. Trump for President Inc. and the Make America Great Again Committee. Dumaplin declined to comment on the donations. When I ask about criticism more broadly, she says, “I very much care about what people think of me. I wish I cared less. I do. But I care about people and I care about their opinions. I care about their feelings, and that’s who I am.”

Like many a millennial parent, I lived in fear of Getting It Wrong, so I ordered Dumaplin’s course preemptively rather than out of desperation. (The head-jiggling trick only sort of worked for me: I’d rock the baby for half an hour just to have her wake up in the bassinet half an hour after I put her down. But who’s to say if that was due to the instruction or my execution or my baby liking to power nap?) My daughter, now 8 months old, is a terrific sleeper, often doing an 11-hour stretch in her crib, though sharing that will certainly doom us to a sleep regression. I, on the other hand, do not always sleep through the night. When I wake up with an urgent question about my baby, I use an AI tool on economist Emily Oster's website to offer me a research-backed response. Dewey, as the bot is called, provides citations to Oster’s books and blogs, as well as the original studies themselves.

“There are more college-educated parents today than there were in the past, so they feel that they have the capacity or the knowledge to collect information and figure out what’s best for their kids,” says Kei Nomaguchi, a professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University who studies parenthood.

Read More: Emily Oster Still Thinks Data Can Help Ease (Some) Parental Anxiety

The question is whether all this information is helpful or ultimately overwhelming. “Parents are now responsible for being experts in so many different areas. You should be your child’s registered dietitian and occupational therapist and literacy coach and sleep instructor,” says Anderson. “And if your child has a problem, it’s your fault.” 

Dumaplin started her business to ease anxiety. After she had her fourth child, she began working in an ob-gyn’s office where she’d treat women at their six-week postpartum appointment. She kept hearing the same refrain: “The baby won’t sleep.” She wished she could go home with the parents—and then she did, starting with in-home coaching and, as demand grew, group sessions, and, finally, online classes. Over time, she’s watched parental anxiety grow. Now with TikTok, she says, parents are fed a new piece of baby-rearing advice every minute: “It’s information overload. This expert says this, but this expert says if I don’t do it their way, I’m going to damage my baby. Do I think this generation is almost paralyzed by all the information? Yes.”

Or as Amin puts it, “We are so obsessed with information and doing it right and what the data show—and we’re also obsessed with not f-cking up our kids to a point that we’re actually going to f-ck them up.” 

While every generation has wanted to get parenting right, millennials’ anxiety may be motivated by socioeconomics. We are the first generation in a long time not finding greater financial success than our parents. “The middle class and upper-middle class used to think their kids would be OK—they would end up upper-middle class,” says Nomaguchi. “I think today middle-class parents aren’t really sure whether their kids will make it because of increased competition in the labor force globally.”

It sounds dramatic to say we’re worrying about our children’s success when trying to get them to nap, but when you repeatedly read that sleep boosts brain development, suddenly their college-admissions chances seem tied to how many hours they slumbered. That notion is fueled by images on social media of parents raising seemingly perfect kids, each post of a child eating asparagus a reminder of how you failed to get something green into your kid that day.

The truth is sometimes there’s simply no right answer. Take baby-led weaning, the feeding method du jourin which parents let babies hand-feed themselves solids rather than spoon-feeding them purees. “Obviously, I contribute to this, but I literally get the question ‘If I didn’t do baby-led weaning, have I ruined my child?’ an astonishing number of times,” says Anderson. “It really doesn’t matter.”

Dumaplin, too, insists there’s no tried-and-true formula. “If what you’re doing is working, you don’t have to change it,” she says. “You are the expert of your baby.” •