More Than a Wife and a Mom

Study Motivation

Mom vloggers are stay-at-home moms who record and share their daily life through short videos. Stay-at-home moms in China face numerous challenges, such as insufficient legal protection for their re-employment, a lack of support in terms of childrearing from their partners, a lack of enforcement of paid maternity leave, and so on. Popular short video content creators enjoy a considerable income and social opportunities afforded by short videos (e.g., comments, fan groups). Mom vlogging can potentially accommodate stay-at-home moms’ financial and social needs to some extent.

While there has been limited literature on mom vlogging, we sought to understand mom vloggers’ motivations, practices, and challenges. We conducted a mixed methods study containing semi-structured interviews (N=4) and video content analysis (n=50) to answer the following research questions (RQs):

● RQ1: Why do moms decide to become vloggers and post their life experiences on video-sharing platforms?

● RQ2: What types of content do they generate?

● RQ3: What challenges do mom vloggers encounter and what are their coping strategies?

Results

Motivations

Our interview participants headed home from their paid employment to accompany their children and for their self-perceived role of a caregiver (“Women are better caregivers”). Heading home led to reduced income, intensive labor, and reduced social life. The transition to a mom vlogger could be attributed to their relevant prior working experience, financial incentives, and a pursuit of community and self-value.

Content

Diverse and evolving vlog quality and topics were observed in the video content analysis. Mom vloggers generally improved their vlog quality over time. Topics featured in the vlogs often shifted from pregnancy/ childbirth experiences to parenting tips when they vloggers became more popular. Such changes also echoed the trajectory of motherhood.

Challenges

Despite enjoying financial and social benefits, the mom vloggers faced numerous challenges, such as striving for more views, being stretched by both intensive motherhood and heavy digital work (e.g., shooting vlogs, editing vlogs, replying to followers), privacy and self-presentation concerns, and “Mommy Wars” (i.e., competition among moms).

Takeaways

Mom vlogging empowers moms financially and socially. In the meantime, mom vlogging brings challenges such as intensive labor and competition. Designs are needed to better accommodate mom vloggers’ needs and address their challenges. We propose several design implications toward addressing the raised challenges:

● Recommend trendy topics to novice mom vloggers (visibility)

● Provide automatic video templates for mom vlogging (intensive motherhood)

● Blur/hide family members unintentionally captured in the vlogs (privacy)

● Utilize AI techniques to flag and make mom vloggers aware of unwanted speech (“Mommy Wars”)