Wait. Did the Competent Husband Just Replace the Tradwife?

The first time I noticed the meme, I actually guffawed. 

“I’m a mom of four headed to a concert with friends. Here’s everything I did to prep my husband…” teases Paige Connell, a motherhood content creator, making videos under her Instagram handle @sheisapaigeturner. She pauses. We wait. And then, across the screen, the word “Nothing” flashes, and she puts on her sunglasses and spins toward the door. 

No freezer meal thawing on the counter, no lockstep recitation of the bedtime routine, no laying out of pajamas for the little ones; just the same kind of prep my wife and I do for each other when we go out separately — which is exactly nothing. The breeziness I recognized as the confidence that your better half has it handled. 

Of course, it's Instagram, so we’d be fools to believe everything we see. But that is not the point. The point is that only in a tradwife-laden social media landscape could a post like Connell’s delight me so. 

For months, I’d been seeing posts of a very different sort in my feed. Posts by mom influencers that cheerfully underscored the scope of work required to feed and care for a family. You know the ilk: Video snippets of nutritious meals, made in batch, with the promise of setting up a family for a healthy and happy week. Nobody says you have to do this to be a good mom, but suddenly making it to the grocery store for a big shop before the work week begins feels like the bare minimum. And nobody says it has to be mom, and not dad, doing all this work, but the meal-prepping dads are few and far between.

Was this “nothing” post finally upending the intimidating fakery of the “you can do it all” tradwife posts? Did it represent a cultural shift toward the idea that wives and husbands not only can share this labor, but are increasingly doing so? I think this may be one of several signs that the uncontested reign of the tradwife in our feeds is ending.

I know it sounds hard to believe, given what we are force-fed on social media, but today, in the U.S., women make up around 45% of breadwinners. And while women continue to do more housework and childcare in American households, even when they out-earn their partners, evidence suggests some men are at last reducing their paid work and increasing their childcare time. Gone are the days when my mom left her four children in my dad’s care for a single weekend girls’ trip a year and considered herself lucky that he didn’t call it “babysitting.” While it’s true that women homemakers predominate on social media, the reality is that most American families have folded men into the domestic routine in historic ways, at the same time that the tradwife has folded us into her orbit. 

To be sure, there’s still plenty of tradwife content out there. 

The examples are numerous; among them, Cyndi Hoffer of @themhoffers creates a weekly video post that illustrates “everything I prepped for my family for the week. In a time-lapsed super cut, she makes a couple dozen “egg bites” in silicon molds, bakes a loaf of homemade bread from scratch, makes a huge stock pot of beans, chops veggies for a veggie tray she says her husband and kids like to snack on while she makes dinner, spatchcocks and roasts two chickens, boiling off a broth from the bones and preparing a chicken salad with the meat. Then she makes two broccoli-crusted quiches, banana muffins, and frozen chocolate-coated blueberry clusters, before closing with her signature joke, “And that’s it. That’s all I did today.” Commenters are mostly awed and inspired, (”I’m scared to make bread but u make it look sooooo easy.“) but occasionally betray exasperation at the thought of attempting it (“i wish i could be more like this. I cant even brush my teeth without someone shouting they need me for something.”) 

Hoffer has a more down-to-earth aesthetic than the more famous, conspiratorially breathless influencer Nara Smith, but the impact is the same: I can make hours of domestic work look so easy you’ll ask yourself why you aren’t doing it too. (Perhaps a further sign of the fading of the tradwife? In a recent podcast recording, Smith rejected the label of “tradwife” and said she self-identifies as a working mom.)

Hoffer has almost a million followers. Smith has a cool 12.5 million followers on TikTok. 

Women’s seemingly unending, anticipatory family labor shows up constantly on my feed in other forms—whether it’s prepping one’s family for the week, for the school year, for a vacation, or prepping one’s husband for the first work trip since children.  

Because I like to cook and I am a woman, my algorithm has learned to feed me an abundance of highly skilled, performative household labor videos. The very absence of that in the “nothing” meme is both funny and refreshing. The meme isn’t exactly viral yet--maybe it needs a good hashtag--but when it crosses into the feeds of reality stars/influencers, you know it has legs. 

In one riff on “nothing,” Conner Leavitt, husband to former “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” turned-Broadway star Whitney Leavitt, waves goodbye, with the caption, “Here are all the things my wife did to prep me before her four day solo work trip.” Cut to a mashup of Conner doing various chores and child care tasks around the house while the caption reads, “Nothing because she didn’t marry a Looooozzzzeerrrr.” 

That post had garnered 180,000 likes and 1,600 admiring comments. “We love a competent man who doesn’t rely on women to take care of him [praise hands emoji]!” writes one poster. “Conner Leavitt raising the bar for men everywhere,” writes another. Part good-man virtue signaling, part-thirst trap for working mothers, the no-prep meme is a sure sign of our times. 

Much like the professional-level meal prepping I watch on @themhoffers, however, this meme is undoubtedly at least partly aspirational for both the creators and their audiences. 

In her 2022 book, “Equal Partners,” Kate Mangino takes an in-depth look at 40 men whose female partners agree that they do at least half or more of the unpaid work of running their lives. Mangino finds the ability to leave town and trust that the family system will continue unbroken under your partner’s stewardship is an essential sign of equal partnership. But these men are the exceptions. She sought them out as a contrast with the unequal partnerships she explores in the rest of the book, and then had to disqualify some men who claimed to be equal partners when she learned their partners did not agree with that assessment.

A quick search suggests that the Leavitts employ one, or perhaps more, nannies, while Conner identifies as a stay-at-home dad. Isn’t that the smoke and mirrors of social media in a nutshell? We relate to the people in our feeds until we don’t. 

As a fresh cohort of non-trad influencer wives and husbands emerges, they find an audience hungry for more realistic and egalitarian portrayals of family life. These new influencers suggest we can aspire to equality, just as others aspire to the promise of home-cooked simplicity. But let’s not get too smug about our progress just yet. The work of building more egalitarian relationships takes more than the funny side swipes at tradwifery, at least for those of us without # MomTok-level cash. It takes flexible workplaces that pay wages that sustain families; a few public policies, like low-cost, high-quality child care and guaranteed paid leave for mothers and fathers; and, yes, a culture that celebrates competent, engaged fatherhood and guilt-free time away from home for mothers.

In the absence of all that, my wife and I actually do prep each other as much as possible before we individually go on a trip and leave the other to solo-parent for more than a couple of days. A meal or two in the freezer. Groceries in the fridge. Dishes and laundry done. Maybe an evening babysitter or an overnight visit from a friend lined up to give the solo parent a little grown-up time. 

I long for a day when we can all do a lot more “nothing” and thrive, but for now, I have to admit that working-family life can be grueling. Fortunately, my wife didn’t marry a loser. Nor did I.