Abstract
The intensive motherhood discourse establishes norms around what is socially considered a ‘good mum’. Social media platforms like Instagram contribute to the widespread reach and reproduction of these norms, although pockets of resistance have been found. Building on humour's capacity to both reinforce and subvert social norms, and its wide circulation on Instagram, this study explores how mum humour contributes to the representation, reproduction and contestation of contemporary motherhood discourses. Furthermore, we sought to understand what mothers take from mum humour and how this shapes their positioning toward these discourses. We identified ten mum humour influencers and selected their five most liked videos for analysis. We also ran a focus group with mum humour followers. Our paper considers three themes that illustrate how mum humour navigates contemporary motherhood: gentle vs. traditional mums; real vs. ideal mums; and overloaded mums vs. good dads. Regarding mum humour's functions, we identified three themes: craving realness, solidarity, and private resistance. Overall, we found that mum humour (seemingly) challenges the good mum ideology and cleverly exposes the asymmetric gendered expectations that sustain it. However, it was discouraging that, at least among our participants, resistance to these unrealistic demands remains largely confined to their private sphere.
Humour is an engaging and accessible medium that can make complex perspectives more digestible. On social media platforms like Instagram, it also allows messages to spread rapidly and widely. Although prior research has examined how contemporary parenting philosophies circulate online (Astudillo-Mendoza & Cifuentes-Zunino, 2022; Capdevila et al., 2022), less attention has been paid to the specific role of widely engaged humorous content created by and for mothers. Our study addresses this gap by exploring mum humour on Instagram as a lens to examine how contemporary dominant motherhood discourses are represented, reproduced and resisted. To ground our approach, we next examine dominant motherhood discourses and humour's ambivalent role in reinforcing and challenging social norms.
Continuities and Shifts in the Intensive Motherhood Ideology
Intensive motherhood constructs the ‘good mother’ around three core expectations: that she provides emotionally attuned, time and labour-intensive care; that parenting is child-centred and informed by expert advice; and that motherhood is treated as a central, identity-defining role. These demands often create significant financial strain and place the full burden of childrearing on mothers (Hays, 1996).
Hays first identified the ideology in the early 1990s, noting that women's increasing workforce participation did not lessen maternal expectations but intensified them. This presents two contradictions. First, it idealises motherhood as a selfless pursuit, while expecting women to meet such demands alongside full participation in the competitive paid work world. These conflicting pressures reinforce a gendered division of labour, with mothers as primary carers and fathers remaining peripheral (Forbes et al., 2020; Liss et al., 2013). Second, although based on essentialist beliefs about women as natural caregivers, it also demands deference to expert authority, revealing a tension between maternal intuition and institutional expertise.
Today, social media plays a central role in shaping and spreading the ‘good mum’ ideal (Capdevila et al., 2022). Amid significant psychological, social and physical changes, many first-time mothers now turn to these platforms for advice, support and community (Ghanbarian & Yeilaghi, 2024; Lupton, 2017), a practice referred to as ‘networked parenting’ (Holtz-Schramek, 2025). Yet in addition to offering support, these platforms also serve as spaces where mothers learn, reproduce and are disciplined by dominant cultural norms, functioning as a kind of ‘panopticon’ that both exposes and reinforces ideals of good motherhood (Astudillo-Mendoza & Cifuentes-Zunino, 2022, p. 380).
Within this digital landscape, neoliberal postfeminist ideals, which frame motherhood as a freely chosen, self-fulfilling project, continue to shape Western parenting norms, and translate into expectations that mothers curate composed, aesthetically pleasing versions of family life (Orton-Johnson, 2017). Such pressures contribute to what San Cornelio (2021, p. 136) calls the ‘professionalization of motherhood’, in which relational labour is stylised and commodified for public consumption. Among the most prominent discourses shaped by, and contributing to, these dynamics are gentle parenting and conscious motherhood, both widely followed online. In what follows, we explore how these discourses both diverge from and subtly sustain the ideals of intensive mothering.
Gentle Parenting
This parenting approach centres on fostering emotionally competent children through connection, emotional coaching and mutual respect rather than authoritarian discipline (Pezalla & Davidson, 2024). Although it shares principles with evidence-based positive parenting, it differs in origin: positive parenting is research-based, whereas gentle parenting has emerged from popular literature, online communities and influencers (Walters, 2024). On social media, gentle parenting content demonstrates these principles through videos that aim to model calm responses, respectful boundaries and support for children's emotional growth.
In a recent study examining #gentleparenting on Instagram and TikTok, Holtz-Schramek (2025) argues that this discourse has the potential to elevate the voices of lay mothers by shifting focus away from credentialed experts and towards relatable lived experiences. However, in practice, the perspectives it amplifies are often those of privileged, white, middle-class women. Thus, rather than resisting intensive mothering norms, the author contends that gentle parenting ultimately reinforces them in ways that centres certain voices and marginalise those who do not conform to affluent white motherhood ideals (Gibson, 2019).
Furthermore, #gentleparenting reinforces a core feature of intensive motherhood: its emotional and relational labour. By requiring mothers to perform a calm, attuned identity online, it adds what Holtz-Schramek (2025) calls the ‘fifth shift’, extending domestic work (second shift), emotional labour (third) and mental load (fourth). This intensifies maternal responsibility, aligning it with neoliberal postfeminist ideals of visibility, perfection and self-management.
Conscious Motherhood
Conscious motherhood presents itself as a challenge to patriarchal models of motherhood, advocating for maternal autonomy, gender equality and the redistribution of care responsibilities (Astudillo-Mendoza & Cifuentes-Zunino, 2022). It frames motherhood as a transformative political force and caregiving as a deliberate choice. Although it overlaps with gentle parenting (also referred to as ‘respectful parenting’) in its emphasis on emotionally educating children, it represents a broader aspirational ideal. This approach extends beyond parenting practices to include pregnancy, childbirth, partnership dynamics and the pursuit of a balanced, fulfilled maternal identity (Villanueva, 2017).
Child-led practices such as extended breastfeeding, co-sleeping and baby-wearing are central to this discourse, framed as ways to foster autonomy and deep emotional connection. Widely promoted on social media, these ideals help shape contemporary motherhood norms and reinforce definitions of the good mum. Since many of these are actually ancient practices that involve the body, linking care and intuition, they can be seen as reclaiming community-based wisdom and empowering mothers to trust embodied, shared knowledge (Hamilton, 2020). However, as it happened with gentle parenting, conscious parenting expertise is increasingly commercialised on social media, where intuition is validated through guided advice from breastfeeding coaches, baby-wearing advisors and paid membership communities (San Cornelio, 2021).
To make sense of this contradiction, we must consider it in relation to broader societal attitudes towards health, particularly what Kugelmann (2003, p. 75) describes as ‘standardized health’. The author argues that scientific advances have fostered an illusion of total health as achievable, weakening trust in communal knowledge and deepening reliance on professional authority for managing everyday aspects of life. In this context, mothers’ tacit knowledge is increasingly commodified, sold back to them through expert guidance, which was once the domain of professionals but is now also repackaged by those drawing on lived experience.
Arguably, despite these discourses’ attempt to dismantle the maternal sacrifice upheld by intensive mothering and involve fathers more meaningfully, many of the practices it promotes continue to place mothers at the centre of parenting labour. For instance, on-demand and extended breastfeeding, while presented as respectful and natural, requires mothers to adjust their lives around their child's needs, often compromising their capacity to engage in paid work (Quinones, 2023). Although breastfeeding is biologically tied to women, curating family content, seeking advice and managing online communities are not. Yet even where shared parenting is valued, women still bear the greatest caregiving and mental load (Dean et al., 2022), reinforcing gendered expectations under the guise of choice and self-expression (Capdevila et al., 2022; Lupton, 2020).
In sum, both gentle parenting and conscious motherhood present themselves as alternatives to traditional parenting norms yet ultimately reinforce and extend key tenets of intensive motherhood. They centre the child's emotional needs, place disproportionate demands on mothers, and are shaped by idealised narratives, particularly within white, middle-class, heterosexual frameworks. We argue that rather than dismantling intensive mothering, these discourses repackage its demands in more socially palatable forms.
Laughing Through the Good Mum Ideal
Scholars have started to recognise humour as a vehicle for negotiating cultural expectations around motherhood on social media (Han & Kuipers, 2021; Holtz-Schramek, 2025). To explore how humour is used to engage with the figure of the good mother, we build on Billig’s (2001) notion of its dual capacity to uphold and subvert normative ideals. Billig argues that humour, by using ridicule to mark certain behaviours as inappropriate, operates as a powerful social regulator, a universal disciplinary tool that helps maintain the social order. It is precisely because we instinctively avoid uncomfortable emotions like embarrassment and shame that humour becomes so effective in reinforcing dominant norms and sustaining the hegemonic order. Abedinifard (2016, p. 235) applies Billig's ideas to argue that humour can serve to reproduce socially organised patterns of power, roles and gendered divisions of labour in Western societies, referred to as ‘gender order’. This order establishes hegemonic masculinity as dominant and privileged in financial spheres, while subordinate femininity is primarily tied to caregiving. Yet as Billig (2001) reminds us, humour not only disciplines, but it can also disrupt the hegemonic order by offering a socially acceptable way to express dissent, challenge authority or expose contradictions in dominant ideologies.
Empirical work has started to examine this tension between humour's disciplinary and subversive functions. For instance, early empirical work such as Mackenzie's (2017) study, found that humorous posts on Mumsnet (a British platform) allowed mothers to perform the good mother role in both normative and resistant ways. More recently, attention has shifted to mum humour videos on global social media platforms, moving beyond comments and posts to focus on content creation, the highest level in the social media engagement hierarchy (Trunfio & Rossi, 2021). Han and Kuipers (2021), for example, analysed humorous TikTok videos created by Chinese mothers about daily life during lockdown. They identified three types of maternal figures: balancing mothers, who depict the chaos of work–family conflict; pedagogic mothers, who offer instructive content; and commercially oriented mothers, who integrate product placements into tutorials. While balancing mothers light-heartedly feature the strain of motherhood, the pedagogic and commercially oriented figures contributed to reinforcing the ideal of competent, composed mothering as both normative and achievable. Importantly, satire was directed at demanding bosses and workplace pressures while the lack of paternal involvement in childcare remained strikingly unaddressed.
Focusing on English-language content, Holtz-Schramek (2025) analysed gentle parenting videos on Instagram and TikTok. Although humour was not the focus, 37% of the content was satirical. These videos use humour to validate imperfection and challenge idealised motherhood norms, often showcasing raw, unfiltered versions of motherhood to reclaim space for authentic experiences. Notwithstanding, the author argues it remains unclear whether this resistance drives real social change or merely offers emotional relief, given the platform's self-promotional nature and the difficulty of distinguishing genuine critique from performance without directly engaging followers.
Focus of the Study
Our study contributes to the growing literature on how mum humour engages with dominant motherhood discourses on social media, and how mothers engage with these representations. Unlike previous research, we aimed to analyse content that combined broad reach (i.e. visibility) with high engagement (i.e. audience interaction). To do so, we focused on mum humour content creators, selecting macro and mega influencers for their large follower counts, and analysing their most liked posts, as likes have been found to function as meaningful acts of communication and endorsement rather than neutral signals (Sarapin & Morris, 2014). Accordingly, our first research question examines how dominant motherhood discourses are represented, reinforced and contested in this widely engaged humorous content. Addressing calls to understand how audiences interpret and make meaning from these humorous representations, our second research question asks what mothers take away from engaging with mum humour on Instagram, and how this engagement shapes their positioning in relation to dominant motherhood discourses.
Researchers’ Positionality
Stemming from a feminist social constructionist epistemology, it is important that we reveal ‘who’ is doing the asking and ‘from what’ social locations (Wigginton & Lafrance, 2019). The author team is white, middle-class (although from working-class family backgrounds) and British, except for the corresponding author, who is Spanish and became a first-time mother in June 2020 during Spain's second COVID-19 wave. Owing to a pre-existing respiratory condition, she remained physically isolated from her support networks to avoid risks. Mum humour in social media became both a source of entertainment and an unexpected educational resource about (normative) motherhood. The second author became a mother in 2012 and engaged with contemporary social media platforms. Although aware of mum humour, it was enjoyed casually but rarely sought out specifically. The third author is not a mother; her interest in mum humour stems from growing up in a large family and from prior research on sitcoms. During our initial discussions, despite generational and national differences, we found that relatable humour reels fostered mutual understanding while also revealing deep gender asymmetries. Importantly, we acknowledge that our shared social identities as white, middle-class women likely shaped our affinity with the content creators, influencing both the content we gravitated toward and the perspectives we foregrounded.
Methodology
Data Collection
The Instagram Phase
To address the first research question, we analysed widely engaged mum humour content on Instagram, defined by: the wide reach of the creator's account and their most liked posts. The criteria to identify mum humour influencers were:
macro (100,000 followers) and mega influencers (1 million) (Ruiz-Gómez, 2019); English-language accounts only (e.g. leaving out those focused on child development); videos (reels), not just photographs, because we wanted to capture the story as completely as possible; and original content creators, excluding accounts that compile reels from other accounts.
We started by exploring the content on some of the accounts already followed by one of the authors. We then expanded the initial pool of accounts by general word of mouth, targeted Google searches with keywords such as ‘motherhood’, ‘mum’, ‘comedy’ and ‘Instagram’, as well as exploring the accounts recommended by Instagram after we created the project's dedicated account. We removed three accounts after realising that they were not original content creators, and we used their accounts to access the original ones. This process led to a final pool of 16 influencers, which was then narrowed to the 10 accounts that were deemed most likely to contain relevant content. The ten influencers were mostly white (two Asian), British or North American (one Ukrainian) and appeared middle-class based on visual cues such as their homes and lifestyles.
Next, we identified the five most liked videos from each of the ten chosen mum humour influencers, totalling 50 videos. We began by saving the top 15 most liked videos per influencer and then rewatched them to ensure they fit the research criteria before narrowing them down to the final five. Our research design was approved by the institutional ethics board. Given that we analysed publicly available content from influencers with large audiences, the study posed minimal risk, and quotes were republished without account names.
The Focus Group Phase
Initial invitations to participate in the research were distributed via Instagram. Sixty people who had responded to mum humour posts and reels were contacted over six days via Instagram private messages, with outreach limited to ten per day in accordance with platform rules. In addition, 42 recruitment messages were placed on highly engaged-with reels. Unfortunately, the combination of these two strategies resulted in our account being blocked. Recruitment messages were then posted on the research section on Mumsnet, the second author's private X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook accounts. Finally, snowball sampling was employed (Browne, 2005), and colleagues and acquaintances helped share the project details through WhatsApp mum groups. This combination of approaches resulted in five mums joining us for an online focus group. Participants received information sheets and signed consent forms, ensuring confidentiality and the right to withdraw. Our participants were five white British women aged 38 to 55, with three having young children (1–10 years) and two having older children (19 and 21). All but one worked full-time; the exception was self-employed and worked part-time. The group's relative homogeneity in race, nationality and class likely shaped how they engaged with parenting content and interpreted motherhood discourses, and may have limited the diversity of perspectives represented.
Data Analysis
Aligned with our feminist social constructionist positioning, the data analysis framework used was reflective thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022). The initial data analysis was done relatively independently for each phase. The third author transcribed the mum humour videos, including on-screen text and elements that preserved their original feel (e.g. music, expressions, tone, gestures). The transcripts were then imported into NVivo, where she conducted initial open coding to identify meaningful and potentially relevant features across the data set. The corresponding author facilitated the interpretative phase, during which both authors collaboratively developed and refined themes through discussion and negotiated analysis. This reflexive, iterative process involved moving between data, codes and themes, with repeated viewings to retain contextual cues. Although word count constraints limit detailed multimodal descriptions in the findings, non-verbal and performative elements were integral to our interpretation.
In parallel, the second author transcribed and initially coded the focus group data she collected, applying a similar process in collaboration with the corresponding author. We acknowledge that our understanding is shaped by our lived experiences, theoretical frameworks and social positioning. As white, middle-class researchers, two of us mothers, our interpretations are situated within specific privileged social and cultural positions, which inevitably influenced our engagement with the data and meaning-making, contrasting with underrepresented intersectional identities.
Findings and Discussion
The Instagram Phase
Each of the three themes captures how humour is used to represent and contest contemporary good mum ideals, articulated through three key juxtapositions.
Gentle vs. Traditional Mums
Humour often arises from the stark incongruity between conflicting realities, making the juxtaposition of gentle parenting with traditional (often more authoritarian) approach, a particularly effective source of relatable and well-received comedic content. On screen: ‘Parenting Styles: Today vs 1980s’ Today's mother: You don’t wanna go to camp? Aw. I know how it feels. Yeah, sometimes I get that way too. I know it must be so hard. You wanna just watch TV? Yeah, I get it. I totally get it. You know what? Why don’t we read this book together, and then if you still don’t feel like going just take a day off. 80’s mother: You don’t want to go to camp? Do you know how expensive camp is? Get the *** out right now.
The logistical and emotional demands of this parenting style (e.g. paying for camp only to stay home) can also be appreciated in the sketch below where a contemporary mum teaches her own mother the ‘gentle parenting’ ropes. Scene description: The grandmother is interacting with her granddaughter while the mum is watching anxiously and critically by the door in a variety of scenarios. On screen: ‘POV Teaching my Boomer mum about gentle parenting’. Scene 1: Grandmother in loud voice: Stop, don’t hit your sister, don’t hit her. Mother: We don’t say stop, we say gentle hands. Grandmother: Gentle? What else is gentle? Daughter: Everything, gentle everything. (…) Scene 2: Grandmother: hurry up we got to go. Daughter: Don’t rush them, gets them anxiety, you always rushed us and now I am anxious. Grandmother: I never rush you, we were always late. Daughter: Exactly and I was anxious because we were always late. Grandmother: What am I supposed to say then? Daughter thinks about it: …gentle.
At the same time, and in line with Billig’s (2001) understanding of humour as both reinforcing and challenging social norms, the fact that these scenarios still depict real gentle parenting techniques means they may also function as an implicit (gentle parenting) guide. Even when absurdities and contradictions are exposed, the content can ultimately reinforce the centrality of this ideal by suggesting what mothers ought to do in each situation.
Observing the daughter's doubts as she teaches her mum also reveals how contemporary mothers can be caught between instinct and the pressure to defer to expert guidance. In striving for externally defined ideals, mothers may become increasingly distanced from their own intuition and local sources of wisdom, including their own mothers, growing more dependent on expertise and, paradoxically, more anxious and uncertain about their adequacy (Kugelmann, 2003). This illustrates the core paradox of intensive motherhood: mothers are seen as naturally qualified yet must continually seek expert advice (Hays, 1996). What seems emancipatory instead reinforces these dynamics, positioning mothers as both intuitive and reliant on external validation.
Notwithstanding, seeing the effort involved, it is important to consider mothers’ agency in adopting these philosophies (Autret et al., 2023). Hanser and Zhang (2025) found that adhering to gentle parenting helps new mothers balance asserting their autonomy with delegating responsibilities to the grandmother. Perhaps a more critical reason is mothers’ faith in the promises of gentle parenting. As illustrated in scene 2 (‘you always rushed us and now I am anxious’), it reflects new mums’ prioritisation of raising emotionally healthy individuals, implicitly reinforcing the belief that children's long-term well-being depends on gentle parenting. As Walsh et al. (2023) found, this perception contrasts sharply with how their own mothers raised them, with new mothers defining their style in opposition through expressions like ‘breaking the cycle’.
Although our upbringing shapes our mental health, treating it as the sole cause dangerously oversimplifies and obscures the broader structural factors underlying mental health struggles. It is also deeply sexist as it places all responsibility on women, blaming yesterday's mothers for the role they played, and today's mothers for their duty to correct those sins. We question how the promise of raising happy and well-adjusted children can be achieved in a context in which mothers systematically place their own judgement below ‘expert’ advice, ultimately relying on external authorities often tied to commercial interests (Han & Kuipers, 2021).
Real vs. Ideal Mums
This theme captures the tension between the ideal of constant maternal composure in gentle parenting and the realities of everyday implementation. This is humorously illustrated in the following clip: POV: Me dropping my daughter off at school hoping to undo the trauma I caused her when I lost my shit this morning. Mother: Love you all. You’re beautiful. And never forget that everyone is a princess. Hee hee. On the screen: Mum sitting in her car. Mum: I’m sorry but gentle parenting is for gentle kids, I got gangsters. Mother singing: My kid only eats macaroni. Her face is always looking at a screen. I rarely read her before bed, and I often forget to brush her teeth. I’m a good mom. On screen: Did you forget school pickup? The mother rushes off-screen. Mother singing: Not a perfect one. I’m always making mistakes. I’m a good mom, with many limitations. I can’t be everything, and that's okay, okay, okay.
Overloaded mums vs. good dads
This final juxtaposition exposes the gendered nature of contemporary motherhood philosophies, and it is succinctly expressed in the following ‘comedic’ reel: Society: Stop. Trying. To. Do. Everything. Mother: Then. Who. The fuck. Is. Gonna. Do it.
The invisibility of caring labour is rooted in the patriarchal division of labour that assigns men to paid work while women take on unpaid domestic and caregiving responsibilities. This division is justified by the deeply seated assumption that women are naturally suited for such roles, reinforcing the idea that their labour at home is both expected and unworthy of recognition (Liss et al., 2013). Damagingly, these outdated ideas coexist today with the growing expectation that we must show up at work as if we do not have children, and we must mother as if we do not have a paid job. Because mothering is something that comes supposedly naturally to us, the effort women put in is not valued, while the opposite logic applies to men. When they fulfil parental responsibilities, their effort is seen, and just as it happens for them in the labour market, it is rewarded with praise and admiration: On screen: Mother singing over a montage of her doing various household chores, she becomes increasingly manic from frustration. I did the cooking, and the cleaning, and the groceries, and the laundry. Fed the cat, and the dog, and someone stole my coffee. Got a gift for your mother that she probably won’t like, paid a bill, wiped a butt, broke up a couple fights. Then I just about lost my mind ‘cause we both took the kids to the park, but someone said to you… you are, such a good dad… such a good dad […] Our kid was crying so we talked about our feelings. You were sleeping. That's cool. But you got up and your mom came over and she said… ‘you are, such a good dad’ (repeat 4 times). POV: Mother singing a heavy metal song: I am not your therapist, your cleaner or your mom, quit acting like a baby ‘cause I already got one. When I take a break, I’m incommunicado. I don’t give a **** if that makes you ‘frustrate’. I need a little time, I need a lot of space. So figure it out, get the **** out of my face […] Mama needs a break.
In short, despite the rhetoric of equality embedded in conscious parenting (Villanueva, 2017), recognition and responsibility remain unevenly distributed. The core tenets of intensive motherhood, constant availability, emotional labour, self-sacrifice and maternal responsibility are not dismantled but rather repackaged in contemporary acceptable terms. Notwithstanding, the popularity of mum humour content suggests that satire may offer a modest yet meaningful space for mothers to renegotiate dominant ideals of good mothering on their own terms.
The Focus Group Phase
We began our focus group discussion exploring participants’ perceptions about societal narratives around what constitutes a good mother. This allowed us to ground the discussion before exploring the functions mum humour served for them (second research question), while also providing a basis for reflecting on the patterns identified in the earlier Instagram phase.
Living Through the Good Mum Discourse
The terms participants associated with societal standards for the good mum included nurturing, caring, being proactive, putting children first, protective and self-sacrificing. The following quotes, drawn from both the group discussion and other parts of the conversation, illustrate how these norms are experienced by mothers, and how deeply gendered they are: S: Everyone's got an opinion, haven’t they, on motherhood? I feel really judged. H: I feel like I have to be some sort of character-builder as well… I have to really nurture what that person's gonna be…be really responsive. C: Some kind of element of self-sacrifice is expected. You put your own life on hold forever. Many years. In a way that men don't have to do…. L: A lot of the expectations of motherhood made me feel under a tonne of pressure, and, you know, resulted in for me, you know, significant mental health decline because you feel like everything has to be right. Everything's perfect. L: I followed (…) a psychologist and they’re talking about how to build your relationship with your child and actually, it just made me feel really crap that I wasn’t doing all of the things (…) it was making me feel I wasn’t doing a good enough job. H: I was like, I'm just gonna trust my intuition. And then you have a baby. Realise that you don't know anything…that's when I started following other people. And then I made a decision at some point a few years ago. I was like, right (…) I'm just gonna carry on doing whatever I need to do.
Overall, mothers’ responses suggest that intensive motherhood norms are deeply internalised, gendered, emotionally taxing and shaped by both expert authority and peer surveillance. This aligns with our Instagram mum humour analysis and provides further support for existing literature suggesting that the core tenets of intensive motherhood have only changed in form, rather than being fundamentally challenged (Capdevila et al., 2022).
Having discussed participants’ perceptions of dominant motherhood narratives, we now turn to the functions that engaging with mum humour served, as analysed through the following themes.
Craving Realness
Respondents described social media portrayals of motherhood as highly curated and idealised representations in which many did not see themselves. The following quotes emerged during a group discussion: S: I don’t like adverts. I don’t like things that don’t seem genuine. I don’t like things that are fake. H: I like the ones which convey that I’m pretending to enjoy it (motherhood) for the sake of everyone else, but really I’m finding it hard. B: Personally, I like the ‘it's not perfect all the time’ ones. C: Me too. B: So for me, I’d like to look at those more. You know, life isn't always perfect. L: Yeah, like a bit naughty somehow, cause (…) you’re not permanently there (…) just meeting your own biological need by going to the toilet (…) kind of going against the grain of always being available and you know, being present and all that.
One respondent raised a particularly resonant point about ‘realness’ that received unanimous agreement from the group: H: You're only seeing a tiny bit, aren't you? The tip of it, then it'll be the beautiful parts of the world in lovely clothes (…) But then there's a pressure on, especially if you got a child or children with special needs. You know you don't see that side of things, do you so much? It's just about like, you know, fun, cute babies.
Solidarity
When asked about the types of scenarios that would make them laugh, respondents observed that daily frustrations were ironically the funniest. They seemed particularly connected around the kids going back to school after a long holiday. B: There's loads of dancing because my child is going back to school in September (…) and celebrating the fact they’re no longer at home all day, and like, what does that say about me always being there? C: (…), but you spend a lot of time seeing how, actually, you should have had such an excellent time in the holidays (…) so it's quite nice that ‘oohhh other mums feel this way as well. You know, this woman actually does need a break’. H: The one's about when your kid's telling you the same story and it won’t end and there's like a demented face (...). C: It's a way of women, like sort of feeling that they can admit that they're like, maybe don't even like their own children very much, at least some of the time. And they want to not be with them all the time. L: […] like nurses used dark humour to kind of get through their day, they’re laughing at things that are actually quite serious and annoying or upsetting. I think it's the same kind of sense of humour.
Private Resistance
Throughout the discussion, there was an all-around support for the ‘anti-good mum’ joy; however, they explicitly comment on the need to remain private about it. H: (…) why it creates a belly laugh in me because it goes against the grain of always being there and present and happy (…) and those very sanitised versions of parenthood that tend to dominate (…) which might be why I prefer to send things privately rather than publicly ‘approving’ of that. I don’t know, it depends. L: I won’t ever engage with them publicly like liking or commenting, but I do share them with people. H: I've been known to save them and put them on WhatsApp rather than like you said, posting anything public. L: Yeah. Privately. And I don't know if it's just me, cause I'm a shy person. I'm just wondering whether, deep down, whether there's some kind of fear of judgement for liking something. S: But there is a level of trust, isn't there with, you know, sending something that's funny, but probably a bit risqué to people who you trust as opposed to, you know, liking this thing that might indicate that you're a terrible mother.
Discussion
Our study aimed to understand how dominant motherhood discourses shaping good mum standards are represented, reinforced and resisted via highly engaged mum humour content on Instagram. Furthermore, we explored what mothers take away from engaging with mum humour on Instagram and how it shapes their positioning towards these discourses.
We discussed three themes showing how humour highlights tensions within contemporary good mum ideals on Instagram, each built around a key juxtaposition: gentle vs. traditional, real vs. ideal mums, and overloaded mums vs. good dads. Our findings show that humour exposes how contemporary motherhood discourses sustain and extend intensive motherhood ideals, now subtly repackaged in social media-palatable forms. This is evident in the impossible demands placed on mothers (e.g. the ‘fifth shift’), the continuous unequal gender expectations (e.g. ‘the good dad’) and the ongoing contradiction between essentialist notions of mothering and expert-driven approaches, now diversified to include non-formally qualified voices. Notwithstanding, we also found that mum humour offers emotional relief and provides empathetic spaces to challenge dominant motherhood norms and validate alternative experiences. These serious feminist messages may reach audiences they otherwise would not, thanks to the ‘soft shell’ of humour and the wide reach of mega influencers. Overall, this suggests that humour can transcend exposure and relief, potentially sparking social change (Holtz-Schramek, 2025).
In response to our second question, focus group discussions revealed that women followed mum humour for its authenticity and relatability. Sharing these ‘unspeakable truths’ fostered a sense of solidarity and created space to question the status quo. However, the extent to which this leads to tangible changes in dominant discourses appears limited, because respondents noted that endorsement of these transgressions largely remained private.
Overall, our focus group findings complement the Instagram insights by showing how humour offers space for resistance, validation and connection, while also subtly reinforcing some societal expectations through normalisation. Although the Instagram phase left open whether this content could truly spark change, the focus group clarified mothers’ positioning: while a desire for alternatives and subtle resistance emerged, these remained largely private. Participants expressed fear that even harmless ‘likes’ might be monitored and interpreted as transgressions against the rigid expectations of the good mum ideology, an ideology built on patriarchal values that frame ‘naturally gifted’ maternal care as unpaid, invisible labour. Arguably, this caution does not apply in the same way to content creators themselves. By creating content exposing good mum transgressions, these women challenge dominant discourses shedding light on less curated, authentic lived experiences and hold the potential to be more inclusive. In doing so, and unlike postfeminist expressions that tend to downplay struggle, they expose themselves to public scrutiny and criticism for their perceived shortcomings as mothers, putting them at risk of sexist online harassment, echoing the risks often faced by feminist voices on social media (Valenzuela-García et al., 2023).
This study has several limitations. First, beginning with influencers followed by one author reflects our positionality and limited diversity, introducing potential snowball sampling bias. Also, interpreting ‘likes’ as endorsement may overstate their meaning, because they might merely signal amusement rather than agreement. Although we considered analysing follower comments to assess relatability more directly, we chose to focus on publicly available content, as macro influencers benefit from wide reach in ways their followers do not. This limitation was partially addressed through a focus group; however, recruitment was constrained by funding and scheduling limitations, and participant diversity remained limited.
Conclusions
In short, our study aligns with prior feminist research in identifying pockets of resistance to the good mum ideology through women's engagement with humorous content, although the need to keep this resistance private serves as a sobering reminder of its limits. This self-censorship illustrates Billig’s (2001) ideas about the very serious function of humour in maintaining the social order. Thus, the fear of openly liking that content is in fact the fear of being ridiculed, and ridicule as Billig states, is a powerful tool to enforce conformity with dominant social norms. As Abedinifard puts it ‘humour apparently has something notable to do with the construction and maintenance of gender structures, but to go beyond such an observation would require taking humour too seriously’ (2016, p. 234).
Footnotes
Acknowledgment
The author also acknowledges institutional affiliation with the SIQoL research group (BU039G24), funded by the Regional Government of Castilla y León (Consejería de Educación), during the final preparation of this manuscript.
Ethical Considerations
This study was reviewed and approved by the Open University Ethics Committee, reference number HREC/4766/Quinones, ensuring compliance with ethical guidelines for research involving human participants.
Consent to Participate
Participants from the focus group were given a participant information sheet and they provided written informed consent prior to their inclusion. The consent form outlined the purpose of the study, procedures involved, potential risks and benefits, and ensured that participation was voluntary with the right to withdraw at any time without penalty.
For the data collection which took place from public accounts of mum humour influencers we followed the British Psychology internet-mediated research ethic guidelines which state that: ‘where it is reasonable to argue that there is likely no perception and/or expectation of privacy (or where scientific/social value and/ or research validity considerations are deemed to justify undisclosed observation nevertheless), use of research data without gaining valid consent may be justifiable’.
Consent for Publication
Participants were informed that their data would be anonymised and could be used to inform academic publications and presentations while ensuring their privacy and confidentiality.
Author Contributions
CQ led the conception and design of the study, data interpretation and manuscript drafting. SR contributed to data collection, interpretation and manuscript drafting. FM contributed to data collection, interpretation, and manuscript drafting. All authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Open University Seedcorn funding research fund, 2023. The funding body had no role in the design, collection, analysis, interpretation of data, or decision to publish this study.
Declaration of Conflicting Interest
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
The data supporting the findings of this study will be deposited in the University of Burgos repository.