The fact that “mom-shaming” is even a thing is a problem in and of itself. But when you find the moms that throw punches right back, there’s a bit of validation.
Celebs like Chrissy Teigen and Jessie James Decker have recently been at the forefront of challenging those who try and tell them how to parent. Teigen has been ridiculed for everything from the way she held her daughter as a baby to taking a photo with her infant in the sun.
Likewise, Decker recently posted an Instagram photo where she’s breastfeeding holding a glass of what looks like rosé -- presumably to encourage the shamers to try and mess with her.
Abbie Fox took it one step further. The mother of three published a photo series of her children and others carrying signs that read off certain parenting decisions that had been scorned for over the years.
“When I was a first time mom I would cry for things people said to me, and the main culprit were other mom [sic],” Fox wrote on her Facebook post. “We are all doing our best to keep these little humans alive all while keeping our sanity. We all have our differences in parenting and need to realize that everyone is raised differently and have different values and things that are important to us.”
The complaints displayed on the letter boards the kids hold in the photos range from material things, like technology usage, to more ethical choices parents have made for their children.
Fox, a portrait photographer based in Las Vegas, gathered intel from her clients to showcase a wide variety of the kinds of criticism they’d all experienced.
“In this technology world where we spend tons of time on Facebook and in Mommy groups we find one major thing every day...Mommy Shaming. People roll their eyes and say it doesn't happen anymore but it is alive and well, and it can be brutal,” she wrote.
All of the kids are adorable and the judgments demonstrated by the photo series are very real. Even so, she’s gotten even more criticism just for taking the pictures themselves -- do the self-righteous mommies never rest?
“There is a group of women trying to convince the world that I perpetuate child abuse by these pictures which is the farthest from the truth. But it’s just proving why I did the photo shoot in the first place and that mommy shaming is really a thing,” Fox told Scary Mommy.
Fox said that she herself wouldn’t make some of the same parenting choices her subjects’ parents have, but that the point of capturing them is that she is the photographer in this situation and has no business sharing an opinion -- much like the mommy-shamers she is calling out.
“I wanted to do this in the first place because I’ve been shamed in the past with my first two children but luckily, by my third child, I had grown some super thick skin and not much bothers me anymore,” she said. “Of course [there are] going to be things that come up that I will regret, but all moms do. We all make mistakes.”
All moms are rockstars!