After succumbing to intrusive demands of corporate sponsors, including putting her children in her blog Dooce, Heather Armstrong had had enough

'I cannot be that person': why the 'Queen of the Mommy Bloggers' had to quit

In a farewell post on her blog Dooce, Heather Armstrong exposed her readers to the dull and often grim reality of her life as the so-called Queen of the Mommy Bloggers – one dominated by hours on the phone with corporate sponsors, a security system set up to deal with abusive commenters, and rubberneckers who “throw rocks at our houses”.

“‘Living online’ for us looks completely different now than it did when we set out to build this community, and the emotional and physical toll of it is rapidly becoming a health hazard,” she wrote.

In the 13 years Armstrong has spent blogging, her trolls have grown more aggressive (recently one tracked her down to a hotel she was staying at and slipped a note under the door) and advertising dollars have dwindled. But Armstrong, a single mom who has spoken before about the challenges of making money online, says that revenue was actually less a factor in her decision to retire than what her dependence on advertisers forced her to do.

The problem, Armstrong says, was that because she felt so beholden to them, she was agreeing to do just about anything to keep the advertisers happy.

“What happened over the last couple of years is the brands have been given a lot more say and a lot more control than they did when I was starting out,” Armstrong said.

I did it for as long as I could, until I was like, I cannot be that person any more Heather Armstrong

“At the beginning, it was, ‘We’re just gonna put the logo at the end of the post. Write something around this.’ … And then it was, ‘Well, actually, we need you to show pictures of the product”. And then it was, ‘We need you to show the product.’ And then it was, ‘We need your kids involved in the post.’”

Involving children in sponsored content is controversial. Most parenting bloggers don’t want to talk about it – to the point of flat-out refusing to discuss it in interviews – because to do so may invite abuse from commenters who say that children are being exploited.

Armstrong says for her, the breaking point on blogging for a living came when one of her two daughters refused to go on an outing that was part of a sponsored post plan. There were tears, and with her child pleading with her, Armstrong decided she could no longer bear the invasive requests of the advertisers. “I did it for as long as I could, until I was like, I cannot be that person any more,” she says, simply.

Asked who “that person” was, Armstrong pointed out that her personal brand as a blogger involved a kind of irreverence (to this day, her Twitter profile reads: “I exploit my children for millions and millions of dollars on my mommyblog”), but many brands weren’t comfortable with her tone. “I really had to dial that part of me back, when that part of me wanted to come out and dance,” she said.

Brands want bloggers to sell the product; selling the product necessarily involves a certain kind of bland recommendation.



“Writing stories around [products] is torturous,” Armstrong said. “You’re basically writing copy for a brand, is what you’re doing.”

Armstrong makes an interesting point, especially in the genre she’s associated with. One complaint about ‘mommyblogging’, in its early days, was that it was too confessional, too loud, insufficiently respectful of children’s privacy. The airing of so much personal material bothered people – but many mothers needed such an outlet.

They needed to be able to talk, in an undisciplined fashion, about the challenges of motherhood, about the work involved in raising kids, with a glaringly honest approach.

“That kind of stuff that doesn’t look good on an Instagram feed,” Armstrong said.

“Back then, we talked about everything, about all of it. We opened it up and we examined it. And I just don’t see that going on anywhere anymore.”

It’s true. A quick perusal of most of the more successful parenting blogs will reveal beautiful homes stocked with artisanal toys and spotless outfits.

Right after our conversation she posted an image to Instagram of her daughter peering at a handful of cereal. “She lost her tooth in her fucking Cheerios this morning,” Armstrong wrote in the caption. “It was a spectacular moment that was in no way sponsored by General Mills. #NotAnAd”.

When I spoke to her by phone last week, I expected Armstrong to rhapsodize about the pleasures of saying goodbye to all that. Instead, she said, her voice swelling with feeling: “I really miss it.”

Armstrong says that writing about her life online brought her a kind of “relief” that she now longs for, she said, reflecting: “I made this. And I’m proud of it.”