Traditional is not necessarily "trad"

Painting time-tested ideas as "trad" makes them easy to knock down

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When I was growing up, my parents had a large family, my dad was the breadwinner, and my mom excelled at a variety of tasks — breading making, sewing, canning, etc. — that are often taken up by women. All in all, our family was pretty traditional, at least by suburban American standards.

But were we also “trad”? Was my mom a tradwife?

I think not. But there seems to be an annoying trend lately to label everything traditional — which is to say, relatively conventional and non-political lifestyle choices like having a family — as extreme or “trad.” I can’t speak to what’s going on in the heads of people doing this, but the ultimate effect is straightforward: It stigmatizes traditional behaviors. By classifying everything traditional as “trad,” everything traditional becomes superficial, performative, or weird. It’s a strategy enabling criticism-by-association, a way to knock choices without critically engaging in their core arguments.

Put another way: Was a traditional life the right choice for people like my parents? Who knows and who cares, because we can just call them “trads” and we all know that trads are just a bunch of losers. Har har.

A recent example in this genre comes from Vox. The piece was titled “What it’s like to be a trad kid” and included the subtitle “Growing up in a ‘traditional’ home means your future can feel predetermined.” I was intrigued because “trad” is a reference to the “tradwives” — a portmanteau of “traditional” and “wife” — who are a much-debated topic today. A handful of such individuals have built huge social media followings depicting a very specific version of femininity and family life, becoming cultural lightning rods along the way. This is a generalization, but tradwives are often influencers (or, those influenced by influencers) and tend to come off as culturally conservative, or in a few cases politically conservative.

But right out of the gate the Vox piece begins with commentary from an alleged former trad kid who is now a professor at Michigan State University. That’s odd, I thought. How could this person have been raised by a tradwife if she is currently a middle aged adult who, according to her CV, finished a bachelor’s degree in 2012?

The problem is that in 2012 almost no one was using the terms “tradwife” or “trad” in their current sense. I know this because in 2017 I was reporting on the movement as a journalist. While working at BuzzFeed News, I reported on the “alt right Mormons” whose ringleader was a tradwife using the pseudonym Ayla Stewart. Some of the members of this movement were already using the trad label, but it was so obscure at that time that I didn’t bother mentioning it in my first piece on the movement.

The “alt right” trads¹ have largely faded into obscurity. But Hannah Neelman — the so-called “queen of the tradwives” who despite not fully embracing the term has helped mainstream it — didn’t buy the Utah farm that’s a major part of her brand until 2018. I couldn’t find any significant media profiles of Neeleman until 2021. And even that profile does not mention the words “trad” or “tradwife.”

When I did a general Google search of the term “tradwife” and limited the results to 2017, only two articles turned up. Neither seemed to actually include the words “trad” or “tradwife,” and one was just a New York Post aggregation of a BuzzFeed News story I wrote. Google Trends further supports the idea that “tradwives” are a new phenomenon, showing that there were almost no internet searches for this term before 2019.

The point is that outside of a few fringy circles, there were almost no trads or tradwives even just a few years ago. There’s a legitimate debate to be had regarding who today deserves the tradwife label and what exactly a tradwife even is. But that debate is beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say that the trad phenomenon is something new, and that people 10 or 20 years ago would not have been a part of this movement.

What appears to have actually happened is that the people featured in the Vox piece were raised in traditional households. Indeed, that’s exactly what the professor in the piece seems to be describing; among other things her upbringing apparently involved “doing chores and caring for younger siblings instead of playing,” as well as participating in “cooking, cleaning, or grocery shopping.” She didn’t love it.

But are these bad things? They sound pretty normal and healthy to me. Am I a tradwife (or, a tradhusband)?

I think not. But the Vox article implies that these behaviors are problematic because they’re trad. It criticizes tradwives like Neeleman — they’re “performing” femininity and implying their lifestyle is the best — then applies the now-pejorative term to people who have nothing to do with the trad movement. Do you have lots of kids? You must be a trad, even if you lived years before anyone knew what that was.

The Vox article is not the only recent piece that uses this strategy.

Last fall, Vanity Fair also explored the tradwife phenomenon. The piece attempts to connect actual tradwives, Republican politicians, and Silicon Valley weirdos — but then goes a step further by mentioning “outright zealots who want (almost) everyone to have babies.” The implication is that if you’re a proponent of having kids you’re in one big kooky boat with the trads and their “ilk.”

So gosh, am I a zealot? I think that, generally, people probably are going to be better off having kids if that option is available. Yes there are exceptions, and people in my life have made a wide array of choices on this issue. But in general, I do think we should cling to the idea that family is a central source — probably the central source — of meaning in life. I guess I’m an outright zealot.

Or not.

In reality, the idea that having kids, or similarly traditional ideas like getting married, are not particularly extreme. Gallup found in 2023, for example, that 44 percent of Americans believe that two kids are the ideal number for a family. Another 29 percent believe that three kids are ideal, while 12 percent prefer four kids. All together, that’s 85 percent of Americans who think families ought to have multiple kids.

Alternatively, only 2 percent of respondents said zero kids are ideal. In fact, Gallup identified a growing preference for larger family sizes.

Other research points to similar conclusions. Pew reported in 2018, for instance, that 86 percent of women between the ages of 40 to 44 are mothers — an uptick of 6 percent since 2006. And just last year, Pew revealed that 69 percent of never-married adults between the ages of 18 and 34 want to get married. That last survey also found that 51 percent of non-parent young adults want kids, while only 18 percent indicated they want to remain childless. Birthrates in America are falling, but researchers have found that’s less because people want fewer kids and more because they’re having fewer kids than they’d like.

Pew has also found that despite the stereotype of the stressed and miserable parent, most people who have kids find the experience rewarding and enjoyable. And other traditional lifestyles are similarly widespread, with Pew reporting for instance that a majority of opposite-sex marriages still have male breadwinners².

The point I’m trying to make is that “traditional” is not trad. The trads are part of a very narrow movement. They’re not unlike, say, indie rockers of the mid 2000s; it’s an aesthetic and vibe that in some cases informs a worldview. But not everyone who listened to music at that time, or who started wearing skinny jeans, was an indie scene kid or later a hipster.

In the same way, traditional lifestyle choices like getting married, having kids, living in a male breadwinner household, etc. are not markers of zealotry or fanaticism. They’re just the default way of life for a majority of people. Whether that’s the way things ought to be or not is a different, and interesting, debate. But either way, and again, traditional is not trad.

I’m almost done here, but I want to briefly touch on politics because it may sound like I’m making an explicitly conservative argument. The Vanity Fair and Vox pieces I’m pushing back against are, after all, liberal critiques of conservatism.

But actually I’m making the opposite of a political argument: Traditional lifestyle choices are not partisan and framing them as such does everyone a disservice. Consider, for example, that just last year only a small minority of Democrats (23 percent) told pollsters that marriage is “old-fashioned and out of date.” Married Democrats and Republicans who have kids report similar levels of satisfaction with their relationships. The writer Freddie deBoer, an avowed leftist who often slams Democrats for being too centrist, has actually asked fellow leftists to knock it off with antifamily rhetoric.

People on different sides of the political spectrum do disagree about some aspects of family life, but overall family is not a partisan issue — though pieces like the Vanity Fair and Vox articles I highlighted above go to great lengths to make it seem like one. That’s what broadening a label like trad does.

At the end of the day this matters because people actually need family. Family is a source of both material and emotional support. It’s a concept that has survived generation after generation, becoming traditional, for a reason. And it’s a tradition that’s likely to survive long after squabbles over things like trads have been forgotten.

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1. The term “alt right” itself has largely faded, but it was a much debated label in the early Trump years. The “alt right” Mormons and trads were a group of people who blended traditional lifestyles — bigger families, male breadwinners, etc. — with more extreme political views. However, today’s tradwives — people like Neeleman — are a different breed and from what I’ve seen, largely eschew political issues, probably because they’re first and foremost savvy marketers. There’s an interesting piece to be written tracing the progression of this movement from the fringes to the mainstream. In many ways, it reminds me of the way other fringe communities became mainstream.

2. I’m well aware that male breadwinners are a newer phenomenon in the grand scheme and that the older tradition is the corporate family model in which everyone — husband, wife, kids, etc. — work together on some enterprise (e.g. a farm). I think the corporate family is actually the better model, and have written as much many, many times on this blog. I’m not a nuclear family nostalgist. That said, a stronger version of the family will surely have to build on the nuclear family, not destroy it.