Performing or Performative Care? The Symbolic Market of Digital Motherhood on TikTok The Reproduction of the Popular Habitus in Greece and Italy

This study explores the symbolic market of digital motherhood on TikTok, examining how offline social inequalities and the gendered division of care seamlessly migrate into the digital environment. By conceptualizing momfluencers through the lens of a digitally mediated “popular habitus”, the research investigates the transformation of maternal care from a private, domestic responsibility into a performative and commodified form of digital labor. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, the study analyzes a purposive sample of 50 TikTok videos created by micro-influencer mothers in Greece and Italy to understand how platform parameters, commercial imperatives, and localized socio-historical legacies shape performative maternal styles. The findings reveal two dominant archetypes: the “honest” mom, who strategically employs curated messiness and the aesthetic of necessity to cultivate relatability, and the “educational” mom, who projects bourgeois perfectionism and pedagogical authority. Despite their divergent aesthetics, both strategies actively commodify domestic intimacy and convert emotional labor into economic value. Notably, the visibility of children increases significantly in commercial content (53.3%) compared to non-commercial posts (28.6%), indicating that children often function as active instruments for product validation, raising profound ethical concerns regarding the unpaid super-commodification of childhood. Furthermore, a comparative analysis highlights distinct cultural manifestations of this habitus: Greek content predominantly emphasizes a material “care-as-labor” paradigm, whereas Italian content reflects a self-reflective “care-as-discourse” model. Ultimately, the study concludes that digital motherhood on TikTok is an overwhelmingly performative practice driven by collective misrecognition, where the illusion of selfless care obscures the underlying commercialization of the private sphere.