A Hit Piece on Large Families

Recently, The Times published a lengthy and highly critical feature on “Ballerina Farm,” the nom de web of social media influencer Hannah Neeleman. Along with her husband, Daniel Neeleman, Hannah runs a farm in rural Utah and has a huge audience on various social media platforms. On Instagram, for instance, she has more than 9 million followers.

The Times piece blew up because it portrays Hannah as a kind of prisoner of her husband and children. Each quote reads like a POW desperately trying to blink out a coded plea for rescue. Feminist publication Jezebel aggregated the piece and, echoing the reaction from the internet, described the Ballerina Farm world as “bleak as hell.” 

The problem, however, is that the story is a clever hit piece. I have been a practicing journalist for a decade and a half, and I can say as a media professional that this is an especially egregious example of agenda-driven, and sloppy, reporting. And while this specific controversy will surely blow over, the episode is worth examining as a case study in how media bias works to make family life appear menacing. 

The Times piece is ostensibly about the “trad wife” movement, which the author explains is a reaction to “girlboss” feminism and frazzled mommy bloggers. Many others have already written about this movement, including Ashley McGuire, who pointed out last month that many trad wives are actually not very traditional, and that their social media personas may actually be counterproductive.¹ Whether trad wives are a net positive or not is a question I’ll leave for others, adding only that I share McGuire’s opinion that there is often something “off” about the movement.

Instead, what I’m talking about here is media criticism. And in this case, the media—specifically The Times—reports that Hannah Neeleman is the “queen” of the trad wives. 

There’s just one problem: Hannah rejects the trad label in the piece, while Daniel accepts it reluctantly but adds that the two act as “co-CEOs.” Mary Harrington picked up on this line, arguing last week that Hannah is less “trad wife” and more “trade wife,” or in other words “a mother who works within an economically productive household.” It’s an intriguing idea, and one that harkens back to pre-industrial ideas of “work-mate” marriages that were as much economic unions as they were romantic ones. A reported feature on Ballerina Farm as an experiment in reviving work-mate families would be a fascinating read. 

Unfortunately, however, The Times simply ignores the Neelemans’ comments, missing this deeper angle in favor of pigeonholing Hannah into something she explicitly rejects. 

The Times piece goes on to ignore the couple's statements again and again. One of the most viral anecdotes in the piece includes Hannah mentioning that she didn’t take pain medication during the birth of her first seven children but did get an epidural for her eighth. Daniel wasn’t present for that final birth, and we’re told Hannah recounted this information in a “lowered voice” while her husband was “currently out of the room taking a phone call.” The impression this gives is that Daniel, sadistically, is the reason Hannah didn’t use pain meds for most of her births—a potentially damning revelation. 

But that’s not actually what Hannah said. Indeed, a few lines earlier, when asked why she has avoided pain meds, she says, “I don’t know, I just have never loved taking it.” Hannah is saying one thing, but the reporter is implying something else entirely. And the irony of ignoring the woman at the heart of the profile to construct a narrative of female oppression is apparently lost on the author.

In other cases, there are simply gross omissions in the reporting. Another viral moment comes when Hannah describes sacrificing her career as a ballerina and adds that her husband also gave up his “career ambitions.” The Times author immediately follows up with a paragraph saying Hannah is wrong, but there’s no further probing to determine what Daniel’s alleged career ambitions or sacrifices were. Maybe those sacrifices were major, maybe they weren’t. We’ll never actually know because instead of asking basic follow up questions, the author simply passes judgment and decides that the couple’s relationship is problematically lopsided.

These omissions are sprinkled throughout the piece. Daniel mentions at one point that Hannah gets so exhausted she can’t get out of bed for a week. But the piece never mentions Hannah’s own comments on being bedridden. Daniel once pulled strings at JetBlue to sit next to Hannah on a flight. Did Hannah think that was creepy or cute? Daniel pushed for a quick engagement. Did Hannah feel manipulated, or did that seem normal because it’s very common in the Mormon culture they both come from?

While this specific controversy will surely blow over, the episode is worth examining as a case study in how media bias works to make family life appear menacing. 

Readers don’t find out, and at seemingly every critical moment, the piece conspicuously does not include context that might shed light on how the subjects themselves interpret their experiences. The article suggests that gathering this information was difficult because the reporter was “up against an army of toddlers who all want their mum and a husband who thinks he knows better.” But Hannah is quoted many times, and gathering quotes in challenging environments is what journalists do. I can’t imagine hearing that one of my own interview subjects is secretly bedridden from exhaustion, and then never digging deeper. 

A follow-up piece—seemingly posted in response to growing backlash—added more positive imagery of the couple’s farm and took a less obviously condescending tone, but did little to clear up the reporting omissions of the first story. Meanwhile, days after the brouhaha erupted, Hannah herself posted online that her current life is the “world we created and I couldn’t love it more.” In a second post, she stated she was “shocked” by the article and its portrayal of her as oppressed, adding that she and Daniel are partners whose priority is God and family—all comments that seem to contradict The Times’ thesis.

In any case, the point is not to get bogged down in every reportorial error, but rather to point out that there was a pattern of ignoring the subject's comments, or of not soliciting them at all. And when the quotes didn’t feed the desired narrative, the author simply contradicts what the subjects told her.

Bad reporting allows the author to connect the dots in ways that aren’t supported by what the Neelemans actually say, but there is a second, deeper issue. The piece, like many others before it, refuses to grapple with the idea that prioritizing family over other pursuits could be a legitimate choice.

On social media, for instance, many readers have breathlessly shared passages about Hannah’s turning away from her ballet career. The fact that she was studying at Juilliard, where admission is extremely competitive, sparked claims that she wasted her potential. A line about space on the farm that was supposed to be Hannah’s dance studio becoming instead a kids’ schoolroom has further outraged some readers. Others have gone ballistic over a quote in which Hannah says her current life isn’t what she always wanted.

But these responses are an exercise in obtusity. How many adults in their 30s are doing what they always wanted? Obviously, people evolve, and many of us give up things we love for other things we also love. Sometimes you want the thrilling ballet career in New York City. Other times, you want something else even more. Hannah makes this point in the piece, saying that she “knew that when I started to have kids, my life would start to look different.” But The Times author and many online commenters simply refuse to accept this, assuming instead that Hannah must have been manipulated or coerced into sacrificing the dreams she had as a teenager in order to have a family. 

More than inadequate reporting, then, the bigger problem with the piece is that it treats sacrifice for the sake of family as unreservedly negative. The implication, the underlying assumption, is that individuals should put themselves first. And once you accept that assumption, it’s hard to see Hannah as anything other than a victim—never mind that Hannah never remotely frames herself as such. For some reason, The Times and many readers have decided that this woman’s decisions aren’t legitimate. 

The debate about the Neelemans will end soon. In the grand scheme, the “trad” movement may be a blip as well. But the bigger issue this episode highlights is unabashed disdain among parts of the commentariat for certain kinds of family life. Most people are not Juilliard trained ballerinas, or social media influences, or even farmers—or all three. But millions of parents are similar to the Neelemans in their choice to sacrifice sleep, personal space, career ambition, and much more because their families matter more than anything. The Times frames these choices as somehow sinister. But in the end, for most people, choosing family is simply the best path to the good life. 

Jim Dalrymple II is a journalist and author of the Nuclear Meltdown newsletter about families. He also covers housing for Inman and has previously worked at BuzzFeed News and the Salt Lake Tribune.

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1.  I’ve also previously written about this movement, including writing the first (as far as I’m aware) piece about a politicized version of the concept within Mormonism.