Jerriette DuBay opens with an apology. It’s the first media interview she’s ever done, and she wanted to get it right: she set up a ring light on her kitchen table, had everything prepared. Then the schools in her small town of Deckerville, Michigan called a snow day, and she ended up with six kids running around her house. The energy is even higher than usual because it’s her second-oldest son’s eleventh birthday. She called in Grandma for emergency childcare and went out to do our interview from her car.
DuBay — better known as “Mama Jerriette” to her fans — is an unexpected celebrity. Just a year or two ago, the conventional understanding of a TikTok account with 1.3 million followers was something highly polished, painstakingly curated and centered around an individual with an aspirational lifestyle. Even as Kardashian-style maximalism gave way to the “clean girl aesthetic”, accounts preaching authenticity still recommended a five-step lip routine and making your kids crayons from scratch.
Tradwife content in particular is notorious for featuring spotless farmhouse sinks in sunlit, marble-countered kitchens while a perfectly coiffed brood of homeschooled kids help knead fresh dough — as opposed to what a truly traditional American homemaker’s life might look like. Mama Jerriette’s is the other side of that coin: chaotic and humble, talking broken ovens and Costco deals in a small kitchen lined with wooden cabinets, where the dinner is made in between school pickup and a low-wage job. Videos are about getting a tail-light changed at Walmart last-minute and her progress on GLP-1s. They are decidely not marathon sessions of making ice cream from scratch while dressed in haute couture. Mama Jerriette whisks her own pancake mix and drops her frozen mince on the lino to break it up. There isn’t a pastel-shade KitchenAid in sight.
But make no mistake about it: Jerriette DuBay is happy. She tells me multiple times during our conversation that she loves being a mom — even though she arrived at motherhood in one of the most challenging ways possible.
DuBay got pregnant with her first baby at 14 and gave birth to her eldest son the day after her fifteenth birthday. “I was really young,” she says. “I was still a baby.”
Now, she’s 31 years old and has six kids, “so I’ve been a mom the majority of my life,” she says. Her oldest is 16, and his siblings are 11, nine, seven, six and three, “and all my children have the same father,” she adds, since “it’s a question I get a lot.”
Both DuBay and the father of her children were teenagers when they became parents and got married. They have since divorced, in a manner that was clearly acrimonious and at one point involved DuBay uploading a video begging her ex to send his child support payments via their lawyers so her kids could have winter coats. These days, she tries to avoid getting into specifics.
“Part of when I was sharing my personal life videos, a big message I was trying to get across and get out to people is, you know, to try and forgive others and don't hold onto hate,” she says. “Even if they don't deserve it. And it's the hardest thing, forgiving someone who doesn't deserve it, in your mind; who isn't even sorry. That's so hard. But that's something I really wanted to kind of make a point to get across to people. Like: Hey, you know, I've had some really hard things that have been done to me but I forgive these people. I have love for these people.”
This wasn’t always how she envisioned life going. She grew up “really poor” and started working at 12, picking up farm jobs locally. Although “they tried their best,” she says, her parents were “yellers” and the household she grew up in was anything but calm. She was raised as a churchgoing Christian — something she remains today — and she says that when things feel overwhelming in her household, she tries to take the time to read the Bible and pray.
“That’s my biggest support system, I guess, is turning to my faith,” she says, then adds with a laugh: “I actually want to try and make some more friends. But I feel bad — I’m not a great friend. Really, I’m not, because I’m so busy with my kids and with life and with juggling everything.” Someone always needs transportation to an extracurricular or help with their homework or a snack or potty-training or college application prep or a simple heart-to-heart. Most of her socialization happens during church services or online, through the comments on her spectacularly popular TikTok and Instagram accounts. The whole thing is so understandable, so normal, so...well...ordinary.
When millennials bite back
A video on @the_mindful.dad’s Instagram account titled “POV: My ordinary life at 41” shows him leaving his house in the early morning dark in London, doing a long train commute with his sleeping toddler in a covered stroller, arriving at work for an office job, and then returning the other way. The post is captioned: “Grappling with the notion that I must be more, I must live an extraordinary life, has been a constant for me over two decades. Not to say that to strive for excellence is an unworthy pursuit, but if striving for ‘something more’ comes at the expense of living life for the beauty of each moment, then something is out of sync.”
Most of the comments under The Mindful Dad’s post are supportive. One commenter writes: “This video is exactly what boomers need to see instead of banging on about Netflix and avocado toast. They need to see how tough it is to have a young family and what it takes to pay the mortgage today.”
The comments that are not as supportive come from people who think The Mindful Dad’s life is depressing. They think it’s sad for his daughter to sleep in her stroller during the early hours, sad for him to commute for almost three hours per day, sad that his content offers no striving for an upward trajectory. No doubt, he could’ve filmed a nicely backlit breakfast and spent the commute talking into a ring light about how he has a five-year plan to become a millionaire. But radical normalcy, of the kind that both he and Jerriette DuBay practice, simply says: This isn’t easy, so I won’t make it look like it is.
And there’s a proven audience for radical normalcy, especially in the parenting or parenting-adjacent world. UK-based Megan Archer-Fox, otherwise known as That Girl In Debt on Instagram, quickly built a social media empire of 174,000 followers throughout 2025 by simply publicly admitting that she and her husband were £40,000 ($55,000) in debt from credit cards and overdrafts. Her efforts to pay off that debt while parenting two young boys — hiring inexpensive halls and printing her own invites for birthday parties, downloading apps for a free glass of wine on her birthday, putting aside a small amount of money per month so the family could vacation in December — made for extremely low-key yet surprisingly engaging content. After the debt was paid, she pivoted into nakedly unaspirational parenting content: images of her messy kitchen, shots of her house littered in dirty coffee mugs, pictures of all the toys they leave scattered around the living room because “we’re not trying to pretend kids don’t leave here”.
When Jerriette DuBay was younger, she thought she might become a chef, or perhaps a police officer or a detective. After she got pregnant with her first son, all of that changed. She continued high school as a young mother, and spoke to a Navy recruiter just before she graduated, when she was 17. She had ideas about building her son a better life through the financial security of the military, perhaps then getting a degree sponsored as a way toward a white-collar job, “but then as I was talking to the recruiter, they were like: ‘Oh, you’re going to have to leave. You’re going to have to.’ And I’m like: I can’t leave him. I can’t. So, no, we didn’t do that.”
She still flirted with the idea of a future in criminal justice, but then, after her third child was born, she realized that it simply wouldn’t be feasible with the resources she had. She dropped out of the degree course she was struggling to finish “and I was like: This is what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to be a mom right now.”
This is not meant to be a happy story — teen pregnancy, divorce, ambitions narrowed and deferred — and yet it is. That tension may be the point. DuBay’s happiness feels radical precisely because it asks nothing of the viewer: there is no product to buy and no ideology to adopt. Even the videos she posted at the height of her divorce were calmly spoken. Her quiet insistence is that, despite the noise, what you have may already be enough.
For decades, millennials were told that stability was just a matter of discipline: skip the avocado toast and the Netflix subscription and buy yourself a house; brand yourself better and make yourself a career. Today’s reality — a K-shaped economy where a small minority accelerates upward while the rest tread water — has made a mockery of that messaging. Through a recession, then a pandemic, then persistent inflation, the generation who graduated college in 2008 or later were sold a dream that was hopelessly out-of-date, essentially impossible. It made that dream look less like aspiration and more like gaslighting.
These days, not some, but most American families (52%) report that they don’t have the resources to cover basic living costs in their community. Middle-income families consistently report that their salaries have not kept pace with the cost of living; the generation most likely to report such financial stress is the millennial cohort, of whom 75% say they are worried about making ends meet. A recent analysis by Investopedia found that the cost of the traditional American Dream today — marriage, home ownership, raising two kids, taking a yearly vacation and, most grimly, being able to pay for your own funeral — is over $4.4 million in lifetime expenses. That’s beyond the reach of most US salaries. Raising one child alone costs almost $300,000, and the main contributor to that number is childcare. This often puts women (and it is almost always women) in a bind: should they drop out of the workplace rather than pay almost their entire salaries toward childcare? Or should they suck up major financial hardship in order to invest in their careers, hoping that eventually it’ll pay off, while all the while feeling the guilt of leaving their kids at a daycare they can barely even afford?
The tone of DuBay’s videos is calm, but the pressures beneath them are concrete: bills, food, time, exhaustion. Her makeup tutorial content features a swipe of lip gloss before an evening shift. When she cooks, the meals are healthy and fresh but engineered for speed and compliance: casseroles designed less to impress than to be eaten. None of this is true “influencing” and it’s not ironic anti-influencing, either. The serenity viewers find in her content is acceptance rather than escapism.
Perhaps that’s why the comments under DuBay’s content are like nothing else you’ll see on the internet: “You’re the sweetest and the cutest and such a good mom. We love you,” says a comment with over 99,000 likes on one of her most-viewed videos (a weeknight dinner TikTok, with just under 4 and a half million likes overall.) “She seems like someone with a warm heart,” says another (over 22,000 likes.) Again and again, people post memes of characters crying into their blankets, sobbing on TV shows, or wiping away tears.
The politics of the sleepless night
Getting recognized is something that happens more often than ever these days for DuBay, whether it’s in the waiting room at the dentist or in the local Dollar General. She says she finds it a little embarrassing but that “the kindness of strangers” has been wonderful for her self-esteem, which wasn’t high when she started out. She’s always happy to give a fan a hug or have a discussion, she adds, but “I might be a little socially awkward. I’m still used to talking to my kids all day, you know?”
Motherhood sits at the center of DuBay’s identity. She’s thankful, she tells me repeatedly, for every one of her children. At the same time, she is careful not to romanticize what that love requires. Her life is loud and chaotic, as well as unglamorous. She juggles work, school schedules, church, cooking, cleaning. She laughs when asked how she does it: “Honestly, I don’t know sometimes.”
And of course, by becoming a mother at 15, DuBay was rushed into adulthood. “I don't want them to rush growing up,” she says of her own kids, when I ask if she’d want them to have the same life as her. “I want them to fully enjoy their childhood, in every sense…” When she thinks about becoming a mother as a teen, “I don't regret it because my oldest son absolutely needed to be here. Like, he is just an amazing person. But I want [my own kids] to fully enjoy their life, their childhood. You only get it once, you know, and it's such a magical, amazing time.”
Her oldest son is looking at colleges now, and she’s been careful to tell him “Mom’s always here and I’m always going to have your back.” He can live with her as long as he likes, she adds — “there’s no rush in kicking you out or pushing you out the door, because this world is hard.”
Even as her audience grows, DuBay resists turning her children into content. They appear in the background, occasionally wander into frame, but they are never the focus. She is adamant about that boundary.
This restraint, too, is part of her appeal. In an era of child influencers and family channels that blur labor, intimacy, and spectacle, DuBay’s insistence on limits reads as care. Just like her, DuBay’s kids are not hustling and they are not primed for efficiency. While the Ballerina Farms of the world post about free-range, low-touch parenting and the Nara Smiths of the world post about sleep training, DuBay talks about parental involvement and embracing sleepless nights as a natural part of the parenting process. The friction inherent in modern-day parenting is on full show, where it is smoothed away elsewhere.
Little wonder, then, that 2026 has been hailed as the year of “friction-maxxing”. The movement — a reaction against “AI slop,” automation, and capitalist grind that leads nowhere — aims to deliberately reintroduce small inconveniences and analog habits into people’s lives. The aim is to bring back human connection and resilience in a world that seems to have lost its way. No one knows if friction-maxxing is actually the answer to all of this — but what we do know is that people really want to try.
Surrendering to the situation
For some, there’s a temptation to see accounts like DuBay’s as giving up. Set against the soft-focus competition, it can certainly look jarring, sometimes even depressing. There’s not a whole lot of glamor in Deckerville, Missouri.
But DuBay isn’t lacking in ambition just because she’s radically normal.
“I hope I'm building something,” she says. “I really hope I'm building something for my children. I hope this spark in social media and on these platforms, I hope it's building a better future for them. More stability. Being a single parent now is so challenging, and so I hope in five years that I have, I guess more stability — not so much even financial, though of course that's a huge thing — but just not worrying day-to-day… I am hoping in the future to have built up a platform that gives me a cushion.” Things are very different now to when she started out. She has a management company and brand partnerships, most recently with the meal prep service Blue Apron. At the Mama J online store, you can buy merchandise emblazoned with the decidedly normcore phrase “It’s Okay”. Some of them add “Jesus loves you”. A pair of oven mitts simply implores “Come make dinner with me”.
DuBay is the kind of Christian everyone says we’re missing these days. She goes to church as much as she can; she reads her Bible. She talks about her personal values and about God, and refers to herself as “blessed”.
“I have people of all faiths that follow me and I love them,” she says. “I've had messages from people that are Muslim faith, atheist, and they're like: ‘It's so nice because we see that you are a Christian and you share your faith, but we still feel welcome here.’ And absolutely you are… We need to love people a little bit more, even if we have different ideas. That's OK. You know, you're welcome here: sisters, brothers, I don't care. You're welcome. And I love you because you're a person.”
That insistence — that human life has inherent value, full stop — lands differently when set against the present backdrop: mass deportations, state-sponsored violence, children separated from parents, protesters killed in the streets, a public discourse increasingly organized around suspicion and exclusion. DuBay’s Christianity bears little resemblance to the Christianity that dominates American public life. It is not hardline and it is not punishing. It positions sensitivity as a superpower rather than a weakness. It is certainly not a weapon.
The viewers who keep coming back to DuBay’s content — for reassurance, for a mental health break or for something they can’t even quite put their finger on — say they find her voice and attitude soothing. Perhaps they also find a kind of permission in it: permission to stop striving for an aesthetic life and instead inhabit a real one, informed by the real economic environment; permission to stop performing. If the game was rigged before you started playing, why pretend you’re winning every day?
The snow continues to fall outside, the car idles, the connection goes in and out, and DuBay still relies on her mother to help her out with childcare when plans fall apart. There is homework to supervise and a house to keep running. Dinner for eight is never simple, either in terms of the cooking or the cleaning up afterwards. She subs at the kids’ school sometimes on top of her other jobs. She tries to contribute what she can at church. All she can say about her ex these days is that she wishes him well, and that she’s grateful for her children.
There were many reasons for DuBay to cancel our interview, but she did it anyway. Then she went back inside and got on with the rest of the day.
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