The Ballerina Farm furor explains why people love being childless cat ladies

Scenes from Hannah Neeleman’s life look downright appealing. Would I love to skippity-skip into my backyard and harvest fresh eggs for my morning omelet? You bet! I’d also happily cook it up on my $30,000 Aga range and complete the look – I’m sorry, meal — with toasted homemade bread spread with freshly churned butter.

The eight children under 12 she can keep. Please don’t take that the wrong way — kids are terrific if you want them. Not everybody does. A recent Times of London profile of Neeleman, the face of Ballerina Farm, makes it sound like she was built for that job. At first.

The profile opens with a scene of “how does she do it” heroism, in which the reporter recounts Neeleman’s extraordinary journey from giving birth to her youngest  – “a one-push baby,” she says  –  and competing in a pageant 12 days later.

By the end of the story, the writer has pulled back the curtain a bit on the Mormon couple’s hyper-successful small-scale lifestyle influencer brand built on YouTube, TikTok (where, as @ballerinafarm, she has a 9.1 million-strong following) and Instagram (where 9.4 million monitor her posts).

The slender, blonde, telegenic GOP fantasy we see in the Neelemans’ social media feeds has hired help with the house cleaning — but no childcare beyond an instructor who homeschools the older kids. They can afford a nanny or five, mind you. But her husband Daniel didn’t want any in the house.

That means Neeleman has to cart her homegrown baseball team along as she does all the grocery shopping on top of milking her livestock and collecting eggs – in a new apron that Daniel got for her birthday, instead of what she wanted, which was plane tickets to Greece.

That video shows her dancing happily as she puts on another garment to help with her chores. What we don’t see is the toll all this takes on Neeleman, who her husband admits “sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.”

The Times’ profile of the Neelemans was published shortly after JD Vance was announced as Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, prompting the resurfacing of many recordings in which he blamed society’s downfall on childless adults.

The most famous is his 2021 comment on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” where he disparaged “childless cat ladies” for “wanting to make the rest of the country miserable too.” But even in 2020 he happily told a conservative podcaster that childless members of the so-called “leadership class,” were “more sociopathic,” further opining that the “most deranged” and “most psychotic” people on what was once Twitter were also child-free.

Before The Times profile, Neeleman drew the fury of all types of detractors on X, Instagram and TikTok – people without kids, but also other mothers who resent her serene portrayal of home-keeping and child-rearing. I get it. In a recent video Neeleman says she's going to make a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. This is before we watch her make the cheese, bake the bread and whip up the butter from fresh cream, along with preparing an acorn squash and sweet potato soup and roasting some fish. Her skill is undeniable.   

Being one of those “childless cat ladies” getting under Vance’s skin, however, I’d like to thank her and Megan Agnew, the Times reporter who journeyed to Utah to see what she’s all about.

For the record, Neeleman seems very happy with her "Green Acres" life. Her story also explains why so many adults – women, and men – have chosen to forgo having children. Simply put, our country makes it a lot more affordable to raise cats than to rear one child, let alone eight.

I’d also be lying if I said that was the only reason my husband and I share our lives with two of nature’s zaniest comics instead of a herd of small humans. I am the youngest of five children with a mother who did her best to do it all, and all by herself, only to collapse and be hospitalized in the effort. I took that lesson to heart.

My husband and I built our lives in a city far away from our families, taking assistance from relatives off the table. Strike two. We also like sleeping in and doing whatever we want with our schedules.

Mainly, though, it’s about the cost. Cats require kibble, distractions from destroying your furniture, litter box maintenance and affection. Raising kids guarantees a six-figure lifetime price tag, with parents struggling to afford the best education for their children, along with health care, food and housing.

Hannah Neeleman seems to have all that figured out. All she had to do was surrender her prima ballerina goals for homesteader cosplay, and her voice to let her husband do the talking for her. But like other famous “tradwives,” a label she softly rejects, the Neelemans’ fantastic life is only possible by the grace of extreme wealth and a staff.

Daniel’s billionaire father owns JetBlue Airlines. He grew up in a Connecticut suburb but dreamed of a farming life out West. Neeleman went to Julliard with dreams of dancing professionally, giving that up to single-handedly repopulate a small town in Utah, make all the family meals from scratch and, as their videos and the Times article reveal, rarely has a moment to herself. 

Agnew describes two of her children “literally swinging off her long golden hair” and one that clings to her bosom for every moment of the four hours she spends with the family. Many read such descriptions and sigh wistfully, wishing they had that life – those children filling a large home on unspoiled acreage. That dream sells Ballerina Farm's meat, along with accessories like “jour” aprons (imported), salt blends (also imported), forager clogs (yes, also imported) and sourdough starters (that Neeleman actually makes in her kitchen and pack into expensive but also Instagram-cute Weck jars, which are also imported).   

What they’re doing is only a shade or two removed from what nepo baby Gwyneth Paltrow achieved with Goop, or the home and hearth Nirvana that Chip and Joanna Gaines expanded from a renovation TV show into a full-blown multimedia brand. The main difference is that TV audiences never watched Joanna go through labor in her bathtub or slapped her with the Queen of the Tradwives label.

“We’re co-CEOs,” Daniel tells the Times reporter, who describes a 328-acre farm that employs three people full time, along with more than 40 others at their warehouse and office, and a creative director handling their website. But again: no childcare.

The Neelemans’ home state served as a case study for a Pro Publica feature from early this year as a state whose conservative lawmakers have long left working parents to fend for themselves:

A larger proportion of Utahans live in areas with few or no licensed child care facilities than in any other state, according to a 2018 analysis of census and licensing data by the left-leaning Center for American Progress, the most recent available. A 2020 report by the state’s Office of Child Care found that Utah’s childcare capacity was meeting only 35% of its needs.

The story goes on to list Utah legislators’ resistance to funding out-of-home childcare solutions in the state with the highest percentage of children, contributing to parents leaving the workforce and care providers having to let employees go or shut down.

Utah is just one example of a nationwide problem. A recently released study by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, an economic policy research group, found that women are responsible for much of the increase in the overall labor force participation rate over the past five years.

Federal subsidies deserve some credit for making child care more accessible, especially a $24 billion pandemic aid package designated to ease the pandemic’s burden on the childcare industry. Since that expired last September, however, more working mothers face familiar difficulties in balancing their careers and caring for their children. 

Progressives have been crying out for a comprehensive childcare solution for years only to have funding proposals blocked by Republicans and other conservatives. You know, the same people blaming our lower birth rate on a culture of hedonistic kitty cuddlin’.

In fairness, the Neelemans do not pass judgment on others’ life choices in the Times’ article, save for sharing their unsurprising anti-abortion views. They are Mormon, after all. But they’re also doing something many child-free cat ladies and cat daddies can relate to on a scale that suits them – growing food, making butter, harvesting eggs.

Nearly every city dweller with or without a backyard chicken coop dreams of more space. Everyone who isn’t wealthy would love to trade in their financial worries and stifling jobs for something they love to do.

Being half of a childless cat couple makes it possible to hold a full-time job while leaving time to grow tomatoes and make jam from our figs, along with cleaning and cooking, all of which is possible because my husband helps with all of it.

I’ve also been alive for long enough to recognize the manufactured fuss over tradwives and childless cat people as the latest version of a recurring argument. In the late ‘90s and Aughts, it was dubbed the Mommy Wars; the 2010s produced the “Lean In” backlash followed by Girlbosses pitted against college-educated women opting out of the rat race to sell macrame plant hangers on Etsy or whatever. 

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These arguments keep reviving because they give smarmy politicians and pundits female stereotypes to pit against each other without anybody stepping up to solve the underlying issues.

“My first ambition, after the ballerina dream got ditched, was to avoid becoming the heroine of 'Marjorie Morningstar,' a 1955 bestseller I read as an adolescent, in which Marjorie dreams of becoming a Broadway actress but instead winds up living a mundane life on Long Island as Mrs. Milton Schwartz, housewife and mother of three,” wrote Tracy Thompson in a 1998 Washington Post essay. “. . . And then one day I found myself living in Washington with a job that entailed staying at home and spending a lot of time dealing with baby vomit and dirty diapers. Is it any wonder that few people thought of what I did as important anymore? And how could I blame them?”

Thompson goes on to decry a culture that claims to value motherhood, “but in fact what we value is jobs with power and paychecks . . . We say men and women are free to swap roles, that greater involvement by men would solve some of the child-care problems, but unwritten rules of the workplace penalize fathers who take extended parental leave, and stay-at-home dads are considered weird.” 

Ballerina Farm opts out of all that because its creators can afford to, even as they leave open the question of whether this life is truly what its namesake creator wants. Neeleman and her husband answer those concerns with a recently posted video in which she reassures the public that this is the world she and her husband created, “and I couldn’t love it more.” I feel the same way . . . about my calm and manageable life with cats.