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In one of Sara Doan’s earliest memories, her mom is asking her to sort laundry. She’s about 6 years old, and as the first child in her conservative Catholic family, she’s already stepped into her role as manager of housework.

Soon she’ll be cooking, doing dishes, and homeschooling herself while her mom takes care of her seven siblings and her dad works six-day weeks at his auto-body shop, occasionally popping in for elaborate home-cooked lunches.

“It was unrelenting drudgery,” Doan, now a professor of experience architecture at Michigan State University, says of her childhood.

I reached out to Doan because I wanted to understand a group I haven’t heard as much about in discussions about tradwives and their role in American politics and culture: the kids who grow up in ostensibly “trad” homes.

On social media, tradwife influencers (think Hannah Neeleman, who posts on Instagram as @ballerinafarm, or Kelly Havens Stickle) are engaged in a “performance of ‘traditional’ femininity,” Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University who studies gender and religion, told me. That performance includes a highly aestheticized vision of motherhood — “it’s beautiful, it’s soft, things are orderly, there’s plenty of time to knead the dough and to gather the flowers from outside,” Du Mez said. In tradwife content, homeschooling multiple young children while making their meals from scratch looks calm and joyful — in fact, creators often present their lifestyle, implicitly or explicitly, as the best, healthiest way to raise kids.

The reality, people who grew up or parented under these conditions told me, is more complicated. While high-profile influencers may be performing for an audience (and for potential brand sponsors), many real-life families are living out a less camera-ready version of the lifestyle in conservative Christian circles, Du Mez told me. (Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but more than 3 million kids are homeschooled in the US every year, and about a third of families choose homeschooling for religious reasons.)

For some kids in these families,........

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