A friend recently sent me a link to a video of two moms sitting in a minivan and sharing some “real talk” type conversation on one parenting issue or another.
I sighed to myself – these sorts of videos are seriously so annoying, I thought – but I kept watching because my friend thought it was worth sharing. Then Facebook started suggesting similar posts, and before I knew it I was watching all kinds of mom confessions and rants all shared from the front seat of a car.
I got sucked in, I guess, and I’m apparently not alone since these car/minivan rant videos posted by moms (and anyone) are suddenly everywhere we look. It’s an issue blogger Sara Farrell Baker recently took on with a post on ScaryMommy titled “Dear Moms Making Videos In Your Minivans, Just Stop.”
If somehow you haven’t seen these videos, we’ll help catch you up. Maybe it started with the singing-in-car videos – including super-viral ones like this dad singing with his daughter or this mom and dad belting out another Frozen hit. Then there was Chewbacca Mom and Kohl’s Cash rant mom, and now you’ll find entire YouTube channels dedicated to moms sharing their thoughts from the driver’s seat.
To be clear, these videos go viral for a reason: people generally seem to love them. They seem real, candid and often share the sort of things a lot of us think but don’t say out loud – and certainly don’t feel comfy sharing with the world – so we’re glad when someone does.
But not Farrell Baker, who says people are just jumping on the bandwagon like crazy now and it’s getting obnoxious. “The floodgates opened, and soon enough, every Melissa, Kate, and Tammy saw a path to fame via the suburban version of the sex tape: moms in cars videos,” she writes in her post on ScaryMommy.
“I literally can’t with these car-video moms,” she writes. “They pretend that their diatribe was inspired so swiftly that they had to pull over into their local strip mall parking lot. I’m not dumb. I know the real reason is that parking spot has the most flattering lighting at 2 p.m. on a Sunday when you’re actually recording this shit.”
Ouch. But yeah, we see her point. There’s no way these videos are always as unscripted or impromptu as they try to seem. But they’re also entertaining a lot of moms and making them feel like someone out there understands how they feel. That’s pretty much priceless to those moms, even if some of us find it annoying.
And if some mom out there (like our Kohl’s Cash ranter – a local mom from Saline!) gets her 15 minutes of fame because of it? More power to her.
What do you think? Are these videos annoying or do you love them? Tell us in the comments.
