Ava Ahavat is 19-years-old, married, has no 9-to-5 job or college degree, and is exactly where she wants to be – at least, that’s what she told TikTok last month in a video that’s since been viewed over 16 million times. In recent weeks, the clip, with its 20,000-plus comments and ample reaction videos, has turned Ahavat into a subject for internet fodder. In it, she wears a pristine puff-sleeved dress, a Van Cleef bracelet and a self-assured attitude. “I’m told by a lot of people that I should be young and out there and ‘living my life’,” she says. “I don’t know what that means – I promise you I’m living my life to the fullest in my faithful marriage.”

Much of Ahavat’s content follows a similar pattern. She’s often immaculately dressed, cooking meals for her husband, and making declarations so out-there that it’s impossible not to wonder if they’re ragebait, a sign Ahavat is in on the joke, or both. But while Ahavat, a self-described “young traditional wife who loves her husband”, may be the latest to have gone viral, she’s not the only 19-year-old singing the praises of a more traditional lifestyle online. The creator is a part of a new class of young tradwives posting about their lives as stay-at-home wives, mothers, and girlfriends.

Posting about living a more traditional lifestyle is, at this point, nothing new. Tradwives, a catchall term used to refer to women, often very young women, who believe their place is in the home, have been catalysts for discourse since as early as 2022, and today, the conversation is still raging on. Take Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel Yesteryear, which, in April, became one of 2026’s buzziest releases, chronicling the journey of a tradwife social media influencer who wakes up one day to discover she’s been transported back to the 19th century. This September, two more tradwife novels, Hallie Shepherd’s Call Off the Dark and Sarah Langan’s Trad Wife, will hit the shelves, signalling that interest in the subject is only growing. The publishing trend, where the trad lifestyle is depicted as a source of horror, reflects how public opinion of tradwives has soured, and perhaps explains why we’re beginning to see some distancing.

Last week, the conversation around who is and isn’t a tradwife bubbled up once again when model and content creator Nara Smith, who, despite being a working mum, has been largely portrayed as the face of the movement, went on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast and explained why she doesn’t identify with the label; while Smith was 18-years-old when she married her husband, fellow model Lucky Blue Smith, she’s always worked, and chores and childcare are evenly split in her household. Dressed in a plain sweater and jeans, Smith also clarified that certain aspects of her past videos, like cooking in flowy dresses and speaking in a low voice, were due to practical reasons – after pregnancy, looser clothes were all that fit, and the whispering was to avoid waking up her baby.

On the surface, Smith’s rebuttal and explanations make sense. But as many online have been quick to point out, the fact that Smith has stayed silent on the issue until now, paid visits to Hannah Neelman’s Ballerina Farm, and generally seemed to lean into the aesthetic she now wishes to reject makes her current bewilderment at being labelled a tradwife difficult to believe. Even her explanations for why she is switching back to couture and starting to share working mum content (her sample sizes now fit again, and she was tired of people thinking she didn’t work) have been interpreted as a tactical rebrand.

At the same time that Smith is denouncing the tradwife title, the new wave of young creators making stay-at-home content appear more than ready to accept the homemaker label. Search “stay at home” on TikTok, and you’ll have no problem finding videos of teens eschewing the workforce in favour of partnering with a “provider” and tending to the household. Though the creator’s exact title – wife, girlfriend, mother or fiancée – may differ, these videos, where women spend their days doing laundry and making gnocchi from scratch, all follow the same cue cards. The women are always very young, film themselves performing domestic tasks, and post the same ragebait-esque provocations as Ahavat – a sort of “judge me if you dare” attitude that demonstrates an awareness of how their content might be received. On the page of creators like Taylor Szotkowski, for example, outfit videos are accompanied by clapbacks to commentators warning her not to waste her twenties married.

Today’s tradwives may have been inspired by the likes of Nara Smith and Ballerina Farm’s videos, but they are also evolving the aesthetic for the next generation. As cultural sociologist Professor Sarah Brouillete points out, their slicker, less prairie-house-coded videos have a different aesthetic feel. “I think a lot of tradwife content looks a bit anti-modern and some of it is very explicitly traditionalist, showing people in farmhouses baking bread,” says Brouillete. “Whereas with these [videos], you can marry a rich man, be a modern woman and not have to evoke the style.”

It’s true that this latest iteration of homemaker creators, while evoking the same traditionalist undertones, look less cottagecore and more ‘pilates princess’. In Ahavat’s videos, for example, strappy workout sets get as much airtime as floral dresses. Between the iced vanilla latte montages, PR hauls and marble countertop shots, they could, if watched with the sound off and captions unread, be easily mistaken for regular influencer content. This illustrates a shift in what aesthetics are considered aspirational, but also how normalised some of the more traditional ideas are becoming.

Another element setting the next generation of tradwives videos apart is the fact that the creator’s age, often boldly stated at the start of a DIML vlog, is the hook. While one may have been able to guess the (still young) age of the previous generation of tradwives, it wasn’t something they were leading with. Now, however, women who have chosen to share their lives as homemakers online have no issue letting audiences know they’re pre-frontal-lobe development – if anything, they seem to be aware that this makes for clickier content.

As Brouillete points out, young women as a whole are facing anxiety-inducing futures, regardless of their choices or political beliefs. “They’re living in a [time] where aspiration to wealth or even climbing the social ladder has never been harder to believe in,” says Brouillette. “And so, these [videos] of relative wealth or success are almost like magic. They have this fairytale element, promising that you can be freed from the burden of having to find a future, from having to work.” This content is arriving during an inflection point in culture – even with a college degree, the job market for young people is frighteningly bad, with the unemployment rate for college graduates at the highest it’s been since 2015, excluding the pandemic years.

The lifestyle choice of teen tradwives is certainly not reflective of the country as a whole, given that gen-Z women are still going to college and entering the workforce at a higher rate than their male counterparts. As an NBC poll found last year, three in four gen-Z women disagree that the country would be stronger if women held “traditional” gender roles. Still, the fact that these videos exist and are gaining traction at all feels indicative of the current cultural dissonance in America, where conversations around work, gender and labour have changed in line with women’s lived realities.

The young women who came of age during the era of #girlbosses and She-EOs have found that the pink-tinged utopia they were promised no longer exists, if it ever existed at all. Aside from the abysmal job prospects, conservative ideology is on the rise in the US. The current presidential administration, through its emphasis on pronatalism, erosion of reproductive rights and general misogynistic rhetoric, leaves little room to wonder what its vision of the ideal woman is. “There’s an aesthetic of this current administration that is young, beautiful and usually white,” says gender and media scholar Professor Sarah Banet-Weiser. “And so, I think this content feeds into that. It certainly validates it.”

Still, some of these young content creators, like Ella Bryan, don’t see what they are doing as political. Bryan, a 19-year-old living in Mansfield, Texas, started making content about her life as a stay-at-home girlfriend before eventually getting engaged this summer, turning her into a stay-at-home fiancée. Growing up, Bryan knew that college was the expectation, but didn’t feel compelled to go; when her then-boyfriend told her she didn’t have to and that he wanted a partner who would stay at home with their future kids anyway, it just made sense. “I’ve never been like, ‘because I’m a conservative I have to stay at home’,” says Bryan. “I’ve never really thought about politics being in it. People are like, ‘This is the most MAGA thing I’ve ever heard,’ and I’m like, really? That’s weird because I’ve never said anything political on my page.”

The critique of tradwives, however, has long been not that they post overtly political content, but that they pasteurise far-right ideas into an easily-consumable aesthetic. And Bryan’s comments section illustrates the tension that allows stay-at-home, tradwife and homemaker content to exist and spawn new iterations; regardless of whether you find the life of a 19-year-old stay-at-home girlfriend regressive or inspirational, you’re still watching the vlog from start to finish. Nara Smith may not be a tradwife (anymore, some would argue), but that doesn’t mean that the movement is going anywhere – whether that’s because of the country’s shift to the right, the internet’s obsession with hate-watching, the algorithm’s tendency to reward extreme content or, most likely, all of the above. As Professor Banet-Weiser puts it, “Media content never happens in a vacuum – It happens in response, in conversation, in opposition, to what's happening in the world and culture around us”. With or without Nara Smith, tradwives will continue to exist. With the options presented to young women today, maybe it isn’t that shocking that this romanticisation of the past will still be in our future.