Alexia Delarosa, a 30-year-old stay-at-home mom and content creator from California, often faces sarcasm for her videos on preparing meals from scratch for her kids. The young mom has devised a quirky response to brush off the negativity and continues to highlight the beauty, value, and power of motherhood,
“I always had very maternal instincts,” Mrs. Delarosa told the Epoch Times, noting that she has loved to bake since she was little and worked as a nanny before she was a mother.
For Mrs. Delarosa, taking care of the home is just a small part of a mother’s work. She says it’s vital that moms “raise good human beings” and that children should not be thrown into the world with the “hope that they turn out OK.”
“That’s going to be the future generation and the people that are making decisions,” she said. “I see great value in [motherhood], and I think everyone else should too.”
Traditional Gender Roles
Her traditional take on life, in general, was probably what led her to her husband. She met Mr. Delarosa at his coffee shop. Gradually, their friendship evolved, and they began dating.
The young couple discussed the kind of relationship and marriage they wanted to have. For both of them, fulfilling their traditional gender roles was important.
“Our vision for life aligned,” Mrs. Delarosa said, adding that she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, and Mr. Delarosa had no intentions of scaling back his business.
“That’s naturally who he was. I don’t think it was something that I had to shape him to be to make him fit into my life,” she said.
With their lives and desires fitting together like puzzle pieces, they chose to get married. Now they work together, making their family life run smoothly as they both embrace their roles as parents.
Sustaining the Family Unit
While Mr. Delarosa runs the coffee shop, much of Mrs. Delarosa’s day is spent nurturing and looking after their two boys. They spend their days baking, cleaning, and playing outside. The proud mom has also chosen to homeschool her children, though they are still young and aren’t currently spending much time on schooling.Recognizing that some people think stay-at-home moms live lives of lazy luxury, she remarked that it’s a “full-time job.”
“Just being home and tending to tiny humans all day is hard work, and taking care of a home all day is hard work. And I think it gets devalued a lot,” she said.
Mrs. Delarosa believes American families are in crisis today, and parents and kids seem to be “living very separate lives.” The school system and the world in general, is “just scary now,” she says.
“There’s just so much disconnect and very little time spent [together],” she said. “Even when I went to school, there’s absolutely things at certain ages that I should not have been exposed to, that my parents had no control of because I’m gone for eight hours a day. I’m kind of at the whip, the will of the adults that I’m around and the other kids that I’m around. So ... having too much freedom as a young child can be damaging sometimes.
“I think it’s a great decision if people are able to [homeschool their kids]. But I get that it’s not possible for everyone. Some families, they have to go to work. There’s no one that can do the homeschooling.”
Dealing With Online Negativity
Amid her busy schedule as a mother, homemaker, and home educator she has also found the time to create content for social media. To Mrs. Delarosa, this has become a job that enhances the work she does in her home.“I have a full-time job being a stay-at-home mom,” she said, “and I’ve stacked on extra responsibilities with the social media stuff. It doubles as my creative outlet. It’s good for me mentally to be doing that—something on the side that I can do for myself.”
The videos she creates usually stem from her doing creative things for her family like making a birthday cake, homemade cereal, or homemade crayons. Often her kids are involved in the process. She’s become known for a specific quirk of holding a slight smile in the videos while focusing on the task before her. Some have even commented that she looks “miserable” with that smile or that she looks like her eyes are closed.
“My eyes are not actually closed,“ she said. ”I know that people say it looks that way for sure. If I’m looking down at what I’m doing, it looks like my eyes are closed.”
She explains why she chose this specific quirk for her videos: “Early on, when I first started sharing my life online, like making food in the kitchen, basically what I’m doing now, people would comment like, ‘Oh, you look so miserable. Why aren’t you smiling?’”
Watch the video on how she deals with the online negativity:
Mrs. Delarosa’s cheeky sense of humor shines through in her videos and in how she deals with negativity in the comments.“I am not saying anything controversial,” she said. “I’m not doing anything controversial. So the fact that people find something negative to say ... is almost humorous.
“It’s not about me. I’m like, ‘You’ve some issues that I’ve triggered somehow with this video of me making a birthday cake, and you’re taking it out on me.’ So I have that separation and that awareness that this person doesn’t know me—I didn’t do anything to elicit a negative comment. So I never take any of it to heart.”
She also says it’s easy to brush off the negative comments when there are so many other positive comments from people who love and are inspired by the content she creates.
Though the crafts and recipes she showcases in the videos can be intricate and time-consuming, she doesn’t expect other moms to try and copy what she does, but, rather, she wants to highlight the importance of motherhood.
“I hope that people find value in being a stay-at-home mom or see the value in stay-at-home moms [or] just moms in general,” Mrs. Delarosa said. “I would love for the world to collectively agree that it is a full-time job. There is great value in having a mom in the home taking care of the kids that you created.”
