At first glance, Zoe Foster Blake is the kind of woman who appears to “have it all”.
She runs a cosmetics empire, writes bestselling books, is married to one of Australia’s favourite larrikins, and has two adorable kids under five.
But speaking to Ellie Halliwell at Stellar Magazine, Foster Blake admits she might have taken on too much.
“I’ve realised in this last year that two kids is a lot harder than one — I think any mum would agree — and I’ve just gone, ‘I’ve taken on too much’… There’s a cost to all of this; there’s a sacrifice to your health, to your family and the quality of your work, so I don’t know if it’s that aspirational,” she told Stellar.
While most of what Foster Blake does is met with adoration and a flood of emojis from her legion of fans, the mum-of-two has faced criticism in the past for sharing too much of her kids’ lives online.
In 2016, Angela Mollard wrote a think piece for Good Weekend, criticising Foster Blake’s decision to share images of Sonny on social media, which were then made into news stories.
Mollard argued that we wouldn’t see the effect of sharing our children’s lives online for at least 15 years.
“What if I told you that in our story you couldn’t see the big bad wolf because he was invisible and would only be entering our story 15 years from now?” she wrote.
Essentially, the piece argued the effects of sharing the lives of young children on social media are largely unknown. We don’t know where pictures of chubby-cheeked, blue-eyed Sonny end up, Mollard said, and we have no way of controlling how they’re used.
We also don’t know what the impact will be on Sonny when he grows up, she argued. Mollard suggests he might “resent the invasion of [his] privacy,” and that his public profile might put unnecessary pressure on him to be a certain type of person.
However, Foster Blake disagreed with Mollard’s grim outlook.
“I spend my life with this child; it would be weirder for me never to post a photo of him. And we are as sure as sh*t not exploiting him,” she said in response.
Speaking to Stellar, the 37-year-old has reiterated her view on sharenting, now that she has two children.
“I’ve always just said it would be disingenuous to pretend these two humans don’t take up most of my day and my heart and my life,” she explained to the publication.
“I think we’re pretty reserved but we just go, ‘This is our life,’ like we do with everything. We’re writers and entertainers and Hame’s a speaker, so it’s inevitable that we share.”
The Foster Blakes are about to spend an extended amount of time in Italy and the United States, and the mum-of-two said she’ll be sharing as much of their journey as she can on social media.
“You get your best content on holidays. It was talked about and I’m like, ‘Hmmm.’ But I’m not going to be on email,” she explained.