Victoria Beckham Has Entered the Boy Mom Chat

On TikTok, viral “boy mom” videos typically follow this format: a mom forces her way into her son’s major life event (whether it’s a wedding, gender reveal, or proposal) and makes it about her, while others, usually the son’s partner, get sidelined. It’s a formula that irks the masses. “Boy moms can’t be stopped,” a top comment will often read.

When Brooklyn Beckham released his Instagram broadside against his parents, David and Victoria Beckham, on January 19, one claim captured attention more than most: an allegedly ill-timed mother-son dance at the 26-year-old’s April 2022 wedding to Nicola Peltz.

“My mum hijacked my first dance with my wife,” Brooklyn wrote. The sentence would have done numbers as the title of a viral post in r/boymoms.

“In front of our 500 wedding guests, Marc Anthony called me to the stage where the schedule was planned to be my romantic dance with my wife,” the eldest of the Beckhams’ four kids continued. “Instead my mum was waiting to dance with me instead. She danced very inappropriately on me in front of everyone. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable [and] humiliated in my entire life.”

With one Notes app-written statement, Brooklyn made the beloved former Spice Girl into the archetype of the toxic boy mom. Thus, Victoria’s name has entered boy mom discourse, and the internet is ready to take her to task.

“The main takeaway I have from Brooklyn Beckham’s Instagram is the fact that boy mums need to be psychologically studied,” culture writer and podcaster Chante Joseph said in a TikTok video that has been viewed over 70,000 times. “Boy moms are never beating the allegations,” adds another podcaster, Mariah Rose.

Boy mom discourse has been bubbling up on the internet for the better part of the last 5 years. What began as a seemingly innocuous hashtag used by moms of boys has evolved into criticisms about gendered parenting.

Often, boy moms are accused of having a misplaced emotional attachment to their sons and exhibiting signs of misogyny towards women in their sons’ lives or even their own daughters. Avatars of this type of mom caption videos with statements like, “your son shows you his crush… but you were his first love.”

Critiquing behavior like this through a Freudian lens is low-hanging fruit. There are obvious ties to Freud’s “the Jocasta complex,” a theory that suggests that mothers can become overly attached to their sons, viewing them as a substitute for the connection they want from a partner. Though Freud’s theories have largely been discredited, therapist Allison DuBois noted in a viral TikTok video about boy moms that there is at least some insight we can take from the Austrian neurologist.

“It can lead to blurred boundaries and an unhealthy dynamic — as you can imagine — where the son becomes the emotional center of the mom’s life,” DuBois said of “boy mom” dynamics.

Held up as the faces of “boy mom culture” are influencers like Avery Woods, who went viral in 2024 when she posted a video in which she said that she “always wanted to be a boy mom” and while she’s “obviously obsessed” with her daughter, it’s her son who “has my heart—my heart and my soul.”

But now, will Victoria be looped in as the celebrity spokesperson for boy moms? The fashion designer, who shares three sons and a daughter with husband David, has stayed silent through much speculation about her alleged feud with her son. However, in Brooklyn’s version of events, she has exhibited enough bad behavior to rival the boy moms of social media.