The cultural shift no one is measuring - and the brand category quietly winning it

By Ishveen Jolly, CEO + Founder, OpenSponsorship. Published May 2026.

Every brand marketer knows that athletes have moved beyond sport. What we did not know - until we ran the numbers - is that the largest, fastest-growing, and most under-priced content lane in sports right now is one no agency has a name for.

It is athletes posting about their kids.

We classified 700,000+ Instagram posts from 1,000 of the most-followed athletes on the OpenSponsorship platform - 500 women, 500 men - going back to 2018. We expected to confirm what a few of us had suspected for years: that family content from athletes is growing fast. What we did not expect was the asymmetry.

Female athletes get a +41% engagement lift on posts featuring their kids. Male athletes get a 23% penalty on the same kind of content. The numbers explain why women have nearly doubled their kid-content posting since 2018, while men have grown more slowly - and they have direct implications for which brands win the next two years of family-targeted campaigns.

This is the first time the data has been published. Here is what we found, and what it means for your 2026 calendar.

1. The asymmetry: why female athletes post 2x more about their kids than men

Across our entire eight-year corpus, female athletes have posted about their kids roughly twice as often as male athletes - every single year since 2018. Female posts mentioning kid or family content rose from 2.0% in 2018 to 3.9% in 2025, a +92% increase. Male posts grew +68% over the same period but from a lower base.

The gap has not closed. It has widened.

The reason becomes obvious when you look at engagement. We compared the engagement rate on kid-content posts vs. all other posts from the same female cohort - same athletes, same audiences, same time period:

A female athlete who posts about her daughter, her newborn, her morning school routine - on average gets 41% more engagement than her own non-family content. Same account, same followers, same algorithm.

Male athletes get the opposite. A male athlete's kid-content post averages 1.87% engagement, compared to 2.43% for his everything-else content - a 23% drop.

That is not a one-month spike or a follower-base difference. It is 5,943 female kid-content posts and 3,626 male kid-content posts, classified post by post, across eight years. The asymmetry is the structural feature of the modern athlete-parent media economy.

Which means female athletes who post about their kids are not being "personal" at the cost of "professional." They are doing the highest-engagement content of their feed. And male athletes are doing it despite the cost - because they are seeing the same cultural shift but their audiences have not caught up.

"Female audiences reward authenticity in a way male audiences still don't - and that single fact rewrites the brand-buying playbook for the next decade." - Ishveen Jolly, OpenSponsorship

2. The sports nobody saw coming

If you asked ten brand marketers which women's sport produces the most "athlete mom" content, nine of them would say the WNBA. Or the USWNT. Or tennis. They would be wrong.

The women posting most about their kids on Instagram are surfers, skaters, BMX riders, mountain bikers, snowboarders, bodybuilders, and CrossFit athletes.

Bethany Hamilton, the iconic professional surfer, posts about her kids in 17.9% of her Instagram posts - more than 1 in 6. Kari Pearce, four-time CrossFit Games athlete and a top-5 CrossFit champion, sits at 21.8%. Paige Hathaway, IFBB pro and one of fitness's biggest accounts, hits 31.5% - nearly a third of her feed.

These are not niche profiles. Bethany Hamilton has 2.7 million followers. Hathaway has 3.4 million. They sit in the alt-sports universe that traditional sports-marketing budgets often ignore - and they are out-producing the WNBA and the USWNT on family content by 50% or more.

The same pattern shows up on the men's side. Male MLB players post about their kids 6.13% of the time - more than any other men's sport. That is 3.6 times the NBA's rate (1.70%), more than Soccer (1.75%), more than Cricket (1.62%), more than American Football (2.89%), and more than Boxing (3.53%).

David Ortiz posts about his kids in 12.9% of his Instagram posts. Carlos Correa: 7.7%. Yasiel Puig: 6.7%. Ronald Acuña Jr.: 6.6%. Mookie Betts: 3.7%. Julio Rodriguez: 3.4%. Salvador Perez, Alex Bregman, José Reyes - the highest-followed dads in baseball are the loudest dads in sports.

Why baseball? Three factors visible in our data: longer careers (more time as a parent), tighter season-to-offseason rhythm (parents post more in the offseason), and a culture that has historically celebrated multi-generational families in the sport. Boxing is the second-highest male sport at 3.53% - led by Tyron Woodley at 17.2% - which similarly breaks the "tough-guy fighter" stereotype that some brands still build around.

If your media plan still treats "athlete-parent content" as a WNBA mom story or an NBA dad story, you are missing where the volume - and the engagement - actually lives.

3. The brand category quietly winning the athlete-parent vertical

We pulled all OpenSponsorship deals accepted between January 2024 and May 2026 involving athletes who qualify as "parent posters" - athletes with at least 3 kid-content posts in the last two years AND a kid-content rate of 2% or higher.

The result was a clear pattern: health and wellness brands have spent more on athlete-parents than every other category combined.

Ka'Chava - the superfood-shake brand - has run 87 deals with athlete-parents on our platform in the last two years, totaling nearly $1M in cash deal value across 28 unique parent athletes. Qunol, Immunotec, NBPure, 1MD Nutrition, Vitacost, Magnum Nutraceuticals, Stoked Oats, Members Nutrition - eleven of the top fifteen buyers of athlete-parents are in the nutrition, supplements, or functional-wellness category.

The non-wellness brands buying in are apparel (Hugo Boss, Psycho Bunny) and golf (LIV Golf, Callaway Golf). The "girl mom getting groceries / dad mowing the lawn" categories that traditional marketing 101 textbooks would predict - QSR, automotive, kid-CPG - are barely present.

That is an opportunity, not a verdict. The wellness category got there first because their products map directly onto the "family routine" content moment. The brands missing in action - Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Target, Walmart, Costco, the national QSR chains, the auto OEMs, the kids' apparel majors - have not yet bought into the lane that supplement brands have already proven works.

"When 11 of the top 15 buyers in a vertical come from one category, that's not a brand-marketing trend - it's an arbitrage that's about to close. The next CPG to commit serious budget to this lane will own a content moment that doesn't have a Super Bowl ad equivalent yet." - Ishveen Jolly, OpenSponsorship

4. The cultural calendar: peaks every brand calendar is missing

When does athlete-parent content spike? Most brands assume Mother's Day and Father's Day. The data says: think bigger.

The female peak is not Mother's Day. It's Halloween. October sees female athletes posting kid content 4.82% of the time - higher than May (Mother's Day, 4.64%), higher than August (Back to School, 4.60%), higher than December (4.71%). October content skews heavily toward family-Halloween posts - costumes, pumpkin patches, trick-or-treating - and almost no national brand has built a sustained athlete-parent activation around it.

The male peak is not Father's Day. It's December. Male athletes post kid content 2.97% of the time in December - their highest month of the year, driven by holiday family content. Father's Day (June) shows only a modest bump to 2.40%, less than May's 2.85% (where male athletes are posting about their own mothers on Mother's Day).

Three implications for any brand planning the back half of 2026:

1. Father's Day is a softer brand-activation moment than Father's Day weekend dollar spend suggests. The audience is there, but the male athlete content volume is roughly half the female Mother's Day volume.
2. Halloween is a sleeper category for female-athlete-parent activations. No brand owns it. Family Halloween content from female athletes outperforms Mother's Day on volume.
3. December is the male athlete-parent moment. Holiday CPG, toys, kids' tech, sports gear - if you are marketing a holiday gift for the dad-and-kid moment, December athlete content is where the audience already is.

The Back-to-School window (mid-August through early September) remains the most-underused brand window on the female side. August female kid-content rate hits 4.60% - the second-highest month of the year - and brands that planned BTS campaigns by mid-June consistently outperformed brands that committed in late July.

5. How to use this report

Three things to take into your next planning conversation:

1. The Female Engagement Lift is the case for any female-athlete activation involving kids. When a brand asks "why use a mom athlete instead of a non-mom influencer," the answer is +41% engagement on family content, holding follower count constant. That argument did not exist before this report. It does now.

2. The Sport Surprises mean your roster is bigger than you think. If you are a kids-product, family-CPG, or wellness brand and your athlete-parent shortlist starts and ends with WNBA + USWNT + tennis, you are missing the highest-density part of the market. Action sports, snow sports, CrossFit, bodybuilding, and MLB all out-index the obvious cohorts.

3. The Calendar means you can plan 6 months ahead. Brands that book Halloween (book by August 1), back-to-school (book by mid-June), and December holiday (book by October 15) are choosing from an open athlete-parent market. Wait until the moment, and you are competing with every other brand for the same fifteen athletes.

OpenSponsorship is the end-to-end tech-enabled agency working across this category. Over the past decade we have brokered more than 9,000 deals between athletes and brands, with 75% of 2025 deals going to female athletes - including the parent cohort this report measures. If you have a Father's Day, Back-to-School, Halloween, or holiday campaign concept, we can pull the right athlete-parents from our roster and run the full execution.

To talk through how this applies to your 2026 plan - or to get the full 1,000-athlete roster cut by sport, kid-content rate, and follower tier - email ishveen@opensponsorship.com or book a 15-minute call.

Methodology

• Cohort. Top 500 female + 500 male athletes on the OpenSponsorship platform, ranked by Instagram follower count, public profiles only, IG-linked, 5,000+ followers minimum.
• Corpus. 700,000+ original Instagram posts from January 2018 to May 2026. Retweets and reshares excluded. For the engagement-rate analysis (Section 1), posts with fewer than 1,000 followers-at-time-of-posting were also excluded, leaving 257,699 analyzable posts.
• Classifier. Caption-text regex, case-insensitive, word-boundary anchored, matching: mom, mommy, mama, mum, baby, babies, newborn, daughter, son, kid, kids, girl mom, boy mom, girl dad, boy dad, my little (girl/boy/prince/princess), pregnant, pregnancy.
• Deals data. 2024-01-01 to 2026-05-12, dealStatus = "Accepted" in the OpenSponsorship platform. "Parent athlete" defined as ≥3 kid-content posts since 2020 AND a personal kid-content rate of 2% or higher.
• Known limits. (1) The classifier misses kid mentions by name only. The reported rates are a conservative undercount of the true cultural shift. (2) "Mom" terms hit when male athletes post about their own mothers (especially in May), modestly inflating the male Mother's Day rate. (3) A scraping infrastructure gap in 2023-2024 reduced raw post volume; reported rates (%) are unaffected. (4) Engagement rate in this report = (likes + comments) ÷ followers-when-created × 100, not platform-reported reach-based ER. The directional comparison (kid vs. non-kid, within the same cohort, same denominator) is unaffected.

About OpenSponsorship

OpenSponsorship is an end-to-end tech-enabled agency connecting brands with athletes and influencers. The platform represents 25,000+ athletes and creators across 160 sports in 120 countries. In 2025, 200% revenue growth and a 336% Q4 EBITDA increase made OpenSponsorship one of the fastest-growing creator marketing platforms in sport.

For press inquiries: ishveen@opensponsorship.com
For research access: opensponsorship.com/learn-more