Are You a ‘Boy Mom’? A Parental Debate Heats Up on TikTok.

Avery Woods has deleted a video that made her the subject of recent online discussion, but that doesn’t matter. The internet never forgets.

Ms. Woods, an influencer and podcast host with more than two million followers on TikTok, posted the video earlier this month, in which she appeared in the eyes of some to prefer one of her children over the other.

It shows her sitting in her car after receiving her son’s recent school pictures. “My boy moms feel me on this,” Ms. Woods says in the video, “but my son has my heart. My heart and my soul.”

She adds that she is “obsessed” with her daughter: “She is just the greatest little girl in the whole world. But my whole life I always wanted to be a boy mom.” Then she shows off several photos of her son.

A boy mom would seem to be just that: a mother to a male child. Online, however, the term has been taken to represent a mother who takes special enjoyment in raising a son.

There are nearly 18 million posts with the hashtag #boymom on Instagram; on TikTok the same hashtag accounts for more than 31 billion views. Some videos use romantic language to describe a mother’s relationships to her children. “You’ll be his first kiss, his first love, his first friend,” goes a popular audio track that many boy moms have used in videos of their child. “You are his mom, and he is your whole world.”