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In her Denver home this past fall, Chelsea Anderson held her iPhone to her face and declared that she was the “best babysitter in the whole world.” She looked bored, unimpressed, and remarkably like the sort of high-school-age gal parents would hire to watch over their brood for a date night. Only, she was 32, with a husband and a mortgage, and she hadn’t babysat in more than a decade—at least not professionally.
Blond with blue, downturned eyes, Anderson moved a piece of chewing gum to the other side of her mouth, which was shellacked in a dark pink lip gloss, and offered proof of her prowess to her roughly 40 TikTok followers: “You got some kids who don’t want to put on their PJs? You gotta have a PJ fashion show. And…you’re not gonna win the PJ fashion show if your teeth aren’t brushed; that would be embarrassing.” She stated this revelation as though it were obvious. “And you’re thinking, Well, what about after the PJ fashion show? Yeah, I’ve got tricks for that, too. I can get kids to bed so fast, and they’re having fun the whole time, they don’t even realize they’re going to bed, mmkay?”
In the weeks that followed, Anderson, who worked for a Boulder advertising firm at the time, posted more babysitting hacks to her personal TikTok account, squeezing them between routine snapshots of her life. There were tips for convincing kiddos to wear sunscreen and to leave the playground without a meltdown; there were ways to persuade picky eaters to finish their veggies. She even proffered a trick for keeping little ones entertained when you’re hungover (hiding plastic Easter eggs filled with spare change in your backyard, of course). She changed her handle to @ChelseaExplainsItAll—a riff on the 1990s sitcom Clarissa Explains It All—and phased out her personal content.
On October 30, 2024, Anderson created a new alias on Instagram, @chelsea_explains, and began uploading as many as five of her previously recorded TikTok shorts every day. Comments and shares poured in. By early November, Anderson was posting solutions to her followers’ submitted quandaries. While wearing a black leather jacket and a full face, she asked her phone camera, “Did you just have a baby and now suddenly your toddler won’t go to bed anymore? Well, that’s what happened to [this mom], but luckily she reached out to me: the Michael Jordan of babysitting.”
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She also called herself “the Princess Diana of babysitting” and flashed her phone camera toward a toilet adorned with jewels and a crown and explained how to potty train a kid. (“You gotta tell ’em they’re the prince or princess of Pottytown.”) She called herself “the Jane Goodall of babysitting” and revealed the best way to interest uninterested parties in eating. (“Hey, kids, it’s time for lunch—if you can find it.”) She called herself “the Usain Bolt of babysitting” and described how to perform errands quickly and efficiently by spinning a yarn: “I get to Target, and I say, ‘Hey, kids, I gotta tell you something kind of embarrassing, and I need your help. I’m actually banned from this Target, and if they see me, I don’t know what’s going to happen. So we gotta get in, get out. You gotta be my eyes and ears, OK?’ …So you’re sneaking around, you send out a scout ahead to check out the paper towel aisle—‘Is the coast clear?’ You’re being real quiet; you gotta commit to the bit.”
Anderson shared dozens of minutelong explainers, always holding her phone camera to her face, blasé and disinterested, and closing with an eyebrow raised and a rhetorical “mmkay?” like a mom negotiating with her child. Her children in this case, though, were her social media followers, which, in just two months, eclipsed a quarter of a million.
In a town not exactly known for its celebrities (Tim Allen, Don Cheadle, some C-list former Bachelor castmates), Anderson is hurtling toward stardom. At press time, she had roughly 967,000 followers on Instagram and 273,600 on TikTok, making her a megainfluencer in marketing circles. Her posts reach more than 20 million people every month.
Anderson was first recognized in person this past November, just two weeks after @chelsea_explains’ initial Instagram post, at a Michaels in Superior. A mom and tween approached Anderson at the self-checkout. “Are you that girl…?” They complimented her videos. When asked if she felt sheepish or standoffish during the encounter, she squeals: “I think I just, like, truly blacked out—I couldn’t believe it.” And then: “I was raised on pop stars and tabloids—I’ve always wanted to be famous.”
Anderson grew up in Boulder and attended Fairview High School, graduating in 2010 against a cultural backdrop of chick flicks like 13 Going on 30 and Mean Girls. She started babysitting in her early teens and spent summers nannying. She studied creative advertising at the University of Colorado Boulder and moved to New York City to cut her teeth with a primo agency. She also tried stand-up comedy and took classes for it. “They taught us to [paint] a picture for the audience, then change it as quickly and as extremely as possible with as few words as you can,” she says. “The more you can surprise them, the funnier the joke is.” She relates such misdirection to how she might conceive a compelling ad. “It’s the same with a social post,” she says. “People like that twist.”
Anderson returned to Colorado in 2020. In her pandemic-spurred free time, she started an anonymous meme account on Instagram with jokes about advertising. “I always wanted to be a content creator,” she says. In May 2023, she uploaded a single slide, a white background with black typeface and a crude edit: “Three stages of life: 1. Birth 2. Updating the deck 3. Death.” Drew Barrymore reposted it.
It was Anderson’s most viral moment up to that time—but her name and face weren’t attached to it. “Content creation is such a saturated market,” Anderson says. “I remember having this thought that if I could just be brave enough to talk to the camera, change my format, be strategic, I can figure out this niche. So one night, I was just like, ‘OK, I’ll tell the story about the PJ fashion show—people love that story and they always ask for more.’ ”
Social media platforms are filled with highly produced reels, videos that require multiple takes, editing and stitching, filters, and image stabilizers. Many influencers use cinematic-grade cameras and hire entire teams to make their magic. But Anderson had neither the resources for nor interest in such a production. In her words, she is a storyteller. She simply needed to put herself out there.
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Parenting might seem like an odd shtick for a childless millennial, but as Anderson explains it, “I understand kids—we have the same hobbies, like stickers, and the same extreme views toward things, like bedtime. And if you understand someone, you can get them to do anything.” In one post, Anderson holds a small toy turtle up to her phone camera. It has fuzzy green felt, googly eyes, and, most important, a record button. She says kids are to share their grievances with it and caregivers will listen to the rant at the end of the day. “Now here’s my secret,” Anderson says. “The Tattle Turtle doesn’t record…. But kids love it, and I’ll tell you why. Have you ever gotten home from work and b——- about your co-workers to your husband? To your wife? Have you ever…needed to talk a little s— [about your friends]? If someone told you, ‘Hey, that’s tattling! Don’t do that!’ you’d be like, ‘Shut up. Someone treated me poorly, and I wanna talk about it.’ Kids want to talk about it, too, but guess what? I don’t want to hear it. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have an outlet.”
For the most part, commenters praise Anderson. “I like how [Anderson] frames situations so it’s less of a battle—not adult versus child, but more about making mundane chores fun,” one told 5280. “She jokingly talks about using manipulation, but it’s always about manipulating the situation, not the child.”
Annie Cowden is the director of a leadership program at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. She’s also the mom of a three-year-old and devoted @chelsea_explains follower. “She is so creative,” Cowden says of Anderson. “Her ideas are off-the-wall to moms, but we need that perspective from someone like a babysitter, who comes in for short stints with high energy, to remind us how to find fun in the everyday struggles. All of my mom friends follow her.”
Some folks have left negative comments, usually when a particular trick isn’t effective for them, but they don’t bother Anderson. “First off,” she says, “you can’t insult someone that is so sure of themselves. [Editor’s note: Anderson certainly is.] Also, if a hack doesn’t work for you, just move on with your life. It’s not like you’ve put weeks of effort into something that didn’t pay off. Maybe the next hack will work for you. The stakes are just so low.”
Anderson is aware of the social media zeitgeist. Influencers appeal to their followers because of their accessibility and openness, and when they reveal differing views from the people who worship them, the trolls come out. Unsurprisingly, Anderson receives angry messages whenever she posts anything about current events. (“I just don’t think it’s political to say that you shouldn’t send people to concentration camps,” she says.) But, in general, Anderson’s feed is remarkably free of any content about, well, her. There’s not much to pick apart.
Anderson’s spouse, a software engineer, is a far cry from your typical Instagram husband. He’s never seen on the @chelsea_explains feed and almost always catches his wife’s posts for the first time with the rest of the Instaverse, as Anderson prefers to create her videos when she’s alone. (Anderson asked us not to print his name, citing safety concerns.)
As her popularity has grown, Anderson has branched into other life hacks, about things like giving gifts and getting noticed at bars and even keeping your fingers warm in winter. In her most viral relationship post, she advises couples to create an imaginary house gnome to blame for the small stuff, like forgetting to lock the back door or leaving the leftovers out all night. “There is nothing better than feeling like you are not just forgiven for something,” Anderson says in the video, “but, like, everyone agrees you didn’t even do it.”
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Anderson’s husband says he thinks the video is funny but that his wife has never used the gnome trick on him. Anderson laughs and says, “Am I just, like, misremembering this? We totally have a house gnome. I guess I just use the house gnome when I mess up.”
When asked if children are in her future, Anderson bristles. She maintains that her tips are for babysitters and nannies, “even if they do work for moms,” and she’s too entrenched in her career to plan for a family right now anyway. In April, she quit her job—with a Boulder-based advertising agency that lists clients such as Boost Mobile, Sling TV, and Domino’s—to go all in on what she’s calling Chelsea Explains Media.
She sends additional content to paid subscribers through the membership platform Patreon; she offers one-on-one coaching sessions for everything from how to bond with stepchildren to how to build an audience; she inks brand deals (for relevant products and services she “actually uses,” she says); she allows affiliate links on her website; and she recently signed a book deal with Clarkson Potter, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group. The book, which will be published in 2026, will catalog her most viral babysitting hacks and add some new, previously unshared tricks. She also receives a payout from the TikTok Creator Rewards Program, which compensates for engagement. (At press time, President Donald Trump had extended the congressional divest-or-shutoff deadline of the app to September 17.)
She’s a sought-after speaker now, too. In her Denver home in June, Anderson was trying out a couple of DIY crafts she intended to lead large groups through at an upcoming conference for a tech giant whose identity she isn’t allowed to disclose. She was just back from Cannes Lions in France, the most prestigious festival in the marketing industry, where she sat in on some seminars and cavorted with “real” influencers, including Christi Lukasiak, a star on the television reality series Dance Moms who has a following upward of six million across Instagram and TikTok. Back in Denver, Anderson was tanned and wearing a long sun dress, her arms and legs spilling over her chair as she sifted through a pan of patches for a gold letter C.
She was reaching into her bag of babysitting hacks for the perfect activity for the conference, something that would be easy to teach and quick to learn. One idea involved ironing patches to tote bags. A kaleidoscope of colorful art supplies mantled her dining room table.
While sipping a seltzer water and arranging patches on a Trader Joe’s tote, Anderson estimated that people now recognize her roughly half the time she leaves her house, and, as you might expect, she was thrilled about it. “It’s affected my day-to-day in such a positive way,” she gushed. “I used to think I must have been breaking a rule if someone was looking at me—this is not how I order here, I’m standing in the wrong line, maybe they think I’m shoplifting. Now, when I notice someone looking at me, I’m sure they know me from social media, which is freeing. I feel so comfortable in public now, and everyone who has ever come up to me has been so nice.”
Her spouse, who does the bookkeeping for his wife, agrees: “She’s a lot happier.”
Despite her surging happiness, Anderson’s numbers had plateaued at around 936,000 followers on Instagram in June. “I truly believe the universe is stalling me right now to, like, teach me a lesson,” she says. “The milestones make you feel good for a week, you drink Champagne, and then it’s like nothing changes—your life is exactly the same.”
Perhaps that’s why, over the course of the reporting for this story, Anderson hired a management team. She hid her list of followers so the public couldn’t see them and, at some point in July, swept both her Instagram and TikTok feeds, purging dozens (hundreds?) of posts from 2024 and the earliest era of her newfound career. The uncut stuff—the real flashes of Chelsea Anderson—is gone. She still holds her camera to her face, lazing on a sofa or walking her dog in the park, but she uses filters, sometimes a ring light. She has a consistent font and style for her titles and closed captioning. If a video doesn’t take off right away, Anderson often pulls it.
In July, she stopped responding directly to 5280. Her management team advised that she would not be participating in a photo shoot for this story (although she did take a fact-checking call from one of 5280’s researchers).
It was a stark shift from the easy-breezy girl who used to post a video in one take and invited a local journalist to her Denver Victorian to watch her devise a plan to hype up a bunch of tech bros using only pipe cleaners and hot glue. Then again, it was exactly the sort of behavior one might expect from someone who’s famous—even if it’s only Instafamous.
