CM

Having a child is often portrayed as the most beautiful moment of your life. And often it is. But alongside the love comes exhaustion, alongside the happiness comes doubt, alongside the pride comes uncertainty.

Together with Friends Born Digital and Cartel Agency, we developed geenrozewolk.be (literally ‘no pink cloud’, the Dutch idiom for the idealised, effortless happiness new parents are expected to feel). This online platform invited young parents to share, in a single sentence, what parenthood actually feels like for them. Honestly, anonymously, and without judgement.

Within just a few weeks, CM collected more than 1,100 messages from Flemish parents. The results were striking: 63% of responses were somewhat negative. Two out of three young parents don’t experience early parenthood as an effortless pink cloud. Or perhaps they simply felt able to say so out loud for the first time.

All the messages together formed a digital cloud. Each testimonial was assigned a colour — from dark grey to bright pink — based on its emotional tone. The result was not a perfectly rosy picture of young parenthood, but a grey-pink data visualisation of what parenthood actually tends to feel like.

It didn’t stop there. The testimonials were also given a physical home in the Stadsfeestzaal in Antwerp, where we built a real-world cloud from over a thousand slips of paper, each carrying an authentic experience shared by a Flemish parent. An installation that quite literally made passers-by stop and reflect on what young parents feel, but don’t always say.

Young parents often look for recognition in people going through the same thing. That’s why we partnered with five ‘momfluencers’ who already had an ongoing relationship with CM and who, in their content, show the beautiful as well as the difficult side of parenthood.

At launch, they shared their own experiences in Stories, with a direct link to geenrozewolk.be. Their followers could leave their own message, which was then added to the cloud. Later, the influencers also created content about the Stadsfeestzaal installation. From there, they directed their audience towards CM’s broader range of support services for young families.

The approach paid off. The campaign reached 200,000 people, generated more than 300,000 video views. But more than that: Geen Roze Wolk gave young parents a low-threshold way to be honest about their feelings. And CM gained a powerful social platform around young parenthood and mental health. Not a conventional awareness campaign, then, but a shared space where parents could recognise themselves and each other.