In the summer of 2007, when the internet was less like a marketplace and more like a scrapbook, a grainy home video featuring two young brothers catapulted to viral fame. The video was called ‘Charlie bit my finger’, and it went on to be viewed over 890 million times, eventually being sold as an NFT in 2022 (for over $7,00,000). When it first appeared, it was cute, serendipitous, and did not hold the promise of monetary compensation. But it was prophetic, offering an early glimpse into the internet’s appetite for content around the daily shenanigans of children and their families.
By December of 2007, YouTube had rolled out its Partner Program, allowing creators to pocket a slice of the ad revenue from their videos. What began as home videos spontaneously uploaded online has spiralled into a sprawling digital economy, where children are recorded not for posterity, but for profit. Today, it’s impossible to scroll through social media without being confronted by videos of elementary schoolers unveiling outfit hauls, toddlers unboxing toys or preteens lit by ring lights, lip syncing the latest viral tune. These are no longer just home videos, but vital revenue streams keeping entire families afloat.
The name given to this phenomenon is ‘sharenting’, or parents sharing content of their children online. If the early years of the internet were characterised by the over-sharing parent narrating diaper changes and filming the first day of school, today’s family vloggers are sleeker, profitable brands compared to the rough-and-tumble blogs of the past.
Like the child actors of yore, for today’s child influencers like Rockelle, whose entire life has played out in front of her social media followers, childhood consists of endless days spent filming content and measuring your worth against how many followers, brand deals, and sponsorships you can bring in.
Take Piper Rockelle, the teenage YouTuber at the centre of the new Netflix documentary Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing, a three-part series that looks at the ugly truths from the lives of child influencers. Rockelle’s mother, Tiffany Smith, actively recruited kids into her ‘squad’, making prank-style group videos that gained millions of views each. Smith has been accused of a slew of abusive behaviours—including sexual harassment of minors—which ultimately culminated in a $1.8 million dollar settlement. Like the child actors of yore, for today’s child influencers like Rockelle, whose entire life has played out in front of her social media followers, childhood consists of endless days spent filming content and measuring your worth against how many followers, brand deals, and sponsorships you can bring in. For Rockelle, that number skyrocketed to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month at its peak, or between an estimated $4.2 million and $7.5 million dollars a year.
“While I’m happy to share fun moments, like a new sport they’ve picked up or a piece of artwork they’ve created, I firmly believe children shouldn’t be paraded on social media for engagement or monetisation. There’s a line, and for me protecting their privacy and dignity will always come first,” says Richa Begani, a Mumbai-based fashion and lifestyle content creator. Initially, Begani did feature her children on her social media feed, but eventually made the decision to pare back their involvement.
On Instagram, there are other kinds of parents too. You may have seen new parents who like to share every little adventure on their feed but are dead against publicly posting their toddler’s face. Their child’s face is often covered behind flowers, a smiley face, or a heart emoji. “For us, sharing about our daughter has meant we could write little notes about her on our Instagram. No face shots, just a running diary. We do post photos of her, but limit them to her back, top shots of her head looking down, hands or legs, and the occasional full silhouette,” says Jayeeta Mazumder, a Singapore-based communications specialist and mother of a toddler.
Sadly, not all parents and family influencers share Begani and Mazumder’s vigilance. A report in The New York Times that looked into 5,000 mom-run Instagram accounts for their minor children found that they had a mostly adult male following, and that the mothers would routinely sell photos, exclusive chat sessions, and even worn pieces of clothing from their children to these followers. To add to the stew, the report found that the Instagram algorithm is programmed to reward more suggestive images with greater viewership, creating an incentive structure that is accused of blurring morality for parents.
Morality was at the centre of now-disgraced Mormon momfluencer Ruby Franke’s parenting ideology—until a harrowing phone call made by her emaciated 12-year-old son from a neighbour’s home revealed the extent to which the woman and her business partner, Jodie Hildebrandt, a therapist, had been physically and emotionally abusing her children, using duct tape as restraint and denying them food and water as punishment for disobedience. On the heels of these revelations, the HBO documentary An Update on Our Family exposed YouTube family vloggers James and Myka Stauffer for profiting off their adoption of their son Huxley from China, only to delete all records of him from their channel and rehome him when his developmental difficulties proved too difficult to handle. “There is no such thing as an ethical family vlogger,” Shari Franke, Ruby Franke’s 22-year-old daughter, said in senate testimony in October 2023.
From Jodie Foster to Lindsay Lohan, there is no dearth of cautionary tales when it comes to the potential dangers that can befall child actors—but unlike child actors, the children that sit at the centre of the family vlogging industrial complex have little to no legal protections
“Personally, I’m not comfortable with it,” says Mazumder of monetised content featuring children, “Childhood should be a time for learning and growing, and not performing for an unseen audience. To me, the idea of profiting off a child’s online presence feels morally wrong,” she adds.
From Jodie Foster to Lindsay Lohan, there is no dearth of cautionary tales when it comes to the potential dangers that can befall child actors—but unlike child actors, the children that sit at the centre of the family vlogging industrial complex have little to no legal protections. “Constantly shoving a camera in children’s faces during moments when they have big feelings is bound to leave a lasting psychological impact on their lives,” cautions Mazumder, “Their stories are theirs to share, not ours.”
In India, while children working on formal film or television sets are protected by law, but these protections currently do not extend to instances of children being featured on monetised social media accounts or informal web series. “It’s probably one of the biggest legal blind spots,” says Sandhya Surendran, a media and entertainment lawyer based in Bengaluru, stressing that children under 18 cannot legally give their consent, and that “[India] needs regulatory intervention at the earliest”. Aside from the most glaring dangers that children face from social media exposure—such as a violation of their privacy—Surendran points to the rapidly expanding AI content market as a potential new treacherous frontier: “We have enough evidence to know that AI platforms are being trained on data that is publicly available,” she says, “So there’s no telling how this data is going to be used—and that’s very scary when you think about it.”
For Mazumder, the decision to limit her child’s exposure online is rooted not in fear but in awareness: “The thing is, once you know this stuff, you can’t unknow it,” she says. “The hundreds of studies with telling statistics about where the photos could potentially land, and how they may be repurposed, add more power to our decision to keep her face private. It’s not paranoia but this probability that cements our decision,” she adds of her parenting practice.
Still, for many parents, moving away from the sharenting influencer model is easier said than done. “When my kids expressed that they no longer wanted to be part of my content, I completely respected their wishes. At the same time, I found myself running out of things to share without crossing into personal territory, like revealing where they are, what classes they take, or which school they attend,” says Begani, “I see many parents sharing things like Sports Day videos on public profiles, and to me that feels like giving away far too much about where your child spends most of their day. That honestly terrifies me.” Begani has now adopted a more protectionist approach when it comes to her children’s personal social media accounts. “My 13-year-old son has an Instagram account, but it’s under strict parental controls with time limits in place. We actively monitor the content he’s exposed to and often share inspirational and positive material with him,” she shares.
When it comes to responsibility, the question arises as to whether the duty lies with parents or with social media companies to ensure the safety of children. “It can’t really be an either/or,” says Surendran. “Platforms have to enforce their policies around age restrictions and monetisation, whereas when it comes to parents who are making money off their children, there has to be a higher standard of care and transparency.”
Just this month, Meta revealed new enhanced safety and privacy features for minors on Instagram, announcing that teens’ accounts would now be private by default, with public accounts for people under 16 requiring parental permission. Now, there is also a restriction on who can message such accounts, with a view to limiting unwanted interactions for children on the platform. While these guardrails are well-intentioned and pointed in the right direction, experts have been quick to point to the fact that they are hard to enforce until Meta adopts a robust age-verification policy.
In the meantime, the content never sleeps: choreographed skits, ‘day in the life’ vlogs, and brand-sponsored challenges engineered to go viral continue to be prolific. Scrolling past these posts, it’s now impossible to ignore that the children they feature didn’t sign a contract, probably don’t understand the repercussions of lifelong digital exposure, and have little to no control over the way in which they are presented to the world. In an age where everything is content, what’s to stop parents from leveraging their children’s futures for profit? And what will it take for us to hit ‘unsubscribe’?
