59 ms·

Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content

264 points by newmac 4y ago

hackinthebochs 4y ago
The purity spiral on full display in this comment section. Somehow social media makes it the default state on topics like this, even in places that typically have a lot of nuance.
denton-scratch 4y ago
> Claire says her father has told her he may be her father, but he’s also her boss. This sounds super-scummy. I'm not surprised she's pissed-off. Both parents quit working? And if Claire doesn't perform, they'll lose their home and she won't be able to "have nice things"? Talk about emotional blackmail.
a4isms 4y ago
Christoper Robin Milne is a famous example of having one's childhood turned into content, although obviously nothing anywhere near as pervasively as happens with attention-starved "influencers" leveraging their children for a dopamine rush: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Robin_Milne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Robin_Milne
- ThinkingGuy 4y ago
  Similarly, Dennis Ketcham, son of "Dennis the Menace" author Hank Ketcham: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Ketcham#Family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Ketcham#Family
paperwasp42 4y ago
One of the most horrifying social media pages I've seen was an influencer who billed herself as a "trans activist" and documented every moment of her trans daughter's life. This poor kid was 8-years-old and attempted suicide on a regular basis. Every time she tried to kill herself, the mom would document the gritty details, post pictures and details about it online (and of course get massive likes/shares by well-intentioned folks wanting to "raise awareness"), and request donations for her "activism." That girl will never be able to "pass" as female due to her face/identity being plastered on social media as a trans kid. She also will have to live with the horror of millions of strangers knowing the gory details of her trying to shove a knife into her wrist, chugging Tylenol, and having complete mental breakdowns at school that required emergency medical intervention. My gut instinct also suspects the girl's poor mental health has a strong element of Munchausen by Proxy. It is bizarre for an 8-year-old to know that Tylenol and wrist-slitting are both preferred methods for suicide, and to act on this knowledge. Despite all this, the mom was clearly raking in donations, and collecting thousands of comments about what a "hero" she was for "bringing light" to trans issues. The horrified comments by trans individuals were always buried at the bottom of posts. The entire page felt like thinly-veiled child abuse, but there isn't anything in Facebook's code of conduct that could be used to stop it. And Facebook of course had no incentive to address the content--the page had millions of likes and was surely a great source of traffic/profit. I would love to see policies in place to restrict this sort of child exploitation. I am all for freedom of speech on social medical platforms, but blatant exploitation of children in exchange for money is a special sort of cruelty that should be reined in.
- jl6 4y ago
  I’m not sure social media deserves all the blame here. This kind of exploitation has its roots in reality shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and I Am Jazz - there’s no bright line between those shows and what you describe.
  - figlett5 4y ago
    Those shows are just as awful. Jazz in particular has been treated terribly. He's been physically and mentally destroyed by his family and his clinicians, brainwashed from age 2 or 3 into believing he was supposed to be a girl. This nightmare is all he's ever known. There will be no happy ending either, just misery and the shock of realizing his life is a travesty. His show should be watched as a dire warning against the medical abuse of children.
- StrangeATractor 4y ago
  FFS nobody's called CPS?
  - colpabar 4y ago
    Imagine how the media would cover the story of CPS going to a prominent trans activist parent of a suicidal trans child and you have your answer.
  - paperwasp42 4y ago
    I saw a post from the mom mentioning CPS had been called on her, which was the only reason I didn't call myself. I am skeptical of CPS in general, but an 8-year-old with multiple, sophisticated suicide attempts, and a mother making money off these attempts, just seemed way too sketchy to ignore. Unfortunately, it seemed CPS had cleared her. At the time (this was back in ~2017), I shared the page with a friend who works alongside CPS, and she grudgingly agreed there wasn't really anything CPS could do. The kid seemed to have legitimate medical diagnoses, and the mom could easily argue in court that she was just "documenting her daughter's medical journey." I can't seem to find the page now, which I'm hoping means it got shut down. Fingers crossed that little girl has found health, happiness, and the privacy she deserves.
ajani 4y ago
Agency. It’s about agency. Social media, while not permanent, can be long lasting, and can have a chilling effect on a child’s future agency. Guarding it until they can make their own decisions is what all good parents ought to do. How is this not obvious and common sense?
Overtonwindow 4y ago
I feel terrible for kids like this whose entire lives are put on the Internet and there's nothing they can do about it. Like that poor autistic kid, whose mother used him to make videos and make money, and then "re-homed" him like he was an animal.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  And the people who adopted a disabled kid from China I think, made their content and found them a new home when stuff got too hard.
  - antegamisou 4y ago
    I really hope that you've been horribly misinformed. I have no words otherwise...
    - jabroni_salad 4y ago
      Oh man the situation with international adoptions is so much worse than even that. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/adoption/#article/part1 https://www.reuters.com/investigates/adoption/#article/part1
  - fullshark 4y ago
    I'm not sure but I think you are referencing the same story? I looked and only really found media about this: https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2020/05/28/myka-stauffer-youtube-star-faces-backlash-rehoming-adopted-son/5278908002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/202...
- gwd 4y ago
  I think that's an unnecessarily harsh take on what happened. People adopt. Some people purposely adopt kids that they know have special needs. Sometimes, people with the best intentions, end up in a situation where they are way over their heads. Before you're actually in the situation, there's no possible way to know how difficult it will be, nor what your limits are. (And until you've seen someone actually overwhelmed, it's hard to even imagine what that looks like.) If a child's needs are beyond your limits, you are doing them absolutely no favors to keep them in your home. Having any child, even one biologically your own, is fundamentally a risk. So consider some hypotheses: A. The couple in question genuinely wanted to help a child who needed help; and genuinely wanted to inspire other people to adopt by sharing the sorrows and joys; but unexpectedly found themselves in over their head, and made the difficult (and publicly embarrassing) decision to pass the child on to someone better suited to care for them B. The couple in question thought that a good way to make a few bucks would be to adopt a difficult child for 6 months, get a large viewership, and then pass them on to someone else I mean, I suppose B is possible, but it seems like a really dumb way to go about things. There would certainly be lots of easier ways to make money. Whether it was right to make a public spectacle of the child's situation, even assuming the best intentions, is a different question.
mydriasis 4y ago
With how toxic we already know social media is, steeping someone's entire childhood experience in it is just awful. I'm hoping the bills for child protection discussed in the articles are passed, but even supposing they are... how many children will be destroyed before they even realize the damage that's been done? Sure, they'll be able to get money or have the videos taken down, but just as there's a trend among Hollywood child stars for their futures...
bhouston 4y ago
I guess the solution is to try to take some of the law's protecting child actors and apply them to influencers? https://www.wrapbook.com/blog/child-actor-labor-laws https://www.wrapbook.com/blog/child-actor-labor-laws I think it is hard, because influences are in random jurisdictions and just arise without much structure. Maybe it can be controlled at the platform level, like YouTube and TikTok as they are the ones funnel money to these influencers? It would require some creativity and a lot of desire.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  I'm not some Rand-worshiping libertarian, but I do think the immediate response of (more or less) "there oughta be a law" whenever something negative gets press is maybe not ideal. These people should probably be shamed publicly for this kind of exploitation, for sure. And things like the Coogan law should be applied when the kids are a big part of the brand.
- afavour 4y ago
  I think it's really difficult because one person's heartwarming family content is another person's child exploitation. IMO there should be a rule that no children appear in public social media content (private would be fine) but I'm sure a great many people would be offended by that. It's tough when shitty parents have the legal right to be shitty.
  - bhouston 4y ago
    Maybe a law where if your views of your videos with your kids have more than X followers or Y views on more Z videos -- it is definitely not just for friends and family and it isn't just a random video going viral. I could see that working. I think that the solution is to have all such people register with no exceptions. Just make X and Y and Z high enough that it excludes the large majority of people.
  - omnicognate 4y ago
    "Heartwarming family content" is a wonderfully shuddersome phrase.
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
This article unfortunately doesn't cover a much darker part of the TikTok children: exploitation of the children for the titillation of online creepers. The Some Place Under Neith podcast goes into this extensively [their "Parasocial Pits Of Hell" series]. It's completely legal to vlog your children in swimming outfits or a similar level of skin exposure, have the children sing or perform for their "fans", and encourage their children to form participate in parasocial relationships with the audience. It nets mad money. https://www.stitcher.com/show/some-place-under-neith https://www.stitcher.com/show/some-place-under-neith
- NotACop182 4y ago
  Same can be said about child beauty contest.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    My wife and I watched a season of this stuff just to gawk at how terrible/creepy it was. Then we felt bad about contributing towards its popularity and stopped.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Child pageants are creepy AF. They are perfect targets for creeps - former President Trump, for example, got alleged by five women to have walked in on girls as young as 15 while they were changing [1] -, but even without that level of creepiness, the sexualization of young girls has been closely linked to mental health issues down the road [2]. And this legalized pedophilia industry makes 5 billion dollars a year[3]. Unbelievable. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/teen-beauty-queens-say-trump-walked-in-on-them-changing https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/teen-bea... [2] https://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report https://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report [3] https://truthout.org/articles/child-beauty-pageants-a-scene-from-the-other-america/ https://truthout.org/articles/child-beauty-pageants-a-scene-...
  - ouid 4y ago
    Yes it can...
gjulianm 4y ago
The examples in the article aren't even the worse ones I've seen. There's a class of videos where the parents have a special interest, or specific lifestyle they want to live and not only they force their kids to live that life and do those things, but also record them for views. There's one with a family that lives in an RV (willingly) with very little space and they make the children record videos for views. I also remember a Youtube channel that made videos where one of the kids was constantly "pranked" because they thought it was funny...
- dotnet00 4y ago
  >I also remember a Youtube channel that made videos where one of the kids was constantly "pranked" because they thought it was funny... If you're thinking of daddyofive, IIRC they had the two kids who were from the dad's previous marriage taken away and put in their bio mom's custody. They were then charged with child neglect and restricted from uploading footage of their kids. They ignored that restriction with no consequences though.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  > I also remember a Youtube channel that made videos where one of the kids was constantly "pranked" because they thought it was funny... That was the Daddyofive/Familyofive situation. IIRC they eventually ended up loosing custody of all their kids.
- ambicapter 4y ago
  I remember another where the parents were hardcore endurance athletes and they had their kids running marathons at the age of 7 or something like that. They bragged about having to "bribe" their exhausted kids into continuing to run.
tqi 4y ago
"that was supposed to be our racket!" -Teen Vogue
- SoftAnnaLee 4y ago
  Teen Vogue has actually been something of a respectable journalism outlet for some time. It's not the Post, but it's one of the few outlets I've found respectable journalism when I've come across their articles.
aaomidi 4y ago
It's not that hard to automatically detect when a kid is in some content and automatically de-monetize it.
luckylion 4y ago
I'm here for the cynical take: the size of the issue depends on whether it's successful. Lots of childhoods suck, and lots of parents make bad decisions. "My childhood was made into content and all I got was this multi-million dollar inheritance" doesn't sound too bad. Plenty of people have worse childhoods and don't get a penny.
- soiler 4y ago
  The implication of your take is that we should exploit children as much as possible because it might pay off big, as long as we don't cross the line into "worst childhood of all time".
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Not quite (because the chance of success is very small), but if you're a successful influencer and then exploit the fact that you have children for even more growth, the trauma is probably small and the therapy is easily covered with the amounts of money you're making (which makes SWE salaries look tiny in comparison). It's not positive, but it's "I have a splinter in my finger" relatively to what many (most?) children experience who don't grow up in the top 1%. There's another post on the front page currently about over 100 kids who were illegally employed in hazardous jobs, and yesterday we had an article about laws being proposed to remove the hourly limits on child labor. I think the children affected by those things would prefer to have had their face on their mommy's instagram and never have to work a day in their life over working in a meat sanitation plant from their 13th birthday on. It's all relative, but I guess that's an unpopular opinion. Maybe most here feel closer to the kids on instagram than those in the meat packing plant.
    - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
      I think you're misunderstanding the realistic state of child influencers. These children have no guarantee of access to any money they "earn", and also the chance of earning that much is quite low. Just like most influencers, most of them don't make anywhere near a fulltime income an adult could make even on minimum wage, but are left with lifelong distortions of how to be a person that have to be unlearned. I don't think it's reasonable to excuse or downplay exploitation of children in one way because exploitation of children occurs another way elsewhere. We can argue against addressing harm to children because other harm happens to children all the way down to the source of Omelas's good fortune if you like, but I don't think this results in positive societal outcomes.
AdamN 4y ago
Seems like lawsuits against YouTube waiting to happen - this should at least be called out in the material risks section of Alphabet SEC filing.
joenot443 4y ago
> When the family’s channel started to rake in the views, Claire says both her parents left their jobs because the revenue from the YouTube channel was enough to support the family and to land them a nicer house and new car. “That’s not fair that I have to support everyone,” she said. “I try not to be resentful but I kind of [am].” Maybe I was raised differently, but it sounds like her family got the deal of a lifetime. Supporting your parents financially is just part of life for a lot of people, some even get a lot of happiness out of it. I know folks here on H1B that live shoestring and send more than half of what they make back home to their family, and are happy to do so. I know it's easy to paint Claire as having been exploited here, but can one not look at the bigger picture and see that this is clearly a positive thing for their family? If I was 17 again and had the opportunity to post videos of myself talking instead of my parents working 50h weeks, I know I'd do it in a heartbeat.
- teerak 4y ago
  At 17 you are an adult and have a choice. By the time this kid could reason about this stuff she already had her privacy taken away forever.
- bragr 4y ago
  Well that's your choice in retrospect though, she wants out and is effectively being forced, which is not ok. Just a bit father down: >Once, she told her dad she didn’t want to do YouTube videos anymore and he told her they would have to move out of their house and her parents would have to go back to work, leaving no money for “nice things.”
- dingusdew 4y ago
  [dead]
- sneak 4y ago
  > Supporting your parents financially is just part of life for a lot of people, some even get a lot of happiness out of it. Yeah, lots of people find happiness in things done with consent. Those same people find unhappiness, resentment, and anger when those same things are done without consent. Consent matters! Children are not born owing their parents anything. This take is disgusting, frankly, because it ignores the core issue: that it was nonconsensual. It would be like commenting on a marital rape story "but many wives love having sex with their husband!" The article says that this child is considering cutting off all contact with her parents when she turns 18 and can move out. Does that sound like happiness to you? Monetize your kids at your own risk.
irsagent 4y ago
I think a film that covers this is "Men, Woman, and Chrildren."
mlhpdx 4y ago
Why aren’t all the participants (influencers) in a performance (channel) automatically actors already? That seems obvious. We acknowledge people with blogs as writers and authors. Is the weird, made-up language around streaming an intentional obfuscation of the precedent in behavior and law?
insane_dreamer 4y ago
turning your child into "the product" is pretty close to "child labor"
uhtred 4y ago
Social media really highlights how many narcissists are among us.
ivraatiems 4y ago
I have some good friends who've gone the other way: they've asked that there be as close to no photos or videos of their child on any social media as possible. They don't post about him online, and they keep pictures of him in photo albums. When he was born, they asked all of us to please refrain from taking photos of him without their permission. I completely support this and I intend to do something similar for my kids. Anonymity is one of the best gifts I can give them.
- oh_sigh 4y ago
  If there are random pictures of their kids in the background of some photo posted to Facebook, how are they not anonymous anymore? I'm reminded of the scene from Jurassic park, where nedry is chastised for using a man's name during a clandestine meeting at a restaurant, and nedry yells out "Dodgson! We got Dodgson here! See, nobody cares!"
  - ivraatiems 4y ago
    Nah, that's fine. It's more about specific photos of the kid.
- rychco 4y ago
  I try to do this for myself, & often request that nobody take photos of me if possible, but definitely to not to post images of me online without my explicit permission. Even amongst my close friends & family, it frequently causes friction & outright anger.
  - jimt1234 4y ago
    Same. I wish this was the default (don't post pics of me without my consent), but unfortunately it's not. People just expect that everyone wants to be blasted all over social media, and they get butt-hurt when I ask them to remove pics of me. - Hey, thanks for inviting me to your wife's birthday party. I had a lot of fun. But could you please remove my pic from your Facebook post? - Why did you show up in the first place? OR You're in a lot of the pics; I can't remove all of them. OR Are you too good to be seen in pics with my wife and her friends? OR Are you hiding from the law? Did you murder someone?
shagie 4y ago
Apparently, this is known as Sharenting and has its own Wikipedia page... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharenting > Sharenting is the practice of parents publicizing sensitive content about their children on internet platforms. While the term was coined as recently as 2010, sharenting has become an international phenomenon with widespread presence in the United States, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom. As such, sharenting has also ignited disagreement as a controversial application of social media. Detractors find that it violates child privacy and hurts a parent-child relationship. Proponents frame the practice as a natural expression of parental pride in their children and argue that critics take sharenting posts out of context. There is a section "Applicable legislation": > There appears to be little guiding legislation regarding parents' online control over their children's media. While different countries have their respective laws to protect children's privacy, most hand over the responsibility to the children's guardians, which sharenting may exploit as the parent is able to take advantage of their child's power to consent. This presumption in favor of the parent fails to protect the child's privacy from their parents. > Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations broadly advocates for a child's individual identity. Article 14 outlines the applicable legal guardians' duty to represent the child's best interest. Which then goes into the specifics for Europe and the United States.
- stametseater 4y ago
  > Proponents frame the practice as a natural expression of parental pride in their children and argue that critics take sharenting posts out of context. You know this framing is BS because they'd all scream bloody murder if monetizing that content were outlawed. It's not about pride in their children, it's about monetizing their children. Of course it's no surprise that somebody psychopathic enough to do this to their kids would also be comfortable lying about their motivation.
  - smolder 4y ago
    No, really. A lot of people just want to show off kids to family and friends, and don't think about the repercussions of making it public on Facebook. The bulk of kid pics post there are not exploitation by the poster, they just don't know better than to trust zuck with photos of children.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
Once again money is the root of all evil. What would be the downside if all videos that had any children in them were demonetized? In addition, buttons for sharing such videos would be automatically disabled. That means a parent could post the video and send links to family, but it would make it less likely for the video to go viral. Looking at the example of culture even before the internet, kids who participate in entertainment from a young age end up often messed up. For example see the Jacksons (Michael being only the most prominent example in his family) as well as a multitude of child stars (Shirley Temple being the exception that proves the rule). I bet once you removed the financial incentive a lot of this over sharing of kids’ lives would mostly stop.

264 points by newmac 4y ago

The purity spiral on full display in this comment section. Somehow social media makes it the default state on topics like this, even in places that typically have a lot of nuance.

denton-scratch 4y ago

> Claire says her father has told her he may be her father, but he’s also her boss. This sounds super-scummy. I'm not surprised she's pissed-off. Both parents quit working? And if Claire doesn't perform, they'll lose their home and she won't be able to "have nice things"? Talk about emotional blackmail.

a4isms 4y ago

Christoper Robin Milne is a famous example of having one's childhood turned into content, although obviously nothing anywhere near as pervasively as happens with attention-starved "influencers" leveraging their children for a dopamine rush: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Robin_Milne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Robin_Milne

ThinkingGuy 4y ago
Similarly, Dennis Ketcham, son of "Dennis the Menace" author Hank Ketcham: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Ketcham#Family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Ketcham#Family

paperwasp42 4y ago

One of the most horrifying social media pages I've seen was an influencer who billed herself as a "trans activist" and documented every moment of her trans daughter's life. This poor kid was 8-years-old and attempted suicide on a regular basis. Every time she tried to kill herself, the mom would document the gritty details, post pictures and details about it online (and of course get massive likes/shares by well-intentioned folks wanting to "raise awareness"), and request donations for her "activism." That girl will never be able to "pass" as female due to her face/identity being plastered on social media as a trans kid. She also will have to live with the horror of millions of strangers knowing the gory details of her trying to shove a knife into her wrist, chugging Tylenol, and having complete mental breakdowns at school that required emergency medical intervention. My gut instinct also suspects the girl's poor mental health has a strong element of Munchausen by Proxy. It is bizarre for an 8-year-old to know that Tylenol and wrist-slitting are both preferred methods for suicide, and to act on this knowledge. Despite all this, the mom was clearly raking in donations, and collecting thousands of comments about what a "hero" she was for "bringing light" to trans issues. The horrified comments by trans individuals were always buried at the bottom of posts. The entire page felt like thinly-veiled child abuse, but there isn't anything in Facebook's code of conduct that could be used to stop it. And Facebook of course had no incentive to address the content--the page had millions of likes and was surely a great source of traffic/profit. I would love to see policies in place to restrict this sort of child exploitation. I am all for freedom of speech on social medical platforms, but blatant exploitation of children in exchange for money is a special sort of cruelty that should be reined in.

jl6 4y ago
I’m not sure social media deserves all the blame here. This kind of exploitation has its roots in reality shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and I Am Jazz - there’s no bright line between those shows and what you describe.
- figlett5 4y ago
  Those shows are just as awful. Jazz in particular has been treated terribly. He's been physically and mentally destroyed by his family and his clinicians, brainwashed from age 2 or 3 into believing he was supposed to be a girl. This nightmare is all he's ever known. There will be no happy ending either, just misery and the shock of realizing his life is a travesty. His show should be watched as a dire warning against the medical abuse of children.
StrangeATractor 4y ago
FFS nobody's called CPS?
- colpabar 4y ago
  Imagine how the media would cover the story of CPS going to a prominent trans activist parent of a suicidal trans child and you have your answer.
- paperwasp42 4y ago
  I saw a post from the mom mentioning CPS had been called on her, which was the only reason I didn't call myself. I am skeptical of CPS in general, but an 8-year-old with multiple, sophisticated suicide attempts, and a mother making money off these attempts, just seemed way too sketchy to ignore. Unfortunately, it seemed CPS had cleared her. At the time (this was back in ~2017), I shared the page with a friend who works alongside CPS, and she grudgingly agreed there wasn't really anything CPS could do. The kid seemed to have legitimate medical diagnoses, and the mom could easily argue in court that she was just "documenting her daughter's medical journey." I can't seem to find the page now, which I'm hoping means it got shut down. Fingers crossed that little girl has found health, happiness, and the privacy she deserves.

ajani 4y ago

Agency. It’s about agency. Social media, while not permanent, can be long lasting, and can have a chilling effect on a child’s future agency. Guarding it until they can make their own decisions is what all good parents ought to do. How is this not obvious and common sense?

Overtonwindow 4y ago

I feel terrible for kids like this whose entire lives are put on the Internet and there's nothing they can do about it. Like that poor autistic kid, whose mother used him to make videos and make money, and then "re-homed" him like he was an animal.

theshrike79 4y ago
And the people who adopted a disabled kid from China I think, made their content and found them a new home when stuff got too hard.
- antegamisou 4y ago
  I really hope that you've been horribly misinformed. I have no words otherwise...
  - jabroni_salad 4y ago
    Oh man the situation with international adoptions is so much worse than even that. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/adoption/#article/part1 https://www.reuters.com/investigates/adoption/#article/part1
- fullshark 4y ago
  I'm not sure but I think you are referencing the same story? I looked and only really found media about this: https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2020/05/28/myka-stauffer-youtube-star-faces-backlash-rehoming-adopted-son/5278908002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/202...
gwd 4y ago
I think that's an unnecessarily harsh take on what happened. People adopt. Some people purposely adopt kids that they know have special needs. Sometimes, people with the best intentions, end up in a situation where they are way over their heads. Before you're actually in the situation, there's no possible way to know how difficult it will be, nor what your limits are. (And until you've seen someone actually overwhelmed, it's hard to even imagine what that looks like.) If a child's needs are beyond your limits, you are doing them absolutely no favors to keep them in your home. Having any child, even one biologically your own, is fundamentally a risk. So consider some hypotheses: A. The couple in question genuinely wanted to help a child who needed help; and genuinely wanted to inspire other people to adopt by sharing the sorrows and joys; but unexpectedly found themselves in over their head, and made the difficult (and publicly embarrassing) decision to pass the child on to someone better suited to care for them B. The couple in question thought that a good way to make a few bucks would be to adopt a difficult child for 6 months, get a large viewership, and then pass them on to someone else I mean, I suppose B is possible, but it seems like a really dumb way to go about things. There would certainly be lots of easier ways to make money. Whether it was right to make a public spectacle of the child's situation, even assuming the best intentions, is a different question.

mydriasis 4y ago

With how toxic we already know social media is, steeping someone's entire childhood experience in it is just awful. I'm hoping the bills for child protection discussed in the articles are passed, but even supposing they are... how many children will be destroyed before they even realize the damage that's been done? Sure, they'll be able to get money or have the videos taken down, but just as there's a trend among Hollywood child stars for their futures...

bhouston 4y ago

I guess the solution is to try to take some of the law's protecting child actors and apply them to influencers? https://www.wrapbook.com/blog/child-actor-labor-laws https://www.wrapbook.com/blog/child-actor-labor-laws I think it is hard, because influences are in random jurisdictions and just arise without much structure. Maybe it can be controlled at the platform level, like YouTube and TikTok as they are the ones funnel money to these influencers? It would require some creativity and a lot of desire.

ubermonkey 4y ago
I'm not some Rand-worshiping libertarian, but I do think the immediate response of (more or less) "there oughta be a law" whenever something negative gets press is maybe not ideal. These people should probably be shamed publicly for this kind of exploitation, for sure. And things like the Coogan law should be applied when the kids are a big part of the brand.
afavour 4y ago
I think it's really difficult because one person's heartwarming family content is another person's child exploitation. IMO there should be a rule that no children appear in public social media content (private would be fine) but I'm sure a great many people would be offended by that. It's tough when shitty parents have the legal right to be shitty.
- bhouston 4y ago
  Maybe a law where if your views of your videos with your kids have more than X followers or Y views on more Z videos -- it is definitely not just for friends and family and it isn't just a random video going viral. I could see that working. I think that the solution is to have all such people register with no exceptions. Just make X and Y and Z high enough that it excludes the large majority of people.
- omnicognate 4y ago
  "Heartwarming family content" is a wonderfully shuddersome phrase.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago

This article unfortunately doesn't cover a much darker part of the TikTok children: exploitation of the children for the titillation of online creepers. The Some Place Under Neith podcast goes into this extensively [their "Parasocial Pits Of Hell" series]. It's completely legal to vlog your children in swimming outfits or a similar level of skin exposure, have the children sing or perform for their "fans", and encourage their children to form participate in parasocial relationships with the audience. It nets mad money. https://www.stitcher.com/show/some-place-under-neith https://www.stitcher.com/show/some-place-under-neith

NotACop182 4y ago
Same can be said about child beauty contest.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  My wife and I watched a season of this stuff just to gawk at how terrible/creepy it was. Then we felt bad about contributing towards its popularity and stopped.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Child pageants are creepy AF. They are perfect targets for creeps - former President Trump, for example, got alleged by five women to have walked in on girls as young as 15 while they were changing [1] -, but even without that level of creepiness, the sexualization of young girls has been closely linked to mental health issues down the road [2]. And this legalized pedophilia industry makes 5 billion dollars a year[3]. Unbelievable. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/teen-beauty-queens-say-trump-walked-in-on-them-changing https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/teen-bea... [2] https://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report https://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report [3] https://truthout.org/articles/child-beauty-pageants-a-scene-from-the-other-america/ https://truthout.org/articles/child-beauty-pageants-a-scene-...
- ouid 4y ago
  Yes it can...

gjulianm 4y ago

The examples in the article aren't even the worse ones I've seen. There's a class of videos where the parents have a special interest, or specific lifestyle they want to live and not only they force their kids to live that life and do those things, but also record them for views. There's one with a family that lives in an RV (willingly) with very little space and they make the children record videos for views. I also remember a Youtube channel that made videos where one of the kids was constantly "pranked" because they thought it was funny...

dotnet00 4y ago
>I also remember a Youtube channel that made videos where one of the kids was constantly "pranked" because they thought it was funny... If you're thinking of daddyofive, IIRC they had the two kids who were from the dad's previous marriage taken away and put in their bio mom's custody. They were then charged with child neglect and restricted from uploading footage of their kids. They ignored that restriction with no consequences though.
_fat_santa 4y ago
> I also remember a Youtube channel that made videos where one of the kids was constantly "pranked" because they thought it was funny... That was the Daddyofive/Familyofive situation. IIRC they eventually ended up loosing custody of all their kids.
ambicapter 4y ago
I remember another where the parents were hardcore endurance athletes and they had their kids running marathons at the age of 7 or something like that. They bragged about having to "bribe" their exhausted kids into continuing to run.

tqi 4y ago

"that was supposed to be our racket!" -Teen Vogue

SoftAnnaLee 4y ago
Teen Vogue has actually been something of a respectable journalism outlet for some time. It's not the Post, but it's one of the few outlets I've found respectable journalism when I've come across their articles.

aaomidi 4y ago

It's not that hard to automatically detect when a kid is in some content and automatically de-monetize it.

luckylion 4y ago

I'm here for the cynical take: the size of the issue depends on whether it's successful. Lots of childhoods suck, and lots of parents make bad decisions. "My childhood was made into content and all I got was this multi-million dollar inheritance" doesn't sound too bad. Plenty of people have worse childhoods and don't get a penny.

soiler 4y ago
The implication of your take is that we should exploit children as much as possible because it might pay off big, as long as we don't cross the line into "worst childhood of all time".
- luckylion 4y ago
  Not quite (because the chance of success is very small), but if you're a successful influencer and then exploit the fact that you have children for even more growth, the trauma is probably small and the therapy is easily covered with the amounts of money you're making (which makes SWE salaries look tiny in comparison). It's not positive, but it's "I have a splinter in my finger" relatively to what many (most?) children experience who don't grow up in the top 1%. There's another post on the front page currently about over 100 kids who were illegally employed in hazardous jobs, and yesterday we had an article about laws being proposed to remove the hourly limits on child labor. I think the children affected by those things would prefer to have had their face on their mommy's instagram and never have to work a day in their life over working in a meat sanitation plant from their 13th birthday on. It's all relative, but I guess that's an unpopular opinion. Maybe most here feel closer to the kids on instagram than those in the meat packing plant.
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    I think you're misunderstanding the realistic state of child influencers. These children have no guarantee of access to any money they "earn", and also the chance of earning that much is quite low. Just like most influencers, most of them don't make anywhere near a fulltime income an adult could make even on minimum wage, but are left with lifelong distortions of how to be a person that have to be unlearned. I don't think it's reasonable to excuse or downplay exploitation of children in one way because exploitation of children occurs another way elsewhere. We can argue against addressing harm to children because other harm happens to children all the way down to the source of Omelas's good fortune if you like, but I don't think this results in positive societal outcomes.

AdamN 4y ago

Seems like lawsuits against YouTube waiting to happen - this should at least be called out in the material risks section of Alphabet SEC filing.

joenot443 4y ago

> When the family’s channel started to rake in the views, Claire says both her parents left their jobs because the revenue from the YouTube channel was enough to support the family and to land them a nicer house and new car. “That’s not fair that I have to support everyone,” she said. “I try not to be resentful but I kind of [am].” Maybe I was raised differently, but it sounds like her family got the deal of a lifetime. Supporting your parents financially is just part of life for a lot of people, some even get a lot of happiness out of it. I know folks here on H1B that live shoestring and send more than half of what they make back home to their family, and are happy to do so. I know it's easy to paint Claire as having been exploited here, but can one not look at the bigger picture and see that this is clearly a positive thing for their family? If I was 17 again and had the opportunity to post videos of myself talking instead of my parents working 50h weeks, I know I'd do it in a heartbeat.

teerak 4y ago
At 17 you are an adult and have a choice. By the time this kid could reason about this stuff she already had her privacy taken away forever.
bragr 4y ago
Well that's your choice in retrospect though, she wants out and is effectively being forced, which is not ok. Just a bit father down: >Once, she told her dad she didn’t want to do YouTube videos anymore and he told her they would have to move out of their house and her parents would have to go back to work, leaving no money for “nice things.”
dingusdew 4y ago
[dead]
sneak 4y ago
> Supporting your parents financially is just part of life for a lot of people, some even get a lot of happiness out of it. Yeah, lots of people find happiness in things done with consent. Those same people find unhappiness, resentment, and anger when those same things are done without consent. Consent matters! Children are not born owing their parents anything. This take is disgusting, frankly, because it ignores the core issue: that it was nonconsensual. It would be like commenting on a marital rape story "but many wives love having sex with their husband!" The article says that this child is considering cutting off all contact with her parents when she turns 18 and can move out. Does that sound like happiness to you? Monetize your kids at your own risk.

irsagent 4y ago

I think a film that covers this is "Men, Woman, and Chrildren."

mlhpdx 4y ago

Why aren’t all the participants (influencers) in a performance (channel) automatically actors already? That seems obvious. We acknowledge people with blogs as writers and authors. Is the weird, made-up language around streaming an intentional obfuscation of the precedent in behavior and law?

insane_dreamer 4y ago

turning your child into "the product" is pretty close to "child labor"

uhtred 4y ago

Social media really highlights how many narcissists are among us.

ivraatiems 4y ago

I have some good friends who've gone the other way: they've asked that there be as close to no photos or videos of their child on any social media as possible. They don't post about him online, and they keep pictures of him in photo albums. When he was born, they asked all of us to please refrain from taking photos of him without their permission. I completely support this and I intend to do something similar for my kids. Anonymity is one of the best gifts I can give them.

oh_sigh 4y ago
If there are random pictures of their kids in the background of some photo posted to Facebook, how are they not anonymous anymore? I'm reminded of the scene from Jurassic park, where nedry is chastised for using a man's name during a clandestine meeting at a restaurant, and nedry yells out "Dodgson! We got Dodgson here! See, nobody cares!"
- ivraatiems 4y ago
  Nah, that's fine. It's more about specific photos of the kid.
rychco 4y ago
I try to do this for myself, & often request that nobody take photos of me if possible, but definitely to not to post images of me online without my explicit permission. Even amongst my close friends & family, it frequently causes friction & outright anger.
- jimt1234 4y ago
  Same. I wish this was the default (don't post pics of me without my consent), but unfortunately it's not. People just expect that everyone wants to be blasted all over social media, and they get butt-hurt when I ask them to remove pics of me. - Hey, thanks for inviting me to your wife's birthday party. I had a lot of fun. But could you please remove my pic from your Facebook post? - Why did you show up in the first place? OR You're in a lot of the pics; I can't remove all of them. OR Are you too good to be seen in pics with my wife and her friends? OR Are you hiding from the law? Did you murder someone?

shagie 4y ago

Apparently, this is known as Sharenting and has its own Wikipedia page... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharenting > Sharenting is the practice of parents publicizing sensitive content about their children on internet platforms. While the term was coined as recently as 2010, sharenting has become an international phenomenon with widespread presence in the United States, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom. As such, sharenting has also ignited disagreement as a controversial application of social media. Detractors find that it violates child privacy and hurts a parent-child relationship. Proponents frame the practice as a natural expression of parental pride in their children and argue that critics take sharenting posts out of context. There is a section "Applicable legislation": > There appears to be little guiding legislation regarding parents' online control over their children's media. While different countries have their respective laws to protect children's privacy, most hand over the responsibility to the children's guardians, which sharenting may exploit as the parent is able to take advantage of their child's power to consent. This presumption in favor of the parent fails to protect the child's privacy from their parents. > Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations broadly advocates for a child's individual identity. Article 14 outlines the applicable legal guardians' duty to represent the child's best interest. Which then goes into the specifics for Europe and the United States.

stametseater 4y ago
> Proponents frame the practice as a natural expression of parental pride in their children and argue that critics take sharenting posts out of context. You know this framing is BS because they'd all scream bloody murder if monetizing that content were outlawed. It's not about pride in their children, it's about monetizing their children. Of course it's no surprise that somebody psychopathic enough to do this to their kids would also be comfortable lying about their motivation.
- smolder 4y ago
  No, really. A lot of people just want to show off kids to family and friends, and don't think about the repercussions of making it public on Facebook. The bulk of kid pics post there are not exploitation by the poster, they just don't know better than to trust zuck with photos of children.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

Once again money is the root of all evil. What would be the downside if all videos that had any children in them were demonetized? In addition, buttons for sharing such videos would be automatically disabled. That means a parent could post the video and send links to family, but it would make it less likely for the video to go viral. Looking at the example of culture even before the internet, kids who participate in entertainment from a young age end up often messed up. For example see the Jacksons (Michael being only the most prominent example in his family) as well as a multitude of child stars (Shirley Temple being the exception that proves the rule). I bet once you removed the financial incentive a lot of this over sharing of kids’ lives would mostly stop.