The stage has moved from the silver screen to the digital screen.
Kris Jenner coined the term “momager” after photographing and cheering on her daughter as she posed for Playboy. Amy Poehler’s character in Mean Girls called herself a “cool mom” for supporting her daughter’s awkwardly sexy “Jingle Bell Rock” choreography. Call it what you want, but pop culture images like these have become a kind of shorthand for the ever-evolving “stage mom.” The parent (stereotypically the mother) who puts pressure on their children to perform is timeless, but the stage is changing alongside the entertainment industry. The newest iteration? That of a child influencer.
With the rise of social media, the stage mom isn’t limited to pushing her kid into a career in Hollywood. The concept has evolved to include vloggers and influencers, and the stage is Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. While we’ve been hearing about the downsides of child stardom for years now thanks to outspoken former child actors like Alyson Stoner, Jennette McCurdy, and Mara Wilson, we’re just now starting to get a better understanding of the lasting negative impacts of growing up on a social media platform.
Kids being used for content is nothing new
In 2002, “mommy bloggers” started making it big and earning money through affiliate marketing. YouTube emerged after that, and with it came the parenting vloggers and influencers who typified the early 2010s. Then, Instagram launched in 2010 and the mom influencer emerged. All these iterations followed a similar script: The creators in question (usually women) would write about, video, or photograph their experience as parents and heavily feature their children in their online presence. At the time, it may have seemed like a harmless and maybe even wholesome way to update fans about their children’s lives. But it starts inching into stage mom territory when the kid ends up center stage, with the parent still running the show.
Journalist Jo Piazza investigated mom bloggers and influencers for her podcast Under the Influence. “So many child stars were damaged by having to perform from an early age and having to live their life in the public eye. We’re starting to see that from the children of the early bloggers and early influencers, and we’re only going to see more of it,” she tells Katie Couric Media.
Cam Barrett, now 24, grew up with her mom constantly sharing her life on Myspace and Facebook. Barrett is now something of a public figure herself, with over 230,000 TikTok followers, but she uses her platform to advocate for children’s privacy online. Barrett spoke at a hearing for the House Civil Rights & Judiciary Committee in April 2023 about the impacts of having her childhood broadcast on social media without her permission. “When I was 9 years old, the intimate details of my first period were shared online,” she told the committee. “At 15, I was in a car accident…Instead of a hand being offered to hold, a camera was shoved in my face.” She was bullied in school due to her mom’s oversharing, and she still feels the lasting impacts of having her most private moments widely shared without her consent.
“I get afraid to even tell my friends or my fiancé something, because in the back of my mind I’m constantly like, Is this gonna be weaponized against me on the internet?” she told the Atlantic.
The same old stage mom, but worse
Parenting vloggers and mom influencers still very much exist, but now there’s yet another type of family content creator added to the mix: child influencers, which seem to have emerged around 2015. It’s basically what it sounds like. Instead of focusing on parenting or family lifestyle content, parents dedicate an entire account to their children, who can be as young as 2 years old. They’ll dress their kids up in outfits and pose them, like you’d see any given adult fashion influencer do. Unlike regular parenting influencers, here, the kids are the faces of the accounts — but the parents are the ones posing them for pictures and brokering brand deals behind the screens. While they may enjoy getting dressed up and posing for photos, these kids may not be old enough to fully understand the repercussions of being an influencer. These children so far haven’t really spoken out about those repercussions since they’re still underage, but we as a society have long known that having children grow up in the public eye can be harmful — so it’s not a stretch to be concerned.
Former Disney star Christy Carlson Romano knows all too well what it’s like to be thrust into the spotlight at a young age. After starring in Disney Channel’s Even Stevens and voicing the lead character in Kim Possible, she’s seen how harmful growing up in the public eye can be. “For so long child actors have been memes. Their trauma is exploited and used against them in ways that really push them to the edge,” she tells us. “I get very triggered by the deaths [of former child stars], the incarcerations, whatever it is that happens to them. It’s like I’m losing a family member.”
Romano sees child influencers (or what she calls “new media performers”) as the newest extension of child actors. What’s different, and potentially more dangerous, is that it’s much easier to push a child into social media stardom than it is to get them into acting or singing. You can have them perform a TikTok dance or participate in a skit, but you can even just film them existing — playing with toys or throwing a tantrum — and rack up tons of views. Piazza agrees that influencers’ kids are “unpaid laborers in the world of content creation.” “We don’t know the damage it’s gonna do, psychologically, to kids,” she says.
“I think that there’s a certain amount of stage parents who are living through their child, and with that comes a tendency to exploit their child,” says Romano. She doesn’t think all parenting vloggers are as bad as TV stage parents — “It’s different when you’re not sending your kid to 12 hours a day of adult labor with other adults that haven’t been background checked,” she says — but acknowledges that there are scenarios in which “new media” parents can take advantage of their children.
There are certainly extreme examples: In June, Youtuber Nikki Phillippi caught heat over a 5-year-old YouTube video in which she explained how she’d decided not to adopt a child from Thailand due to the country’s policy of prohibiting adoptive parents from posting their child on social media for a year after the adoption. (TikTokers railed against the Phillippis for their intention to “exploit [their child] for money” and “use them for views.”) In 2020, Myka Stauffer was widely criticized for “rehoming” her disabled child, whom she’d adopted from China — but only after regularly featuring the adoption process on her vlog and posting him on her Instagram for her some 168,000some-168,000 followers.
Think before you post
Stacey Steinberg, the director of the Center on Children and Families, tells Katie Couric Media that, although there hasn’t been a lot of research done on the kind of harm this can have, there are risks with posting kids on social media, no matter how many followers you have. “When we overshare online, we risk harm to our children’s sense of self, both now and in the future. If we share information without talking to them, we’re putting their image out there in a way that they might not be comfortable with right now, and as they get older, they might come to regret it being out there.”
As someone who’s had her own resurgence on social media and dabbles in the parenting space, Romano is deliberate about the images she puts out there. “I can count on one hand how many times my daughters have made an appearance in any of my lifestyle content,” she says. They do occasionally appear in ads — like a July sponsored post she did for Petsmart — but she says she only does this with products they already love, versus shilling for random brands, and she doesn’t film them playing for more than an hour. In general, “there’s a vast difference between shooting lifestyle content with members of your family, and putting your kid in the business of vlogging,” she says.
Ostensibly, parents should be looking out for their kids’ best interests, but that’s not always the case, especially when money is involved. “If [parenting influencers] are using their money to continue to grow their brand, and they’re living a lifestyle so that their kids can seem to be aspirational, how much of it are they actually putting away for their kids?” Romano asks.
Romano believes we need more regulations to protect child performers across all media, and founded the Coalition for Child Performers, which aims to conduct research on the mental and physical impacts to child performers and to draft legislation protecting children in the entertainment business. “There needs to be some sort of a new media Coogan Act,” she says, referring to the California law named after Jackie Coogan (which also exists in a handful of other states) that requires 15 percent of child actors’ earnings be set aside in a blocked trust account. “How does this become regulated so that the parent has checks and balances on how they’re utilizing their child’s talent?”
With one recent exception, there are no legal protections for children whose existence has been monetized online by their parents. University of Florida Levin College of Law graduate Alyssa Rodriguez, who has devoted her studies to child labor laws within the entertainment industry, writes in a paper, “Many think that federal labor laws provide adequate protection for all minors, but the truth is that minors in the industry are entirely exempted from the Fair Labor Standards Act.”
That means, even for child actors, there are no federal limitations on how long they work, and each state comes up with its own rules. California has some of the strictest protections, followed by New York. Other states have some rules, but because it’s not required, some states have none. The federal child labor laws were created during the Industrial Revolution to protect against “hazardous and dangerous occupations,” like working in a factory. “The problem is that over time, they haven’t amended it to what hazardous and dangerous activities mean today. They haven’t even caught up to TV shows and movies — they are far behind with social media. So we need to figure out how we can protect our children.”
But more people — and lawmakers — are recognizing that this needs to change.
Earlier this month, Illinois became the first state in the U.S. to pass a law that entitles children under 16 to a percentage of earnings made from online content they appear in. The parents are required to set aside the money in a trust for when the child turns 18. If they fail to do that, the child can sue. It’s a good start, and other states may follow suit. Chris McCartry, the 18-year-old founder of the advocacy group Quit Clicking Kids, who spearheaded a law in Washington, told Fortune, “I sincerely hope that this momentum continues in other states and eventually nationwide.”
At the same time, more and more adult content creators are realizing the unforeseen consequences of posting their children online. YouTuber Shyla Walker, who before 2021 was known for sharing videos featuring her 3-year-old daughter, decided to stop sharing her daughter’s face on her platforms. She told Insider, “I wish I would have known sooner how innocent things can be used in not-so-innocent ways.” Ayesha Curry also made the conscious decision to stop showing her kids on social media. “If we had known back in the day just how chaotic it would make life, I don’t think we would’ve done it,” she told Insider. The Real Housewives of New York City‘s Sai de Silva, whose daughter was one of the first child fashion influencers, has since pivoted her social media channels away from her daughter and put her own face as the focus instead.
Romano is hopeful that advocacy can lead to legal protections. She put it simply: “Let’s just focus on the kids — not the trauma porn, not the memes, not the gossip. Let’s just try to help kids.”
