Monetizing Vulnerability

A Q+A about the creepy world of child and family influencing.

Anson Tong (she/her) is a writer, photographer, and behavioral scientist based in Chicago.

Fortesa Latifi is a journalist reporting on influencer parents and their children. She is the author of Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online.

Family influencers are now a multi-billion dollar industry largely built on voyeurism and selling consumer goods. Family influencers are also a microcosm of what’s happening on the internet writ large these days—it’s just one of the ways in which people are monetizing loneliness and isolation, using parasocial relationships between digital families and real people to sell the promise of connection and relatability.

While we as a culture reckon with how child stars of the 2000s and 2010s were treated in the public eye, a more diffuse (and harder to regulate) cohort of child influencers are growing up surveilled and exploited. Influencer behavior online trickles down to people posting on their personal accounts, and also shapes the aspirations of children, many of whom now want to become professional content creators. Horror stories that make the news often elicit a sense that we should pull the plug and shut social media down, but the most dramatic stories also distract from the fact that this industry is about much more than a few extreme cases—it’s the milieu in which we now all live.

I was excited to talk to Fortesa about her book, parents posting their kids on social media, and who’s watching all this content.

[This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

I’d love it if you could tell me about how you ended up on this beat and how you define the child influencer, family influencer, the ecosystem.

When 16 and Pregnant came out on MTV, I was obsessed, and I just couldn’t get enough of it. I was watching it and I watched Teen Mom for all these years. I was like wow, these kids are becoming teenagers, they’re shaving their legs for the first time, they’re getting their learner’s permits on TV.

Then I would get on social media and all these kids are going through the same things as the Teen Mom kids where everything that they do is recorded and monetized and put online. It struck me as very similar but extremely different because the Teen Mom kids or other reality TV kids film a few days a month.

So I started looking around as any journalist who has a hunch does, and I found a young woman who was in her teens who had grown up on a family vlogging channel.

I asked her, “What would you say to your parents if you could say anything?” And she said, “Nothing they do now can take back the years of work I had to put in.”

There’s merch with her name on it. And there’s photos of her from baby to toddler to a kid to a tween to a teen, and I could just watch her grow up online and she was like, if it were up to me, none of those billions of hours of YouTube views would exist.

So I wrote that story. I published it, and I was really excited about it, but I had no idea that it would resonate the way it did, and that people would feel the way they did about it, and that it would become my beat and a book.

One of the mom influencers you interview says something along the lines of, “well, everyone has problems with their parents. If my kid is upset about me putting them online, I’ll deal with it.”

I make decisions for my daughter all the time that obviously she can’t consent to or that she hasn’t agreed with because she’s not even 2. That is the work of being a parent; and the work of being a child is reckoning with those decisions that your parents made for you. But like at least in almost every other circumstance, that reckoning happens privately and doesn’t have public implications, whereas this has public implications. The decisions I’m making for my daughter are private, although my husband likes to joke that she’s gonna hate me for not making her a YouTube star.

There’s so much money on the table that you’re leaving behind! Relatedly, what do you think has made family influencing such a huge industry?

I know I’m like, should I be a mom influencer? They’re making my yearly salary in one post. I think that family vloggers and mom influencers are so popular because American parenthood and specifically American motherhood is so lonely. In my postpartum period, my daughter would only sleep on top of me so I would just be sitting there for 8 hours a day, letting her sleep on me, and I would be on my phone watching these mom influencers and these family vloggers.

If we had better social safety nets and systems, like everyone says we need a village to raise a child. If we all had those villages, we would be much less tempted by these people.

Influencing is worldwide, but it seems to me a uniquely American pursuit because it’s the American dream. A regular person can become fabulously wealthy through their own efforts. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, start posting on YouTube, and who knows what could happen? In this time of economic precarity, it doesn’t surprise me that it’s getting more and more popular because women, especially women and moms, are looking around and they’re like, what am I gonna do?

Influencing and family vlogging is the only career on earth that I can think of where having a child is a benefit to your career. I love my daughter. I would do anything for her. But I love my work and she has not been a benefit to it.

Where do you think the line is between letting a kid do something because they want to, versus protecting them from these consequences they might not understand?

If my daughter had her way, she would only eat ketchup for every meal, but just because she wants to eat ketchup all the time doesn’t mean that she should or that it’s good for her. I think my job as a parent is saying, “Okay, you really like ketchup, but how much ketchup is actually okay for you and how much is too much?” And that’s kind of how I feel about social media.

I do think there can be a way for kids to have this form of expression and for parents to have this career and for kids to have this career without it being this terrible thing. God forbid, not every story is a Ruby Franke story. I don’t think that it’s black-and-white. I don’t think that if you post your kids online and monetize the content that you’re immoral and you’re evil and you’re a terrible parent. Personally, I’m not comfortable with it for my own family and in my own life, but I can see how people would make the trade-off.

So much of the family content is very ordinary. What do you think makes it so addictive to people when it’s so boring?