An Urgent Question for Anyone Who Uses Social Media
· The Atlantic
In 2014, Kristine and Matt, the parents of five young children, posted a 15-minute video on YouTube. “24 Hours With 5 Kids on a Rainy Day” was the first vlog to appear on their channel, Family Fun Pack. It splices together snippets of the utterly ordinary and frankly boring activities that make up a kid’s life: eating, getting dressed, playing, practicing piano, more playing, story time before bed. Watching this feels somewhat akin to watching a home video—except I don’t know these children, and their parents are trying to sell me things. The “unbreakable, colorful cereal bowls” the kids eat out of, for example, are affiliate-linked in the caption. Over the past 12 years, the vlog has received more than 316 million views.
Kristine and Matt, who don’t share their surname publicly, have been on YouTube since 2011, when Kristine uploaded a video of her twin toddler boys putting themselves to bed. As she tells the journalist Fortesa Latifi in the new book Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online, she “didn’t understand privacy settings” and simply intended to send the video to her mother-in-law. Soon, it had 8 million views. “Everything just spiraled from there,” Kristine says, which is putting it mildly: The Family Fun Pack YouTube now has 10.5 million subscribers and 15.9 billion lifetime views. One marketer estimates that the channel brings in about $200,000 a month from YouTube’s AdSense revenue-sharing program, in addition to whatever the family makes from brand-sponsorship deals, affiliate links, and Cameos.
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The Family Fun Pack are in the upper echelons of the family-influencing industry, in which parents invite social-media followers into their family’s life with constant streams of content. Over the years, Kristine and Matt have continued growing their brand on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. They’ve also had three more kids since that first rainy-day vlog—kids who have never known an unrecorded life. In 2024, Kristine chronicled their second-youngest’s potty training in a 20-minute video complete with affiliate links for organic cotton underwear and a plastic Fisher-Price toilet. A moment that YouTube highlights as “most replayed,” Latifi notes, is Kristine describing the toddler having an accident.
This kind of runaway growth in search of virality is typical of family influencing, Latifi writes. For years, she has been covering family and mom influencing—writing about, for instance, TikTokkers posting #dayinthelife videos of their infants and toddlers, or telling the stories of kids whose entire childhoods have been recorded for clicks. In Like, Follow, Subscribe, she documents what happens “as the family shifts from its first form into something more resembling a business arrangement.”
[Read: The cost of perfection]
Latifi’s book also raises urgent questions for anyone who scrolls social media. Family and mom influencers are all over the internet; even if you don’t think of yourself as a viewer, you might be surprised when you audit your feeds. The proliferation of these monetized videos risks desensitizing viewers who might otherwise consider the ethical implications of “sharenting”—which, in its most extreme form, has enabled and concealed serious harm. The most famous case may be that of Ruby Franke, an early and successful family vlogger now convicted of child abuse. Latifi, who has spent years interviewing influencer parents and children as well as researchers who are concerned about the practice’s effects, stops short of such inquiry. But Like, Follow, Subscribe paints a picture disturbing enough to prompt hard questions about what we’re comfortable watching on our screens. This content is not going anywhere—tech companies continue to resist regulations, and the financial incentives are compelling enough to make parents tolerate serious risks to their children. The only people who can slow it down are the viewers—by actively choosing not to watch.
It all began, Latifi explains, with mommy bloggers. In the early 2000s, women used the democratized format of the blog to talk about previously hush-hush topics. These mothers shared vulnerable, deeply personal thoughts about topics such as mastitis and feeling annoyed with their kids, but they largely weren’t getting paid. Even when they began taking on banner ads and brand deals, Latifi writes, commodified mommy blogs were different from the mom-influencer pages and family vlogs of today. In the blogosphere, “it almost felt like the children involved in the stories were secondary,” she explains. Over time, the focus shifted from confessional reflections on motherhood to curated images of children’s lives.
Social-media influencing became far more lucrative than mommy blogging ever was, in large part because posts starring children garner attention. A Pew Research Center analysis of YouTube videos uploaded by high-subscriber channels in the first week of 2019 found that videos featuring children under the age of 13 averaged three times as many views as videos that didn’t show kids. A YouTube strategist tells Latifi that vlogging families know the best-performing videos include “content where a child is sick or hurt and content surrounding a pregnancy or the arrival of a new baby.” Children’s most vulnerable and embarrassing moments bring in more views, and brands want kids in social-media ads and sponsored content. A mom influencer on Instagram and TikTok who doesn’t show her kids’ faces online tells Latifi that she has turned down or lost out on brand deals with diaper, baby-food, and toy companies as a result of her decision.
Much of what family and mom influencers put out—weekly grocery hauls, time-lapse kitchen-cleaning videos, bedtime routines—is mundane. That mundanity is, in fact, the appeal: “We want to see how other families function and measure them against ours,” Latifi writes—a natural and relatable impulse. Yet after conducting an informal poll, Latifi found that for some viewers, particularly kids, watching family influencers offers something else entirely. “I was a young, depressed, lonely, financially poor child,” wrote a respondent, who viewed one family every day after school. Watching them “made me so happy because for a little bit, I could escape my terrible home life & see how other children were enjoying their life.”
[Read: How parents of child influencers package their kids’ lives for Instagram]
A video of a mom creatively keeping her baby entertained can feel like a lifeline to a struggling parent. Latifi admits that this is why she tunes in: She wrote Like, Follow, Subscribe during and just after a pregnancy, and includes multiple passages about watching mom influencers and family vloggers while bleary-eyed from breastfeeding in the night. “It can’t be overstated how much other mothers sharing their experiences has helped me through my own first foggy days of motherhood,” she writes, offering her strongest argument in favor of this economy. Perhaps understandably, she’s deeply empathetic to the choices of the families in her book. On the one hand, this appears to have allowed her to get influencers to open up to her; her access is remarkable. On the other hand, it seems to stop her from fully synthesizing the implications of her reporting and research.
As Latifi plumbs the industry, what stands out is just how manufactured this content is, and how often the children are being manipulated to perform. A former nanny for an influencer family tells Latifi that the toddler she cared for struggled to tell the difference between being allowed to play with his toys freely and having to play with a particular toy in a particular way for a video. In the most revealing interview in the book, the parent behind a now-defunct family vlog that brought in more than $1 million a year explains that they would bribe their kids with as much as $1,000 to participate in a video. Even though the family is no longer on YouTube, the kids’ worldview still seems skewed. “They really struggle when things don’t go their way, or they don’t get what they want, or they don’t get bribed to do what other children are just expected to do,” the anonymous parent tells Latifi.
The dangers of sharenting don’t come just from within the family. The most harrowing chapter in Like, Follow, Subscribe focuses on pedophiles who seek out influencers’ posts featuring kids, and publicly posted pictures of children that have turned up on the dark web and been transformed using AI into child-sexual-abuse material. Yet multiple times in the book, even when influencers are aware that adults are using their children for sexual gratification, they find sometimes-convoluted excuses to keep posting.
The evidence that Latifi collects in Like, Follow, Subscribe could easily support the conclusion that family influencing is unethical, full stop. Parents who chase algorithms on social-media platforms are sacrificing their children’s privacy, well-being, and safety. Their home becomes a boundaryless jobsite where there is no third-party protection, and where a child’s primary caregivers are also their bosses. Seven states have now passed legislation to regulate family influencing, but these laws mostly just ensure that parents set aside a percentage of earnings to compensate their children. Latifi’s sources indicate that most of these kids are already being paid—usually in the form of bribes. At any rate, the laws put the onus on the parents to comply and correctly calculate their children’s earnings, with little to no outside enforcement.
Latifi doesn’t take a clear stance on what should be done with this evidence. In extending empathy to the influencers, she might be giving them too much credit. She repeatedly references how moms who have few other work options have carved out hard-won financial stability via their kids’ virality, positioning influencing as a viable career path. She concludes the book by throwing her hands up when confronted with the ethical dilemmas. After admitting that she’s “talking in circles,” Latifi finally states that she wouldn’t do it herself.
The question of whether parents should enter this world is not the only—or the most—important one; just a small fraction of people raising young children post them online even semiprofessionally. More consequential is the question of what their viewers should do. Courts have begun to penalize tech companies including Meta and Google for addictive and harmful features on their platforms, and for insufficiently protecting child users from sexual predators, but regulations that force these platforms to de-prioritize content that features children don’t seem to be on the horizon.
I’ve written before about the harms of family influencing, so I was unnerved to realize, while working on this review, that I still followed at least five different accounts that posted monetized content featuring children. In fact, I had recently watched parents who have millions of followers relate the traumatic birth story of their premature son, who already had an Instagram account even while he remained in the NICU. I had been following this couple for years, initially drawn in by their cheeky videos about the differences between Italian and American life, only to get sucked into their intimate stories about a high-risk pregnancy following years of fertility struggles. As I waited to click past a YouTube ad to get into their birth vlog, I suddenly asked myself why I was still watching. Honestly, it was mostly to rubberneck people whose lives were very different from my own. For others who are watching to feel less lonely, or to find a model of how to manage the labor of motherhood, or to escape their own family life, logging off might be more difficult. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be the right thing to do.