When Internet

By Stephanie McNeal

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Shannon Bird's older children had slowly begun to chafe against the demands of her career.

Shannon is a mommy blogger, an OG if you will. For the past decade she has been making money online from sharing her family life: the good, bad, and the ugly. But as her five children grew older, it had become harder to maintain her career. Her oldest daughter, Holland, especially had come to resent being a character on Shannon's blog and Instagram, and as she grew, she became less and less willing to participate. Instead of smiling for the camera and hamming it up for videos like some kids on social media, Holland would frown and roll her eyes. She and Shannon's oldest son, Hudson, set the tone for the younger kids, so they all would rebel when it came time for Shannon to create her content.

One day in late 2019, Shannon needed to film some content for a Christmas partnership with a school uniform company called French Toast. Six-year-old Holland and eight-year-old Hudson led one of their typical rebellions. None of the kids were cooperating. Shannon became more and more anxious trying to get them to behave and smile for the photos. All she wanted was for her kids to look perfect, so the brand would be pleased with the end result. She had gathered the kids in her bedroom, against a white wall, and they just wouldn't participate. She grew more and more frustrated. The company was paying well, and it would take just a few minutes to get the shot if the kids would just play ball. The money she brought in paid for their vacations, their clothes, and their hobbies. Why did they have to make it so hard for her?

Finally, she lost it. She started screaming at her kids, telling them they wouldn't be able to leave the room until they "got it right." She even tried to hide the cast on one of her son's legs because it didn't match the aesthetic. The pressure to please the client was too much.

Once she had cooled off, she had an epiphany. Maybe, she thought, she needed to just be done with this. What was she doing to her children?

"I was like, ‘What is this childhood?’" she said. "Is this worth it?"

For so many years, Shannon's career dictated her children's lives. In the beginning, it was easier because they didn't have any real opinions about what they wore or what they did. But now in hindsight, Shannon realizes that sometimes her career determined her kids’ childhood, not the other way around.

Take Halloween. Shannon's first free perk ever from being a blogger was gifted Halloween costumes for Hudson, sent to her in exchange for a blog post. For years after that, the Bird family's Halloween costumes were dictated by sponsors. The kids would wear the costumes they got for free from whatever partnership or deal Shannon had managed to secure that year, Shannon would get a brand deal, and everyone was happy.

As the kids grew, they started to want to assert themselves and their own creativity. They didn't want to wear whatever sponsored costume came their way; they wanted to pick out their own. For a few years, Shannon resisted. Frankly, these costumes were free and were helping to pay the bills. Her kids could suck it up for the good of the family. Recently, she has been reconsidering. She now lets her kids have their own costumes for their activities with friends and trick-or-treating, and makes them wear the sponsored ones only for obligatory content on her page. It's a small step, but it's just one of many ways she's reconsidering the way that her motherhood and her career have merged.

Shannon isn't entirely sure why her kids, the oldest two especially, have chafed so hard against becoming characters on her blog. She sees so many families in which the kids seem delighted to participate in photo shoots and videos with no furtive eye rolls like Holland especially tends to throw in. She doesn't get how some parents can get their kids to happily participate in not just photos for blogs and Instagram but also mediums like YouTube videos, which take much more cooperation, time, and energy.

Even when it's fun, the kids seem to know that they are working, not having a spontaneous family moment. It doesn't make a lot of sense to Shannon. She tries to get her kids excited about the opportunities they are given through her work, experiences she would have killed for as a kid. But the kids realize they are on the clock and resent it. When Shannon got the opportunity to take the kids on a sponsored trip to an amusement park, which came with six hundred dollars to spend there, they weren't enthused. All they would have to do is take a few pictures, and do maybe 10 Instagram Stories.

"They would almost rather not even go sometimes…they’ll pitch a fit about it," she said.

Shannon places some blame on herself.

"It's because I get so intense," she said. "I started being a stage mommy about it."

Penguin Random House

How to responsibly feature kids on the internet is one of the thorniest issues that the influencer industry is having to consider as it evolves and matures. Shannon's dilemma is not unique. The kids who have grown up being filmed and discussed on their parents’ social media accounts are growing up, and are slowly beginning to have agency. They are beginning to ask, "What rights do I have to my own image? Aren't I owed some of these profits? Can I say no?"

When I first started following blogs, so-called mommy blogs like Shannon's were central to the industry. The radical act of unabashedly recording motherhood for public consumption has changed the lives of countless women across the US and has upended our viewpoints of how mothers are supposed to behave. The prominence and prevalence of these types of blogs probably explains why I, as a single woman in my early 20s, started reading them in my spare time. In fact, I read mommy blogs more than fashion blogs. It wasn't just me. In 2009, around the peak of the mommy-blog obsession, a study found that 23 million women were engaging with blogs, by either reading and commenting on them or writing their own, every week.

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The fact that young children were at the heart of these accounts has always been a source of shame—for me as a reader and for the industry as a whole. The subjects of this content are real children, like the Bird kids, who are starting to realize their entire childhoods, or at least large swaths of it, have been documented on the internet. And that means they are at the mercy of the internet's judgment.

Currently, the children of content creators have no legally protected rights, but that may be about to change. Incidents over the past few years are beginning to demonstrate how kid-centered content can be a slippery slope into darkness, exploitation, and abuse. To best demonstrate these issues, we must examine a different corner of the social media universe: YouTube.

Let me tell you a crazy story.

By Stephanie McNeal

Myka Stauffer and her husband, James, were family vloggers. It's a genre that you’re familiar with if you spend any time on the platform, but if you have never seen them before, the videos are rather strange. They literally just film themselves all day, not doing much besides going to the grocery store, doing chores, or walking around their neighborhood. It's bizarre, but very popular, especially among young children, who spend hours and hours on YouTube on average every week.

Myka and James had been on YouTube for about two years when, in July 2016, they announced they were planning to adopt a young boy with special needs from China. Over the next year, their impending adoption was a huge part of their channel. They hosted fundraisers, answered frequently asked questions, and revealed all the ins and outs of the adoption process.

In October 2017, the Stauffers welcomed their son, Huxley, to their channel with a video titled "Huxley's EMOTIONAL Adoption VIDEO!! GOTCHA DAY China Adoption," which they said was dedicated to "all of the orphans around the world." It got more than 5.5 million views, more than any other video on their channel before or since. Over the next few years, Myka posted updates on how Huxley was adapting to the family, sharing that the boy had been diagnosed as "having a stroke in utero, has level 3 autism, and sensory processing disorder." As Huxley adjusted to the US, Myka's fame and prominence on YouTube grew. She positioned herself as an adoption expert and advocate in outlets like Parade, and partnered with brands like Glossier, Good American, Fabletics, and Ibotta. Her channel grew to more than 700,000 subscribers. But slowly, over time, Huxley began to be featured less frequently, before disappearing from the channel altogether.

In May 2020, James and Myka posted a video titled "an update on our family." In it, they revealed that they had decided to give Huxley to another family, who they said was better equipped to deal with his special needs. Their attorney told me that the couple was "forced to make a difficult decision, but it is in fact, the right and loving thing to do for this child."

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I wrote a story about the Stauffers when I was a culture writer for BuzzFeed News, and it became the most-read piece I have ever published for BuzzFeed, attracting 7 million views. I received countless emails and Instagram DMs from horrified readers, begging me to investigate further (I ended up publishing several more stories on the Stauffers, including one in which local authorities confirmed Huxley was safe in a happy home).

People tended to be angry about two main things. First, they felt Huxley had been exploited by the Stauffers on their channel. The second was that some people were horrified that so much of Huxley's life had been used on a monetized channel. People online began to call for the monetized videos to be removed. A Change.org petition on the matter was signed by more than 150,000 people.

On the one hand, the Stauffer story is an extreme example of how the overexposure of a child on social media can lead to bad outcomes. Huxley, a special needs child, had been adopted into a family where he was conscripted into contributing to the family income without any personal compensation or right to privacy and then cast aside when he no longer could work within the family unit. It was horrifying, and a clear-cut case of the dangers of monetizing your family and using children for paid advertisements.

However, the dynamics at work apply to anyone who makes a profit from content featuring their children. These children, commenters agreed, deserved a right to privacy, to not have every detail of their lives shared with strangers on the internet. There needed to be some sort of rule book in place to standardize what parents can and cannot share about their kids without their consent. And if children are working in a family business making ad revenue, they deserve a cut of the profits.

I began to wonder if the Stauffer case was going to be the tipping point that caused the general public to actually start to seriously examine these two issues, and I was not alone. A few days after I published my original story, I received an email from a woman named Rossana Burgos, the matriarch of the Eh Bee Family, a popular YouTube family channel with more than 10 million subscribers (they recently changed their name to The Bee Family.) If you don't know them, google their name plus "GIF," and you’ll recognize immediately that their family is one of the most well-known reactions for "celebration" on the internet.

Rossana wanted to thank me for writing about the fight to protect kids on YouTube, which she told me she had been privately battling behind the scenes for years. She has been trying to get YouTube and other platforms to "protect children who are exploited every day for views," she wrote, but she was barely making progress. She was tired of watching families involve their kids in inappropriate or dangerous stunts on the platform, and continue to profit off the exploits.

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Rossana's role as a wildly successful parenting content creator gives her a unique vantage point into the world of those who make money off content featuring their kids. What she has seen has horrified her.

"Things can very easily get out of control in this business," she said. "When you incorporate money with kids, it can be a very, very dangerous equation. When you see some of the things these families are doing in the name of making money, it's really dangerous and I don't think that we will see the effects for another 10, 15 years," until now-children are grown.

Rossana is bothered by the amount of time children are spending being filmed and thinks the parents who are detailing all the minutiae of their children's lives online don't really understand the consequences of what they are doing. Women who share their children's potty-training journey, for example, think they are helping other moms. They aren't thinking about the possible consequences for their kids.

"I just don't think they have the awareness to really understand what they are doing, the foresight, that emotional intelligence, to realize," she said. "Yeah, it's cool when they are two or three; it won't be so cool when they’re 16 and there's videos of them on a potty."

Family vloggers on YouTube and parenting influencers on Instagram like Shannon are not exactly the same, and the potential for exploitation on YouTube is much higher because so many family vloggers film their kids for several hours a day. Their audiences are also very different. Children and young people are the prime audiences for family channels like hers, Rossana said, and their demographics on YouTube skew younger than on other platforms.

"It's this perfect storm, where there's people that shouldn't have a platform, who shouldn't have a camera, who should not be allowed to put out content. You have unsupervised children who are watching this stuff, who are thinking that this is normal, and then you have the kids who are in the videos, who don't realize the situations they are being put in," she said.

In contrast, she said, the audience for their family Instagram accounts skews older. If the primary audience for YouTube family vlogs is other children and teens, the primary audience for many parenting influencers is their peers, and other women looking for advice and community on their own parenting experience.

But the risks are still there, and the backlash coming from extreme examples of toxic YouTube culture could trickle down to affect influencers on Instagram. If the exploitation of kids on YouTube leads to new laws or protections for children, those laws will likely apply to Instagram influencers as well.

There have been some tepid efforts to regulate and protect kids through legislation, but none have gained any real traction. Some have suggested that child performers on the internet be regulated under guidelines similar to those that regulate how child actors are treated.

In the early days of Hollywood, no regulations existed to protect the emotional or financial rights of children who appeared onscreen or onstage. That changed in 1939, when California enacted what is most commonly referred to as the "Coogan Law." According to SAG-AFTRA, the labor union representing film performers, the law is named for former child star Jackie Coogan. He entered the film industry as a child in 1919, soon becoming a star in several films with Charlie Chaplin. When Coogan turned 21, however, he discovered all the money he had made was gone. His parents had complete control of his earnings and had apparently squandered them. Coogan sued his mother and former manager, and the law that helped protect kids avoid this same fate bore his name.

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Almost a century later, SAG-AFTRA and others have worked to strengthen the original law to better protect the assets of child actors. In 2000, California law changed to ensure that any income minors made from the entertainment industry was their property, and did not belong to their parents. In California and many other states, parents and guardians are required to set aside 15% of child actors’ gross earnings in a trust for their future use. In addition, most states have laws that regulate child actors’ employment, with some of the strictest, like California's, restricting how many hours a child can work and other provisions.

None of these laws, though, apply to children making money on the internet. That's a problem, writes Marina Masterson in a 2020 piece on "kidfluencers" for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. "Because kidfluencers have no legal right to these earnings or safe working conditions, the risk of exploitation is extreme and immediate," Masterson writes.

Masterson, however, acknowledges the issue is complicated to fix. After all, even regulating child actors has been a struggle, with a "patchwork" of state laws regulating the industry rather than a federal mandate, she says. Regulating kidfluencers, who are most of the time being filmed or photographed in their own homes by their parents, is even more complicated.

As Masterson writes, "Certain common child actor regulations, like those involving work permits and workplace conditions, are difficult, if not impossible, to impose on kidfluencers." This is due to the nature of how the content is produced and filmed. There's no set, no working hours, and no script. Rather, the filming is spontaneous, in their own home, generally without a set schedule.

For example, some states dictate how many hours a child can be on set in a typical film production, which is pretty easy to enforce. But it's much trickier to enforce a work hour limit, Masterson writes, when the "set" is the child's own home. "Even if the state set an hour limit that these children can work, the only way to enforce that rule would be to monitor the families within their own homes, which would be an overstep by the state," she writes.

Thus, trying to make Coogan Law protections apply to kid influencers would be "largely unworkable in the fast-paced social media context, which is generally confined to the family unit," she writes. "Financial protection is immediately possible through Coogan Laws, but regulating the content production itself presents new and challenging questions that require states to consider the specific needs of the social media industry."

Ultimately, Masterson says she believes that at the very least, Coogan-style financial protections should be enacted to protect kidfluencers. But she concedes that the other issues are complicated, recommending lawmakers "continue to research and refine the appropriateness of other regulations."

As of now, though, she writes, kids and parents are mostly on their own to regulate themselves: "Children spend hours per day producing high-valued content at the direction of their parents with no financial or personal protection besides the good will of their parents."

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Rossana thinks that children can be protected online both financially and emotionally, but it would require more than just the government or the platforms to step in. It would take all of us collectively working for change. In addition to legal protections, she envisions a kind of "governing board" of mental health experts and teachers regulating the industry, ensuring the kidfluencers are emotionally healthy, are getting a real education (no unregulated homeschooling), and their earnings are safe. Everyone would need to be on board, she said. The platforms, the government, the brands, and the audience all need to step up and work for change.

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Those are some potential solutions to the kids-on-the-internet issue on a macro level. But what does life as an influencer actually do to a family unit?

Since she has stopped taking as many campaigns, Shannon has started to reflect on how her own anxiety and stress about building her career have affected the way her kids feel about her. It's a hard topic to talk about, but she is extremely candid with me about it. Lately, she has been wondering if her career as a mommy blogger has impacted how her kids, especially Holland, perceive her. She's beginning to think it has, and to wonder if that has contributed to Holland's resistance to appearing in campaigns.

"I think I almost created it with having a blog," she said. She wonders if when her kids were with her in their early childhood, they began to feel like they were on the clock, and began to associate time with her as work, not pleasure.

Dallin agrees. He thinks that maybe the kids felt like their time with their mom was for her benefit, not theirs. They wanted their mom to be investing only in them, and they resented anything else.

"The kids perceive that you are getting them to do things to make you look good," Dallin suggested to Shannon. Kids like it, he said, when they are being supported in their own hobbies and interests. "When they are doing things for the blog, they see it as supporting you," he told Shannon.

So they have begun to rebel against what they think is an artificial part of their life. When they see their mom making content, they don't want to be a part of it.

"They say, ‘This is staged! This is fake!’" Shannon said. It leaves her in a tight spot. "It's hard. What do I say? Like, do it? This is my job. My kids are my job."

Excerpted from Swipe Up for More!: Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers by Stephanie McNeal, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Stephanie McNeal, 2023.