Smile for the Camera Sweetie: Mommy Bloggers & Child Exploitation

From their first sonogram, many children already have a digital presence. Parents have turned to social media, particularly TikTok and Instagram, to document their children’s lives. Capturing moments – good and bad – parents have begun to share almost every aspect of their children’s lives with the internet. But at what point does documentation turn into exploitation? 

“Sharenting” is a sector of TikTok, in which parents share tips and tricks along with the struggles of parenting. However, within sharenting, parents often feel compelled to record every aspect of their child’s life, like when they have meltdowns or go to the bathroom for the sake of content. In many instances, these parents view the invasion of their children’s privacy simply as funny, relatable parenting videos. What these parents fail to realize, though, is that eventually their kids will grow up and find out what their parents posted about them as kids – and I doubt any child would be happy to learn that their mom posted a video of them pooping. 

With these videos, parents are blatantly violating their children’s privacy and can embarrass them with the vulnerable content they post. Not only do privacy concerns come into play with vulnerable moments, but also with the amount of information that is shared about kids online. Parents will share their child’s full name, what the child looks like at any given time, the city and state they live in, their child’s likes and dislikes, their daily routines, etc. As someone who spends quite a bit of time on social media, I try to stay cautious of what I am posting – like not letting people know where I will be at a specific time on a certain day, and not showing the view from my apartment. These children, though, have no control over what their parents post. Viewers could easily recognize these children in public, calling them over by their names. People can be scary, and even with all of the “stranger-danger” we were taught as children, these parents forget to realize that it can apply to the internet too.

Parents don’t just use daily life as content either— they manufacture it as well. Parents will record the pranks they play on their kids for content, but these pranks are often more mean than funny. I remember seeing a video in which the parents recreated the chili scene from The Office with their toddler-aged son. I assume the parents thought it would be funny, but it just hurt to watch. The kid was crying, complaining about his hands hurting, and worried about the big pot he dropped. The parents even went so far as to shave their son’s head for the video so he would look more like the show’s character. While the prank itself was never funny, it hurt even more to see the parents do and say nothing, as the child just stood there completely upset and confused. Ignoring their role as parents to comfort and care for their child, they stood there and recorded him instead. The original video has since been taken down, most likely due to all of the backlash it received. There are tons of videos like it, though. With the virality of these kinds of videos, parents put content creation above their children. 

Many of these parent/child influencer accounts actually revolve fully around the child. These accounts will have the username as the child’s name and often say in the bio that it is run by the parent/mom. Every post will be focused on the child, rarely including the parent. The most heartbreaking part about these parent-run child influencer accounts is that, in most of the popular accounts, the child is always a young girl. The most popular, largely due to backlash from other users, is @wren.eleanor on TikTok. This account documents the life of a three-year-old girl and has over 17 million followers. To a normal viewer, the content is just a toddler doing normal toddler things with her mom. However, all kinds of people have access to the internet. Wren’s mom, for example, posted a seemingly harmless video showing all the food her daughter ate at the fair, one item being a hotdog. This video has over 376,000 saves, and the number along with saves of other videos from the account raised suspicions from users, who urged Wren’s mom to be more cautious of what she posts. 

While it can be argued that Wren’s account and others have no bad intentions behind the content, it is very clear that some parent-run accounts are aware of their audiences and cater to them. @mom.uncharted on TikTok calls out accounts and websites that post mature and suggestive content of young girls. She discusses accounts both on TikTok and Instagram, making sure parents know the dangers of posting their children on these platforms. Her videos occasionally pop up on my “For You” page and every time they do, I am always shocked by the information she shares. For instance, there are many Instagram accounts of young girls, run by their parents, that post photos and videos of them posing in bikinis. These girls, often under age 13, are almost exclusively followed by older men. Even if the parents never check who follows the accounts, these men do have the (for lack of a better term) audacity to comment on the posts. The men share their excitement for the day when the girls are “old enough for OnlyFans,” and how much they enjoy
”watching their bodies in bikinis”. There is no denying that the parents running these accounts are aware of their demographic, especially when they set up a subscription on Instagram for exclusive content – exclusive content of an underage girl. 

Even though sharenting accounts and parent-run child influencer accounts are different in the kind of content they share, they both exploit children for content. Children have no control over what gets put online, and most likely have a very limited – if at all – understanding of what social media is and how it works. Whether the intentions behind posts are innocent or not, parents continue to exploit their children and share every aspect of their life. These kids can’t consent to what their parents film and post, and won’t be able to have their own identity aside from the one that their parents have already created for them online. Their lives have been documented since their mom’s first ultrasound. and their followers have their own ideas of who they should be according to what their parents post. Children already have a hard enough time growing up as it is, but these parents are just making it harder by sharing that process with the world.