Child Influencers Are At Risk Financially and Emotionally — From Their Parents.

And only one state has stepped up to offer the most token protections.

A few years ago, I was scrolling on Instagram when I came across something that truly skeeved me out: a child, four years old, posing and modeling like an adult, down to holding a Starbucks coffee cup.

I stumbled across it because I followed a fashion account that posted outfit inspiration. At the time, I believed that whoever ran the account picked accounts at random to showcase. I have since learned that, if you were a burgeoning fashion influencer, you could pay an unspecified amount of money to be featured on the page.

I clicked on the young girl’s profile and learned that she had around 200,000 followers. She had brand sponsorships. And her account was managed by her mother. Makes sense, because I struggle to think of how a four-year-old’s pudgy fingers would be able to type the requisite caption: “I just love trench coats and I’m obsessed with this one !!”

The girl — or her mother — maintained her Instagram presence since the age of two. Two years old. Imagine being posed and primped and propped into weirdly adult outfits since the age of two. Not even for a photo to share with friends or family, but to post on a public profile with the aim of growing a social media presence. To become a child influencer, and presumably influence other mothers to purchase these oddly adult outfits for their own toddlers.

I quickly fell down a rabbit hole. I spent hours finding more and more child influencers, who had varying levels of success. Some had posted hundreds of photos, but had just a few hundred followers. Others had upwards of a million followers. An overwhelming majority were young girls. And of course, all were run by the parents, typically the mom.

Mental health consequences

I, a woman in her late twenties, have a difficult relationship with social media. Professionally, I have whittled down my online presence to just a few platforms. In my personal life, I no longer use Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, the platform formerly known as Twitter, or Pinterest. I share photos with friends in direct messages.

This is in large part in a bid to protect my mental health. I’m not alone when I say that I struggled to not count likes and compare myself to my more popular peers.

I cannot imagine what it would be like for my own parents to be tracking the likes and comments on my posts, and to be profiting from my popularity or my looks. I cannot fathom growing up with my parents asking me to pose for pictures for strangers, from the age of two upwards.

This isn’t new. From mommy blogs to family YouTube channels to child stars, parents have felt little qualms about sharing their children with the world, regardless of the effect on their children’s health.

The question of consent

Here’s what I wondered as I thought about what circumstances could ever compel me to post my own future children online for the consumption of others: Even if these kids had been asked if they wanted to do this, even if the answer was a full and enthusiastic “yes,” could a parent trust that answer?

Some parents seem to think it’s OK. “Any time I’m doing a live [stream], [my daughter] will jump in on it,” Martha Krejci, online personality, told Fast Company a few years ago. “She knows there are people on the other side of the camera. She’ll wave at them and talk to them. As she has questions, I’m helping her understand what this life is about and what she’s doing and the part she’s playing in it.” Krejci is a slightly odd case — she’s the online personality, and allows her daughter to take part. It’s still a little weird to me, to call her daughter being on camera “the part she’s playing in it,” but clearly Krejci believes her daughter wants to participate in being live in front of strangers.

Other parents express more hedging about whether it’s right or wrong to film children for financial gain. “We know it’s something that we could have not put out on YouTube, but we film our whole lives,” Savannah LaBrant told the Guardian about her April Fools prank. The prank was ill-received on social media because she lied to her child, Everleigh, by pretending they were giving the dog away. She did this to get Everleigh to react for a vlog. “That’s what we signed up for,” she says.

Whenever I think of those moms justifying their children’s (harmful, in my opinion) choices, I always think back to my mom’s brief stint with smoking.

My grandma was a smoker, until my mom, at the age of two, picked up the ashes from the ashtray and put them in her mouth. Those ashes must have tasted disgusting. But that’s what her mom was doing, so she did too.

If a child would go so far as to put cigarette ashes in her mouth to emulate her mother, I think it’s safe to say they cannot consent to be influencers online. Children are impressionable and easily influenced by what their parents do, or what they approve of. My mom may have “wanted” to put the cigarettes in her mouth, but my grandma was able to see that was harmful.

Krejci continued her justification to Fast Company, “To any parent that thinks this might be something their kid would enjoy doing: You really have to be okay with your kid being in public.”

LaBrant may well have signed up for that. Krejci may have made her peace with the complications of featuring her child online. But how can a two-year-old agree to put their life on YouTube or Instagram?

And when there’s money involved, is it safe to even accept what parents say at face value? One kidfluencer’s mom chilled me in particular: Bee Fisher, the mother of three Instagram-famous boys. Discussing her boys’ work schedule, she told Wired, “If there’re days they’re totally not into it, they don’t have to be … Unless it’s paid work. Then they have to be there. We always have lollipops on those days.”

When your child puts your cigarettes in her mouth, it’s relatively easy to quit smoking. But when she puts bread on your table, it may be harder to put down the iPhone.

The legal ramifications

I should add that in cases of child labor, a parent’s legal right to consent on behalf of their child is waived. Child labor is illegal under the age of 14, no matter what the parent says. But parents are within their legal rights to take home 85 percent of any child actor’s earnings. Even that small portion is only legally protected thanks to Coogan’s Law.

In the 1920s, Jackie Coogan was a wildly popular child star, earning millions of dollars. He was discovered by Charlie Chaplin doing an equivalent of today’s TikTok trends — a dance called the shimmy. He earned three to four million dollars as a child actor, which is upwards of $33 million in today’s dollars.

When he came of age, he found his parents had spent every bit of it on frivolous things, literally fur coats, jewels, and cars. He sued his mother and successfully reclaimed a portion of his earnings. The result was the 1939 California Child Actor’s Bill. Alongside requirements like schooling and limiting working hours, the bill enforced that a 15 percent minimum of a child actor’s employer be set aside in a trust.

Here’s what gets me. Coogan’s mom really thought that Coogan himself deserved nothing. She really believed that he should not share in his earnings, as captured in an archived newspaper. Coogan’s financial advisor, who married his mother, said that “[e]very dollar a kid earns before he’s 21 belongs to his parents.” Neil Patrick, a writer for The Vintage News, adds, “Coogan’s mother and stepfather claimed Jackie enjoyed himself and simply thought he was playing before the camera.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? To me, it echoes those same justifications of today’s kidfluencer parents. “She wants to.” “We chose this.”

Ultimately, Coogan won his battle and received at least a portion of his deserved money — at least, whatever hadn’t been lost by his financial adviser on horse racing. In his name, Coogan’s Law protects the earnings of child actors, models, and voice actors.

Kidfluencers, until now, had no such legal protection. Parents were not only allowed to run influencer accounts for their children, despite the alleged age restrictions on social media, but they were also legally entitled to every penny of money a kidfluencer earned. One law aims to change that.

Illinois steps up

As of July 1st, 2024, child influencers can sue their parents in the state of Illinois if a percentage of earnings isn’t set aside for them. Illinois is the first state to successfully pass such a law, though states like Washington and California are following in its footsteps.

“The rise of social media has given children new opportunities to earn a profit,” wrote the law’s sponsor, Sen. David Koehler in an emailed news release. “Many parents have taken this opportunity to pocket the money, while making their children continue to work in these digital environments.”

This law is the direct result of sixteen-year-old Shreya Nallamothu. Three years ago, she had a similar experience to me. Scrolling on social media, she saw the sheer quantity of child influencers working with zero protected compensation.

“I realized that there’s a lot of exploitation that can happen within the world of ‘kidfluencing,’” said Shreya, now 16, to the Chicago Times. “And I realized that there was absolutely zero legislation in place to protect them.” She went to her state legislators to push them to act. The result is a new protection for child influencers.

This isn’t far enough

Illinois is a vanguard of digital privacy and rights. They are also the first state to pass a data breach privacy bill with actual teeth, as well as the first real biometric data privacy law, BIPA, that forces companies to pay consumers damages when they suffer a data breach. But while Illinois pulls in one direction to protect its citizens from harm, other states prioritize the rights of those already in power.

Child labor laws, once sacrosanct, are being weakened, especially in Republican-led states. In Iowa, a new law now allows teenagers to work more jobs and for longer hours. Teens can work up to six hours on a school day. So you get home at 2:30 pm, drive to your job at McDonald’s, and can legally work there until 9 pm. This is two more hours than was previously allowed.

In Arkansas, employers no longer need permits to verify a child’s age and a parent’s consent. The law went into effect two weeks ago.

So while I laud Illinois legislators for stepping up to protect children on social media, it’s only one step in the right direction. And it’s not even a particularly large step. Children now have the right to sue parents if they don’t hold a “percentage.” It’s only for content that generates ten cents per view or more. It also doesn’t force parents to set up a trust as soon as they create an account on behalf of their child. Instead, this law effectively asks the child to go through the traumatic process of suing their own parents to ensure they get what’s rightfully theirs.

And even though one step in the right direction is better than none, many, many other forces want to pull in another direction.

You’ve got the parents, who continue to earn money from exploiting their children. You’ve got social media giants, who continue to profit from hosting ads on this engaging, child-focused content. One 2019 content analysis found that videos featuring children averaged three times more views than those who did not.

And, of course, you have the brands who do these sponsorship deals. In my experience as the mom of two catfluencers, I was rarely offered money in a trackable, above-the-table way. I was frequently paid in goods like cat food, cat treats, cat toys. Instagram, YouTube, and other social media giants were very slow to create influencer platforms that put boundaries on the relationships between influencers and brands. I mean, even the option to add the “partnership” label to a sponsored Instagram post was only implemented in 2021.

Everyone profits from the exploitation of children. Everyone wins except the four-year-old who’s told to pose for likes. Everyone is happy except for the boys who get paid in lollipops on days spent creating sponsored content.

What comes next?

This law is good, but it’s not enough. Clearly, we can’t trust all parents to look after the best interests of their children, which is part of why we need child labor laws in the first place.

Prior to child labor laws, parents took their kids out of school and put them to work, often in dangerous conditions, to help them support their family. (“Many parents believed that they should begin receiving some money back on their investment once a child reached the age of 10 or 12,” writes Michael Schuman in an article for the Bureau of Labor Statistics explaining why child labor laws were enacted.)

It was true in 1939 when the Fair Labor Standards Act was finally passed, and it’s true today. Legislators, brands, and social media platforms need to step up and protect children from avaricious, exploitative forces, even if those forces are the parents of the children themselves.

And we, as consumers, can agree to stop watching. I don’t follow that fashion Instagram account anymore, and I sent them a message to tell them it was because they either featured a child influencer — or worse, accepted money to feature her. I don’t follow any family vloggers or bloggers because I think it’s nigh on impossible to get a child to consent to put their life on camera in a way that is true. As engaging as that content may be, it’s within our power to stop consuming it. And I wish I had done as Nallamothu did when she first noticed the quantity of unregulated child labor on social media. I can’t go back in time and write, but I write to my senators today and ask them to not only follow in Illinois’s footsteps — but to go farther and actually protect kidfluencers from their parents.