The dark side of posting about your children online

DIGITAL FOOTPRINTS start long before children take their first steps. They may still be in utero when their parents post about them on social media, sharing sonograms with captions such as “Love at first sight!” Then come the newborn photos, flashed across Instagram within hours of a baby’s birth. “Sharenting” is on the rise: one in four children in the West has a social-media presence before they are born, according to one oft-cited figure.

Parents don’t always stop there, however. Some turn their offspring into full-blown social-media stars—catchily called “kidfluencers”—documenting every major milestone (and many minor ones). They pick up the camera to capture first words and first steps, teething troubles, tantrums and potty training. Even the “most intimate moments are broadcast to millions”, writes Fortesa Latifi, a journalist, in a new book, as content is spun out of everything from puberty to menstruation.

“Like, Follow, Subscribe” is a fascinating exposé of kidfluencing, a multi-billion-dollar business where “children’s privacy is traded for profits”. She meets the parents who have become “producers, managers and cameramen”, incentivising their kids to film videos and dictating how many hours they work a day.

Kidfluencing is a lucrative family profit centre. Ms Latifi discovers that the top accounts charge as much as $200,000 per sponsored post, bringing in between $8m and $10m a year. In this world, “Nothing is too personal to be #sponsored.” Potty training becomes an advert for nappies; shaving your legs for the first time is a chance to promote a razor brand.

The industry has drawn comparisons to child acting or modelling. Yet it does not have the same legal safeguards, Ms Latifi points out. In America only five states have laws requiring a parent to share a child’s earnings with them. Things like consent to be filmed, control of content and hours spent filming are up to parents’ discretion.

Certainly some children benefit from the fame and money influencing brings. Take Ryan Kaji, who became famous at the age of three for toy reviews; today he has more than 40m subscribers on YouTube and earned $35m in 2025, according to Forbes. Yet Ms Latifi’s reporting focuses more on the downsides. She asks Julie Jeppson, a mother of eight who runs a family YouTube channel, which of her videos are most popular. Ms Jeppson reveals it is the ones in which her children get hurt: “The bloody noses, or the broken arms, or the emergency-room visit.” When one of Ms Jeppson’s children is in pain, Ms Latifi wonders, is her instinct to help them or to reach for her phone and record it? In a viral clip on another account, a father keeps filming his son having a seizure rather than immediately calling an ambulance.

Virality—which parents usually take such pains to avoid in nursery—has taken on a different dimension with social media. Pregnancy announcements and videos of newborn babies are especially popular. A former blogger reveals that she has “known people who have had more children because those brand deals are really lucrative”. The idea of having babies for social-media views may sound implausible, but industry insiders tell Ms Latifi that there is serious money in marketing products including buggies, nappies and pregnancy tests.

People are also fascinated by unfamiliar family dynamics. One popular Christian influencer is Karissa Collins: her 11 children all have names starting with “A”, including Anchor and Arrow. She both intrigues and infuriates her followers, such as when she posts about homeschooling or her belief that contraception is unholy.

Many of the most popular influencer families are Mormon. As well as chronicling their large broods, they post photos of pristine houses and countless loaves of fresh sourdough bread. Behind this idyllic façade is the Mormon church: it pays them thousands of dollars per post, pushing imagery that makes the religion look Instagram-worthy, such as followers giving food to the homeless.

But children’s smiling faces can belie their suffering. Shari Franke, the 23-year-old daughter of a momfluencer who was convicted of child abuse in 2024, testified to lawmakers in Utah that she was a “victim of family vlogging”. (Her mother enacted severe punishments on the children, and was arrested after her malnourished son escaped from her house.) “No amount of money”, Ms Franke said, can make up for having your childhood “plastered all over the internet”. In 2025 Utah passed a law to protect kidfluencers and child performers by requiring parents to set aside some of the earnings and enabling children to later ask for content to be removed.

The internet brings other dangers, too. The most disturbing section of the book concerns online predators. Ms Latifi offers grim examples of parents filming suggestive content of their children eating or dancing and kidfluencers being stalked by strangers at school.

“Like, Follow, Subscribe” stands out for its rich reporting, though Ms Latifi does not offer enough satisfying recommendations about how to improve the industry. She reflects on her own daughter and concludes nothing could persuade her to invade her child’s privacy. More parents may soon think twice before posting that sweet picture or sonogram. ■