TikTok, the wildly popular video sharing platform, has an algorithm that will occasionally push a video captioned “Pranking my kid!” or “Parenting hack!” No one watching the video will wonder if the kid(s) consented to filming and sharing their life to the Internet. However, people need to start considering the ways in which an influential online identity impacts a child’s mental health and social development.
Social media revolutionized global connection, information delivery, and creative expression. Many would argue that these sites and apps brought immense good to the world, but social media also introduced new problems. Some parents are profiting by turning their children into social media influencers, a practice that could be damaging to youth mental health. It is difficult to regulate any content, let alone content created by parents featuring their own children. However, it is possible to regulate the labor of monetized child influencers, and this is currently the most accessible approach to curbing harms brought by social media to youth mental health.
In May 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General released an Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. The Advisory compiled research and statistics on the matter and addressed the benefits of social media use among youths, like building positive community, sharing information, and creating space for self-expression. The rest of the Advisory studied the potential harms of social media use. Exposure to extreme, inappropriate, and harmful content can create risks of fatality, physical injury, body image issues, and low-self-esteem. In addition, excessive use of social media can create risks of insomnia, addiction, attention deficits, depression, and anxiety.
Next, the Advisory identified five groups—policymakers, social media companies, researchers, parents, and youths—and provided recommendations to each group on effectuating maximum benefits and minimal harms from social media, and “creat[ing] safer, healthier online environments for children.”
Recent lawsuits have claimed that the lack of safe, healthy online environments for children is a consequence of profit-motivated social media companies prioritizing engagement over safety. Social media companies have been condemned for the addictiveness of their platforms, including the constant, compulsive engagement of children which has led to negative effects on their physical and mental health. The goal of these lawsuits has been to hold these companies accountable for knowingly, intentionally, and deceptively designing algorithms that harmed youth mental health.
Social media companies certainly hold some of the blame for their part in this crisis, but they are hardly the sole perpetrators. Content creators—particularly parents who monetize videos or images of their children—must also be taken seriously for their role in harming youth mental health beyond the screen.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory recommends that parents mitigate the potential harms of social media by modeling responsible social media behavior to their kids. However, variation of social media use by parents, caretakers, and guardians makes it difficult to determine exactly what it looks like to “model responsible social media behavior” and protect children from harms.
In her 2017 article entitled Sharenting: Children’s Privacy in the Age of Social Media, law professor and children’s privacy expert Stacy Steinberg addresses the social media behaviors of parents who share content of their children online, using the term “sharenting” to describe this behavior. Sharenting serves as an outlet for parents to express their true feelings on the realities of raising children, particularly the hardships brought on by raising children with chronic mental health or developmental needs. By sharing these stories, parents build supportive communities of similarly situated parents and advocate for greater awareness and education around the raising of children with mental and developmental needs.
The dark side of sharenting lies in parental oversharing that invades a child’s privacy, agency, and safety. Some parents go viral for videos of them disciplining their children, for example, where a child is forced to stand in public with a sign describing his misbehavior. These parents are trying to effectuate behavior changes in their child through public shaming. Once shared, some in the online community approve of the disciplinary video, finding the post entertaining and authentic. However, others point out that this kind of online discipline is disrespectful and humiliating to a child. Unlike traditional offline forms of discipline, a viral video leaves a digital footprint beyond the child’s control.
Parents who share content of their kids with little regard for short-term and long-term repercussions may be just as harmful to youth mental health and development as the social media platforms. While litigation has the potential to protect children from the harms dealt by social media companies, it is a less viable option when the offender is a child’s own parents. Other methods must be used to protect children from their parents’ harmful use of social media.
Steinberg suggests a public health model of child protection. The public health model proved effective with the secondhand smoke campaign, where pediatricians warned parents of the dangers of secondhand smoke and encouraged parents to not smoke around children. When parents continued to do so, some state legislatures enacted laws to prohibit the discouraged behavior. The public health model prevails by identifying a crisis and disseminating appropriate warnings and education to the public, with state legislature available as a fallback measure.
Steinberg proposes a draft of the public health model for protection of youth mental health, organized by the best practices to be advised to the public. It mirrors the Advisory, listing educational points for parents like giving their child veto power over online posting, considering the effect that sharing has on the child’s current and future sense of well-being, and sharing anonymously.
For some parents engaged in sharenting, anonymous posting defeats the entire purpose of sharing because anonymity is counterproductive when the goal is to build a career as an influencer.
Melanie Fineman has discussed commercialized sharenting in her 2023 note Honey, I Monetized the Kids: Commercial Sharenting and Protecting the Rights of Consumers and the Internet’s Child Stars. She argues that commercial sharenting has negative effects on child influencers, or “kidfluencers,” and that more support for regulations of commercial sharenting might be earned by reframing the issue as “foster[ing] misleading content online” or “implicat[ing] child labor concerns.”
Sharenting fosters misleading content because parents often instruct their children to talk and react for the camera in ways that prioritize profit and engagement over authenticity. One mother told her Internet-famous twins to “say Oshkosh!” when asked about their favorite brand at an Oshkosh promotional event, though the twins later indicated they did not know what Oshkosh was. Followers on social media were influenced to support Oshkosh because of the twins’ uninformed endorsement, but the endorsement only occurred because Oshkosh incentivized their mother to do so.
Sharenting also implicates child labor concerns. A kidfluencer’s advertisements or sponsorships on social media could bring is so much money that running the account becomes a full-time job and income source for the parent. Content featuring the child becomes the key to the parent’s commercial success, increasing the risk of parents exploiting their children and harming their mental health.
An apt comparison might be child reality TV stars from shows like Toddlers and Tiaras or even Kendall and Kylie Jenner in their earliest years on Keeping up with the Kardashians. Children develop a different sense of self when they’re put in the public eye from a young age, lacking the agency to control their own image. Dissolving the boundary between portrayed character and personal self puts the child in a position to believe he or she is a commodity in the parents’ eyes, always expected to perform in a money-earning, content-worthy manner and creating pressure, stress, and negative mental health outcomes in the child.
Exploiting a child’s presence on social media for the parents’ financial gain is a difficult issue to address due to legal protection of parental rights. A parent’s right to control and shape their child’s life historically outweighs the child’s rights to privacy or autonomy. Thus, the law is unlikely to compel parents to stop sharenting and grant children autonomous control over their own digital footprints. Limitations also exist in regulating what is posted, rather than who is posting. Steinberg notes that a parent’s social media posts may be considered free speech protected by the First Amendment, and therefore, insulated from state regulation. However, states are permitted to regulate the monetization of a child on social media and mitigate damages of commercial sharenting by approaching the matter as a labor issue.
Fineman describes California’s Coogan Law, which ensures that a portion of money earned by child actors be put in a trust until the child turns eighteen. The intent is to protect children from exploitative employment, where earnings are spent by parents and not the child. It returns a degree of control to the child, diminishing the risk of the child believing he or she is a commodity in the parents’ eyes. Coogan’s Law has since been mimicked in other states like New York, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Illinois.
Illinois is the first state in the nation to pass legislation amending its Child Labor Law to include protections for child influencers on social media. The amended act defines vlogs, family, and online platforms, and mandates that profits from online content featuring a child’s name, image, or likeness must be directed to a trust fund account for the child. Children will have the right to sue their parents for failing to direct profits to the trust fund in violation of the amended Child Labor Law.
The amended Illinois act goes into effect on July 1, 2024, so it remains to be seen whether it successfully mitigates the harms to child influencers posed by commercial sharenting. In the meantime, the public health model could serve as a means of protecting the mental health of child influencers by disseminating education to parents and raising awareness of the privacy, health, and safety risks of sharenting.