Would you allow your husband to post a video of him doing a saline cleanse of your nasal cavity? The video would be of him standing behind you, holding you down as he squirts an entire bottle of saline up one of your nostrils, and buckets of snot come out the other side. He would repeat it again on the other nostril, still with a lot of snot.
You probably wouldn’t consent to that kind of content being posted online. I know I wouldn’t. However, the mother of one unlucky child somewhere in the United States posted that video of him, and I saw it on Instagram and on X multiple times last week. He’ll forever be known as the saline-snot boy. What a claim to fame, and one he never signed up for or consented to.
My oldest child is 11 years old, and I’ve never posted a picture of her face on the internet. The same goes for her five younger siblings. I was always uncomfortable with the idea of the internet knowing that much about my children. We’ve never posted their names or much in the way of personal stories about them, either. My third child was born in a car, and my fourth child gets herself lost a lot. That’s the extent of what I usually share: surface-level cute stories. I make a point to keep what I post about my own children vague and fairly vanilla: nothing embarrassing, nothing overly personal. They’ll be able to make their own digital footprint when they grow up, something to which I believe all children born in the internet era are entitled.
Over the last year, I realized something as I’ve existed on social media with this mentality about my own children: I’ve been a hypocrite. While I’ve opted my own children out of the social media landscape because I believe it to be damaging to children, I’ve contributed to the commodification of other children’s childhoods online. I followed a number of mothers on Instagram who post personal parenting content. They’re called influencers, and they use their own children as content creators for their pages. These mothers aren’t just posting their own children. They are using them as free labor and creating for their children a digital footprint and narrative that they never consented to and can never undo.
Writing for Cosmopolitan, Fortesa Latifi tells the story of one influencer family: “Garrett Gee, 35, of the Bucket List Family, which boasts over 5 million followers and subscribers, says that each of his three kids has their own bank account, with money set aside for them for their work on brand partnerships. He’s frank about how he sees content creation: as a ‘constant flow of intense work.’ He hopes that the money and the platform he’s been able to give them will set them up for the future and launch their careers (though one could argue they were already financially set, as Gee netted $54 million after selling an app in 2014). Each of the Gee children has their own Instagram account, which are verified and boast an average of 260,000 followers. Though the accounts are currently managed by their parents, the plan is that the children will one day get control of them.”
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That idea makes me deeply uncomfortable. These kids will inherit at least a quarter of a million people who feel entitled to be part of their lives. They will inherit an expectation to keep going and to keep sharing because so much energy was put into building their public profiles while they were still in diapers. However, given that discomfort, it’s only logical that I shouldn’t count myself as one of those quarter of a million followers.
There is a growing belief among many parents that this generation of “sharenting,” or sharing all of our children’s lives online, comes with significant downsides for children. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed more and more of my fellow parents declining to post their children’s names and likenesses online, believing that their children are entitled to privacy. However, there’s also a reckoning on the horizon about the downsides of parent vlogging and influencing, with scandals about child abuse and even abandonment rocking the parent vlogging community. However, even in your average influencer family, there will always be an element of exploitation. Ultimately, as a consumer, I’ve realized that parenting influencers only exist because there is a market for their content. As such, I need to stop being part of that market.
Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a homeschooling mother of six and a writer. She is the bestselling co-author of Stolen Youth.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
