In this day and age, social media is a major part of the majority’s lives. People love to share their milestones and post things they love, including their kids. Whether it’s a simple picture on Facebook or a video being posted on one of the various social media platforms, many parents use these platforms to post cute memories of their kids. Despite the actions’ innocence most of the time, viewers may have malicious intentions. Either way, posting videos of your kids on apps like TikTok and Youtube isn’t the best idea for a multitude of reasons.
For starters, family and kid-focused YouTube channels can heavily impair a parent’s relationship with their kids, as they take on the role of ‘manager’ in addition to ‘parent’. And if the child starts bringing in revenue for the family, the parent-kid dynamic will never recover. Once parents realize the profit that can be made, they tend to start forcing the kid into more content and they start to exploit their kids.
Exploitation can come in many forms, one being the family vlogging industry, where they occasionally make videos of their kids in ways like making them participate in romantic situations and just sexualizing them in general. One of the major cases of this is Jordan Matter, a photographer and YouTuber who uploads videos mainly targeted towards kids and usually involving kids as models in his videos. His channel slowly started to shift to his personal and family life instead. As his channel grew, videos where Matter’s daughter, Salish and other young girls he has no relation to were doing splits and poses that can easily be seen as a sexual act. As these videos got more traction, he would slowly start posting videos like this more, and they eventually shifted into the stereotypical content people post of their kids. Along with this, some of his videos would be him making his daughter participate in age-inappropriate scenarios. When Salish was in elementary school, he made an entire video where he forced his daughter to have her first kiss with a dude she seemingly had no interest in. Posting your child’s first kiss is already extremely strange, but when they are an elementary schooler who seemingly has no interest in the dude, it’s a whole new level.
This isn’t a one-time thing either; a majority of his videos from when his daughter was younger were centered around things like this. He would post about her “crush,” with thumbnails that say “don’t ship them.” Matter also has a son, who doesn’t get posted as much, seemingly for the fact the videos about him don’t do as well as the videos of his daughter. One of Matter’s videos includes his daughter ‘switching lives’ with an adult woman. The thumbnail of this video includes his daughter, Salish, edited to be pregnant. The video itself includes his daughter pretending to date an adult man. There is no reason to post anything about your child acting like an adult, but if it gets to the extent where you make a video where she pretends to date a fully grown man, you’re just feeding pedophiles videos of your daughter.
Sexual exploitation isn’t the only kind of exploitation that happens in the industry. A lot of family vloggers will post their kids’ injuries or illnesses for clout, using the injury as clickbait just to draw attention. There will be at least one example of this on almost every channel that actively posts their kids, but one of the accounts that stands out for having an absurd number of these videos is ‘This is How We Bingham.” This account has playlists for just their family’s injuries, and will make at least five videos of their children per injury. Highlighting kids’ injuries to this extent shows that these parents don’t truly care about their kids and would rather force them to perform for views over taking care of their child when they truly need them. Some of the videos from them that fall into this category are “Toddler Breaks Arm in Two Places at Legoland on Vacation” and “The Morning After a Severe Concussion.” Both of these videos are just them shoving a camera in their kid’s faces and not letting them get the rest they need when they have medical issues. Instead of their children getting to take a break, they’re forced to be accessories to the videos.
Another one of the biggest issues with posting your kids online is that they can’t truly consent to these videos. Children who get posted online from a young age usually will not get a say in the matter.. If a child is so young that they can not process the idea of what is happening or doesn’t get a say in the matter, they should not be posted online. Even if the parents eventually stop posting their kids online as they get older, the videos of them from when they were younger will follow them throughout the rest of their lives. Whether this would cause them to get bullied or just exist forever due to their digital footprint, it can severely affect their life negatively.
YouTube isn’t the only platform that has people guilty of this, and there are plenty of people posting their kids on TikTok in the same way. An account called Wren & Jacquelyn consists of a mother posting and her toddler. While her account seems innocent, if you focus on what her daughter does in videos and thumbnails, you can see how the mother is sexualizing her toddler. She posts videos of her daughter doing sexual poses, dances and wearing outfits that aren’t age-appropriate, like extremely cropped shirts and some of the shortest shorts I have ever seen. There are accounts she’s been tagged in that post truly disgusting AI-edited photos of her toddler, and though people comment sexual comments about her child on her videos, she still does nothing. Although none of the videos exist on her specific account, they still circulate through other accounts posting them. She personally refused to delete the videos or do anything about what others were getting posted of her daughter, which is genuinely disgusting.
Technically, none of this is illegal and is within the parents’ rights, with no regulations, which is insane. Some apps will have rules to protect kids’ privacy by taking down anything that overshares too much of their personal information, but this isn’t a widespread rule. On a majority of apps, parents can overshare about their kids’ lives freely with no repercussions.
While posting kids on social media will unfortunately be around as long as social media is, it can and should be regulated more than it is now. Supporting any channel that posts their kids in an exploitative manner will only allow them and more people to do this, so I heavily encourage you to find anything else to watch and try to avoid condoning people who will willingly post their own kids for their own gain.
