Despite exclusively watching video essays, food how-to videos and the occasional product review, I always seem to attract a certain genre of content to my YouTube feed: family vlogging channels. These videos are created by parents nationwide, and show a special inside look into their families’ daily lives, from mundane everyday routines to the exciting milestones achieved by their children. Family content creation is only growing.
These channels are no new phenomenon. However, in recent years, questions regarding the ethics behind these content farms have started to be raised, promoting further legal action to protect child influencers who don’t even know that their lives are being exploited for profit initiated by their parents.
On Dec. 18, 2023, Ruby Franke, a mother of six who was known for her popular YouTube channel 8 Passengers, pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse after her 12-year-old son ran to a neighbor’s home asking for help. The boy had duct tape on both his ankles and wrists, severe wounds and visible signs of malnourishment. Over eight years the 8 Passengers YouTube channel accumulated millions of subscribers, simply by sharing the daily lives of the Frankes. However, that channel was merely a façade, and behind the scenes, the children were tormented physically, emotionally, and psychologically.
Cases like that of the Franke family have only continued to surface, and in response, legal action has slowly started to be put into place to protect child influencers. In 2024, Illinois became the very first state to expand its child labor laws to cover both child influencers and vloggers with California and Minnesota following not long after. Then, Utah mandated the establishment of trusts for minors involved in entertainment outlines, enforcing responsibilities for earnings management and rights for content deletion.
To me, family vlogging channels have always felt artificial. How can their lives be so seamless, tidy and fun? More than that, how much genuine enjoyment can even truly be there, when every second of your day to day is being recorded? Humans were never really meant to have an intricate view into other people’s lives, but now we do. Why can’t the mundane just be mundane? Why are these families ok with sharing very personal things to the whole world? Well like most things in life the simple answer is money.
Though new progress is occurring in this area, the question of whether family vlogging is child exploitation remains. At the end of the day, these channels are made for entertainment and profit. Their content is largely consumed by kids and is family-friendly, or at the very least, appears to be. With new laws in place, child influencers get to profit from their work, but at the same time, children are forced into this influential position at ages where they are too young to fully comprehend the situation. Plus, by showing your family, especially children, to the whole internet, there are bound to be viewers with malicious intentions.
