Family content creators have taken social media by storm, creating the image of an ideal life with happy parents and their perfect children. Many of these family influencers produce the bulk of their content by constantly filming their kids, whether it be displaying their daily lives or using their kids to make funny and relatable parenting jokes.
Recently, viewers have been drawing attention to the potential harm and toxicity behind these family influencer accounts. How could the constant need to produce more content interfere with the lives of popular child influencers? Do certain family influencers truly possess the perfect lifestyles that they portray to their fans? Social media users are even beginning to beg the question of whether or not family-centered content creation is morally ethical.
One family influencer I have been keeping up with for a while is Kayla Kosuga, a wife and mother of two young girls living in Florida. Kayla is a common example of a family content creator, with countless followers constantly tuning in to see cute videos of her family’s daily life. But there is a shadow of controversy surrounding her page, as many viewers have been drawing more attention to how young Kayla and her husband are. After having kids at 19, she has few opportunities to experience what is considered a normal young adult life. Although she isn’t the most concerning example of a family blogger, the consistent nature of her content might also create an unnatural lifestyle for her daughters, who are both under five years old. Fans are also worried about how she states her kids’ full names on social media, makes several mentions to the city where they live, and generally gives information that could be used to track and endanger her family.
A more concerning example of a social media family is Eight Passengers, managed by mother of six, Ruby Franke. After one of her sons fled to their neighbors’ house with open wounds and a severely malnourished body, an investigation on the true nature of the Franke family emerged. Ruby Franke was soon arrested and pleaded guilty to both starving and abusing her children, including tying them up with a rope and withholding their dinners when they misbehaved. Today, Eight Passengers is a dead account with a horrifying backstory. One of Franke’s daughters, Shari, recently published The House of My Mother, a book detailing the reality of growing up under this abuse and eventually being able to heal.
While Eight Passengers is a particularly violent example of the toxicity behind family content creators, there are still countless smaller issues with these accounts that aren’t discussed as often. An alarming example of this is the potential lack of consent given by younger children whose entire lives are subjected to the public nature of social media. Additionally, there is the risk of the family being cyberbullied, or the children being bullied in school because of their family’s online presence. In general, family content creation has bleak implications for the children involved.
Camper families are especially controversial due to concerns about the kids living in these situations. There are several family vloggers who live in camper vans consistently, and have built in a bathroom, kitchen, and more for their family to live in full time. While the families themselves idealize this lifestyle as “quiet” and “peaceful”, there is the obvious setback that the children are confined to such a tight living environment with little to no consistency in their lifestyle. These children are moved around numerous times throughout their lives, often do not attend school and are homeschooled, and are still consistently on camera in order to produce content for their family social media account. Essentially, camper family vloggers eliminate any semblance of normalcy and consistency from their kids’ lives.
Fortunately, there are a few family-centered content creators that are able to do their job in a way that is safe for their children. Lindsey Gurk is one of such influencers, a mother whose content mainly consists of skits mimicking the actions of her six year old son and three year old daughter. Throughout her social media accounts, she tries her best to blur the faces of her kids or even leave them out of her videos entirely. Instead, she makes interesting content about them by copying their actions in such a dramatic way that makes her videos even more hilarious. As a whole, Gurk follows the trend of making comedic videos about her children while still keeping them safe on the internet and protecting their privacy.
After seeing countless family social media accounts on Instagram, I’m compelled to argue that the concept of consistently putting videos of younger kids online for the world to see is morally wrong. Using children to boost the popularity of a family social media account could harm their development both socially and mentally, and parents of especially young children might even be unable to get proper consent from their kids to do so. Although, I will concede that there are family content creators such as Lindsey Gurk that use their creativity to make interesting content about their children while still keeping their family safe. Creators like Gurk prove that it is possible for all family social media accounts to make a shift that maintains the same type of family-centered content that preserves the privacy of the children involved. Other family content creators should make similar changes in order to protect their families from the invasive eye of the internet.
