States Are Cracking Down on Mommy Bloggers. It’s About Time.

I’m not a mom, but that doesn’t stop TikTok and Instagram from thinking I am, or at least assuming I’m interested in what moms are doing. I scroll past a day in the life of a wealthy stay-at-home mom in New York City shuttling kids around Manhattan or moms of multiples corralling triplets into matching outfits and then into car seats in minivans — cribs, bottles, onesies, all in threes. Parents hold newborns up to the camera; the babies are captivated by their own image in selfie mode, staring with big, glassy eyes as their moms talk to their followers.

Family and child influencers, which grew from the original online network of mommy bloggers in the 2000s, are constantly finding their way onto For You pages. The influencer economy is worth $250 billion, and parent and child influencers claim a sizable slice of that pie. Top earners like Ryan’s World — the channel of a YouTuber who rose to fame at age 3 unboxing toys on camera — have raked in as much as $35 million a year. In a 2023 Morning Consult survey, 57% of Gen Z respondents said they wanted to be influencers.

The trend of kids playing influencer has gotten so unwieldy over the past two decades that lawmakers across the country are stepping in and attempting to regulate it. The trend started in 2023, and since, California, Utah, Minnesota, and Illinois have passed laws that mandate kids receive compensation in a trust if they appear in about one-third of someone’s monetized content or if the poster hits a certain income threshold from their content. Some give the children the right to demand the content be deleted when they become adults. Half a dozen or so more states are drafting their own bills. It’s a move that recognizes content creation as labor and not amateur home videos capturing kids being kids.

The laws are bolstered by the most heinous examples of parents abusing the children they force to perform in monetized videos. Shari Franke’s recently published memoir, “The House of My Mother,” is a look inside one of the most insidious cases of a parent exploiting children in a drive for online fame, one that involved abuse and the introduction of an abusive life coach into their family in Utah (her mother, Ruby Franke, is serving prison time for four counts of aggravated child abuse). Their family’s story became a major driving force behind the Utah law, which is set to take effect in May. Some parents have sold photos of their children in revealing outfits to men online, running Instagram accounts for their young daughters. A new Netflix docuseries, “Bad Influence,” alleges that the “momager” Tiffany Smith became verbally and physically abusive and forced preteens to work alongside her daughter for long hours to create YouTube content. (Some of the other former stars involved in the content settled a $1.85 million lawsuit with Smith last year. Smith’s daughter, Piper Rockelle, has denied the claims that her mother was abusive, and Smith said the docuseries showed a “false narrative.”)

For all the good intentions the laws bring, they lack teeth. There’s no enforcing body, critics say: The kid-fluencers would need to first know the laws exist and then have the resources to sue for their money once they turn 18 if their parents didn’t set up trusts. The laws require people to keep records of the content they created, compensation received, and what they deposited into accounts for their children. Even if there’s recourse to sue your parents, it’s likely to make coming home for the holidays more than awkward, and grown children of influencers may take these steps only in the most extreme circumstances. Even as the trend shows lawmakers want to do something about child influencers, they largely don’t address questions about whether children can or should consent to spending hours in front of a ring light or unboxing toys.

“It’s so tricky because on the one hand, these children are engaged in labor and deserve to be compensated for their labor,” Sara Petersen, the author of “Momfluenced,” tells me in an email. “But on the other hand, should these children be engaged in such labor?”

Petersen says the laws could normalize child labor and pave the way for children to be seen as employees of their parents, which could lead to more harm. As natural as influencing may look to the viewer, Petersen says, it’s really “the performance of a self,” which blurs the line between public and private aspects of life, even for adults. “I don’t think children are capable of the kind of psychological compartmentalization necessary in professional influencing, nor do I think they should be asked to be,” she adds.

Work is kind of everywhere and nowhere. Anybody with a device has already been experiencing that since the era of the smartphone.

Hilary C. Robinson, a professor of law and sociology at Northeastern University

Illinois was the first to pass such a law, which took effect in July, quickly followed by California. They take similar approaches: Content creators must set aside portions of earnings from content in which children appear and put it into a trust for when the kids turn 18. They’re modeled largely on the Coogan Law, which mandates child actors’ employers keep 15% of the kids’ income in a trust their parents can’t touch (some of the state laws use this 15% figure, while others require more income to be set aside). Utah passed its own law in March, which stipulates children receive pay for the time they’re featured if the accounts rake in more than $150,000 in a year. Utah has been a hub for mom influencers and tradwives. Women there, many of whom are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, show an idealistic version of home life and traditional gender norms, sometimes as a way to subtly evangelize their faith online, but also to monetize their roles as homemakers. Now the state is pivoting toward regulating how children use and are seen on the internet — both with the new kid-fluencer protections and with a new ban on smartphones and smartwatches in schools.

The biggest swing among the laws comes from Minnesota, where children under the age of 14 won’t be able to “work” in content come July. The new law there defines working as appearing in more than 30% of compensated content; if parents break this rule, children are entitled to sue for all the money made from the content. Those 14 and older who make their own content get to keep all the money under the law. The feasibility of the laws will be put to test in the courts if children grow up and do bring lawsuits, but Allison Fitzpatrick, a partner at the New York law firm Davis+Gilbert who represents brands that hire influencers, says “parents better start following these laws,” adding: “At some point, their child can sue them if they do not take these steps.”

Influencing has ballooned in the past decade and become a way to get work outside the traditional market. Before the last century, children always worked — first in agriculture or as apprentices to family businesses, and then in factories. Then we decided as a society that they shouldn’t be clocking in and out. Aside from carve-outs for child actors, some top-tier athletes, and after-school gigs, the US mostly outlawed child labor. But in recent years, there’s been a rise in states attempting to roll back some child labor regulations, and child labor violations have jumped. The proliferation of family influencers created a harder industry to regulate because so much of it takes place at home, in cars, or during daily life. “You went to the factory, you went to the coal mine, and you got the kids out of there,” Hilary C. Robinson, a professor of law and sociology at Northeastern University, says of past child labor crises. Now “work is kind of everywhere and nowhere,” she says, adding: “Anybody with a device has already been experiencing that since the era of the smartphone.”

There are shocking stories of exploitation, but most families don’t have anything close to a horror story unfolding out of frame. There are kids and teens who want to express themselves online and have broken through, connecting to their peers in huge ways. There are others pushed by their parents to do so. “It is difficult for any brand, or for any agency, to really understand what goes on in the four walls of a family home,” says Nick Walters, the president of SuperAwesome, a firm that represents brands and child influencers. Walters says his firm stays in close contact with families and will sever ties with those who don’t put children’s best interests first, perhaps by prioritizing content creation over schoolwork. He says he largely doesn’t see the regulations as a hit to the influencer business: “Sensible, common-sense regulation that recognizes that young people are going to be in these spaces, and make sure they are dealt with fairly and responsibly and in a way that is in their best interest — we are a huge supporter of that.”

Even as more people question whether and how children, or even themselves, should appear online, there’s a massive demand for family vlogging content. People simply can’t look away. “I don’t see these laws stopping the momentum that has taken place in the industry with respect to child influencers,” Fitzpatrick says. Some of the viewers are fans, but some are rage-watching. After several big-name influencer families moved out of California in quick succession, viral rumors circulated on social media that they were fleeing to avoid the state’s new law in February. It was largely a hoax, Rolling Stone reported at the time; some influencer families had left California but did so for personal reasons. “TikTokers’ outrage at parenting influencers isn’t actually about protecting children or ethics in content creation, it’s about pushing a moral panic for clicks and views — ironically the exact thing that they criticize influencers for,” the tech journalist Taylor Lorenz wrote recently in her newsletter, User Mag.

All this regulation is focused on the concept that influencing is labor and the kids doing the work deserve a slice of the pie. There are still questions for all of us to answer about how children appear online, and what can be done to protect their privacy. In Europe, there are stronger protections, like the “right to be forgotten,” that allow people to demand their images and data be removed from platforms (France passed a child influencer law in 2020, becoming a global pioneer in regulating the hours kid-fluencers worked and what happened to their compensation and enshrining a right for them to demand the deletion of videos they appear in).

For now, most Americans don’t have those privacy luxuries against Big Tech. These laws are one of the first steps in recognizing that people are going to post. If they’re lucky enough to strike gold, at least the kids propelling them to the top will see a cut.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.