Episode Transcript
Caymi Barrett: I think when I first started to notice that like, hey, this is kind of really weird and like we need to kind of tone it down is when I was hit by a drunk driver. Like immediately my mom pulled out her camera. The first responders were there. I was being strapped down to a stretcher because I had like a spinal injury and I was really scared. I was vomiting and my mom was just like in the back of the ambulance like taking pictures and taking little clips of everything going on.
Morgan Sung: Caymi Barrett is 26 now, and the internet has always been part of her life. In the 2000s, her mom was a mommy blogger. And throughout her childhood, Caymi’s most vulnerable moments were posted online to thousands of strangers.
Caymi Barrett: It’s something I still just very vividly remember. I never know how to explain it other than just kind of like an out -of -body experience. I wanted my mom there to comfort me. I wanted my mom to hold my hand. I was experiencing so much fear and pain in silence because I was just in shock. I had a concussion and meanwhile, my mom was just taking pictures and like writing up a post about literally what had just happened. So it was probably like a five minute ambulance drive. From the time of the accident to the moment we got to the hospital, there was already one post up. And I remember a nurse came up to me and she asked me if I was in pain. And I just said, “No, I want my mom.” But she was at the foot of the bed making a Facebook post, like another update.
Morgan Sung: The mommy blogger scene of the early aughts laid the groundwork for family vlogging today. That’s vlogging with a V, as in like video blog. It’s an entire genre of content on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram.
Family Vlogger 1: Hello everyone and welcome back to my channel.
Family Vlogger 2: Hey babies! Welcome back! My name is Bronte, for those of you who are new here.
Family Vlogger 3: Good morning. Let’s cook breakfast for 10, 10 year olds.
Morgan Sung: Family vlogs and momfluencers make up a multi -billion dollar industry. Like the mommy blogs that came before them, family channels are often an outlet for parents to share advice and open up about the very difficult realities of raising tiny humans. But when your entire livelihood revolves around making content about your kids, I’ll Caymi explain.
Caymi Barrett: It’s caused a lot of paranoia, a lot of anxiety. There’s a lot of things that people don’t necessarily think about. And throughout the years, it’s been really hard to kind of navigate life with a non -consensual digital footprint.
Morgan Sung: Caymi was 15 then, and her mom had crossed the line plenty of times before. But this particular incident with a drunk driver changed everything for her.
Caymi Barrett: After that, I just felt very exposed and I started to isolate myself a lot. So I had reconstructive surgery and I had a spinal injury and so I was prescribed some heavy narcotic pain medication and that was kind of how I just got through the rest of my teen years by isolating and unfortunately becoming addicted to substances because I just wanted to numb everything that was happening in my real life and then I had also no control of what was being posted on social media.
Morgan Sung: Caymi checked herself into rehab when she turned 18. Since then, she’s been working on rebuilding her relationship with her mom and also with the internet. That means protecting the kids who are going through what she went through. Caymi started speaking out about her own experience a few years ago on TikTok to raise awareness and advocate for the right to privacy for child influencers.
Caymi Barrett: When I started seeing people talking about how these family channels don’t affect kids and it’s fine because they get all these free things, I just was like, “Hey, that’s actually really not the case. Like, it’s actually really hard to grow up with all of these things attached to your name.”
Morgan Sung: Multiple states are trying to establish protections for kids who appear in their parents’ content. Caymi actually testified in some of those hearings. A few states have already passed laws about child influencers. On paper, the fact that there’s any legal protection for kids online is huge. But are these laws enforceable? And what gaps do they leave when it comes to regulating this massive content industry?
This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung:, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.
To understand the latest attempts to regulate it, we need to get into where this industry even started. New tab. How did family vlogging get so big? And to walk us through this issue, we’re calling up Fortesa Latifi. She’s been reporting on this world of family channels for years and is working on a book about child influencers.
Fortesa Latifi: So the first big family vlogging families really took off in the aughts. So I wanna say around like between 2006 to like 2010, that was when they first really started making a ton of money from YouTube. And I think part of the reason that the families that got in then were so successful is because it was not over-saturated yet.
Morgan Sung: So we had the early aughts of like, these are like the beginning of family vloggers and then the mid 2010s to late 2010s, that was kind of what I have seen as the golden age of family vlogging. What was that age like? What kind of content were they making?
Fortesa Latifi: Back in the day on YouTube, it was very much just like, “Come along with me as I get my six kids ready for school,” or like “This is the day in the life of a mom with like five kids.” And you’ll notice that’s changed over the years. Like on YouTube, things had to ratchet up a lot. It was a lot of challenges. It was a lot of kind of trying to like outdo each other. One video that sticks in mind for me is this one family, the Family Fun Pack. I think they have like seven or eight kids and they did like a “We’re gonna only eat a specific color food.”
Family Fun Pack: So I have a challenge planned for the kids today. They may or may not like it, but I’m about to go tell them what it is right now. They have no idea.
Fortesa Latifi: So like this kid only could eat green food for a day, this kid could only eat purple food for a day. And it was just like these kind of like silly challenges. And then once there became more people in the space, you had to do more to get noticed. So things started getting more personal and people would post videos of their sick kids and like come along with me to the emergency room for little Joey and there’s videos of him crying and bleeding or whatever. And then there’s videos of young women talking about getting their menstrual cycles for the first time or getting the sex talk. Like I cannot tell you in the research of my book how many sex talk videos I stumbled upon from family bloggers.
Family Vlogger 4: I don’t want them to learn about sex and how we get pregnant from just anybody. I don’t want them to learn from somebody at school. And then they also get kind of a memento to remind them as they get older about this special time when they learned about how we have babies.
Fortesa Latifi: And I was just like, “Whoa, this is a little wild.”
Morgan Sung: Right. It seems like to get engagement, it’s almost incentivized to be increasingly intimate and personal. And I don’t, I mean, exploitative? Is that the right word? You know?
Fortesa Latifi: I mean, I think a lot of people consider that the exact right word. In the research for my book, I talked to a bunch of family vloggers and I asked them what is the content that does the best and several of them told me if a kid is hurt or sick or upset, that does really well. And so, you know, that kind of feeds into its own little monster there.
Morgan Sung: It seems like this pushback against family vloggers, this like conversation about protecting child influencers is relatively new. Like it’s only been in the last couple of years that people are actually questioning the ethics of this industry. It’s probably because there are particularly egregious cases of child abuse that came out of this industry. Can we talk about that?
Fortesa Latifi: So there’s two cases that really stick out to me. And one is, I’m sure you’re familiar with the Stauffer case.
Morgan Sung: Myka Stauffer was a YouTuber who built a following with videos about cleaning tips, parenting, and then trying to get pregnant after a miscarriage. Back in 2016, Micah and her husband announced that they were in the process of adopting a disabled baby boy from China. They were already popular, but their views skyrocketed with the adoption videos. They made a lot of monetized content about their adopted son and his medical needs.
Myka Stauffer: If anything, my child is not returnable. And we, without a doubt in our minds, we knew, no matter what state he came to us, that we would love him.
Morgan Sung: And then, followers noticed that he stopped appearing in videos.
Fortesa Latifi: And then she made this like tearful apology video basically saying that he was living with another family and that he wasn’t in their family anymore. And it kind of went viral as like this YouTube mom rehomed her adoptive son after making money off of him and she was still after he wasn’t living there still had videos on YouTube that were monetized about him. And so there was kind of this outcry. And so that was the first thing that I think really like planted the seed for people. And then the eight passengers and Ruby Franke, I don’t even wanna call it a scandal because it’s child abuse, it’s not a scandal, but that entire case.
Morgan Sung: And what happened there?
Fortesa Latifi: Yeah, so Ruby Franke, her and her husband, Kevin, had this YouTube channel called 8 Passengers, and it was called 8 Passengers because they had six kids and so the eight of them. And they had over two million subscribers at their height. I kind of consider them to be family vlogging royalty at the time. They kind of faced this sort of cancelation where Ruby had posted a video where her son said that he hadn’t slept on a bed in seven months as punishment.
News Anchor 1: She explained her teenage son Chad had been sleeping on a bean bag for months.
Chad Franke: I was sleeping on a beanbag since October and they gave me my room back like two weeks ago.
Fortesa Latifi: And people were like, “Wait, wait, wait, what?” Like, everyone was like, thought that Ruby had been kind of like a strict mom, but then this kind of like pushed it over the edge. And so people started digging into like, what is going on with this family? And then a couple of years later, Ruby was arrested for aggravated child abuse.
News Anchor 2: A once popular parenting YouTuber, Ruby Franke, will spend up to 60 years in prison.
News Anchor 3: She pleaded guilty to numerous charges, including things like holding a child’s head underwater, putting her hand over a child’s mouth and nose so they couldn’t breathe, kicking a child while she was wearing boots.
Fortesa Latifi: And so that was kind of the second thing. You had like Myka Stauffer and then you had Ruby Franke where people were like, “There is a darkness behind the perfect veneer of the YouTube vlogging family.”
Morgan Sung: Parents are supposed to be responsible for protecting their children, but clearly that isn’t always happening with family vloggers in this very lucrative industry. So is there anything out there to protect these kids? I think that’s a new tab, Child Influencer Protections. So last year, California Governor Gavin Newsom actually signed two pieces of legislation that have to do with child influencers. The first expands something called the Coogan Law.
Morgan Sung: It’s a 1939 law named after a silent film star named Jackie Coogan, who worked his entire childhood. And basically, by the time he was an adult, there was no money left for him. So now, California requires that 15 % of whatever a child performer earns is saved in a trust for when that child turns 18.
But until last year, the Coogan Law only applied to child actors, as in kids who are working on actual film or television sets. This expansion extends the law to child content creators. That includes vloggers, influencers, streamers, podcasters. Whenever a kid, or their family, is paid directly to post something online. It’s pretty straightforward. But California’s other law is unclear. Here’s Fortesa again to explain.
Fortesa Latifi: So SB 764 dictates that content creators who feature minor children in at least 30% of their content must set aside a proportionate percentage of the earnings from that content to be held in a trust account until the child is 18.
Morgan Sung: Now you may be wondering what does proportionate percentage even mean?
Fortesa Latifi: So I’ve reached out to lawyers to ask and experts what a proportionate percentage like what that really means in practice and I haven’t been able to get like a good solid answer. Like the worry here is that you would need like a forensic accountant who has a specialization in social media to even know the right amount of money that should have been saved for you.
Like I can’t imagine going back through maybe like a decade of like YouTube and TikTok videos and trying to calculate like, “How much was I in this video? 29%. Okay, and they made $6 ,000 off it.” It’s very complicated, but I don’t know that there’s a better way. I’m not saying I have a better idea. And I think that kind of speaks to the convoluted nature of both the industry and attempts to regulate the industry.
Morgan Sung: It doesn’t even touch on other protections for traditional child actors, like making sure they’re in school or that they’re allowed to take breaks. How do you even enforce something like that though?
Fortesa Latifi: I don’t know. I think it’s so difficult because this work is happening largely in the home, right? Being a family vlogger, inherently your work is in your home and it is with your children and that’s really difficult. We know how this country feels about the government stepping in between parents and children.
Morgan Sung: Right. So, how do these new laws in California compare to similar laws in other states?
Fortesa Latifi: So Illinois was first, Minnesota was second, and California was third. Illinois’s law is pretty similar to California’s law. Minnesota’s takes it a step further, and they have this clause that’s basically considered the right to be deleted. And so it states that upon reaching the age of 18, the former child influencer can request the deletion of content. I do think that that was Minnesota’s attempt to address the privacy concerns.
But it’s also like, I don’t know, I sound like a boomer when I say this, but I feel like once something is on the internet, it really is kind of on the internet forever, especially like with these famous kids. Like you see it with the eight passengers stuff, right? Like after Ruby was arrested for child abuse, their channel was taken off of YouTube. And I’ve asked family members and they didn’t delete it. So it seems that YouTube took it offline in the wake of this arrest. But you can still find clips everywhere. Like if you look up Ruby Frankie on TikTok, you can watch entire vlogs.
Morgan Sung: So, this content thrives on platforms like YouTube and Instagram and TikTok, but do you see these platforms taking any action to protect these kids?
Fortesa Latifi: No.
Morgan Sung: Why?
Fortesa Latifi: I mean, what’s in it for them, you know? Like, I think these are companies that make a lot of money off of content featuring influencer kids. Family vlogging is a multi -billion dollar industry. I don’t think that there’s any reason for them to step in when it is so lucrative for them. Like that’s not their job to think about the child. That’s the parents’ job. The platform’s job is to make money which they’re doing off of this content.
Morgan Sung: So social media platforms have no incentive to restrict family vlogging and the new laws aren’t foolproof, not to mention a mess to enforce. Like Fortesa mentioned, it’s on the parents to have their kids’ best interests at heart. Well, when it comes to influencers who make a living off of sharing almost every aspect of their lives, what does that even look like? The answer, after this break. Now back to the story. When it comes to influencers sharing their kids’ lives online, is the tide changing at all? Okay, new tab. Influencers taking kids offline.
Fortesa Latifi: I’ve noticed this in the last couple of years where huge influencers who built their considerable platforms off of showing their kids and sharing their life with their kids have reversed course. The biggest person that comes to mind for me is Maia Knight.
Morgan Sung: Right. She was a single mom who had twins.
Fortesa Latifi: Yes. Yeah. She would be holding both the babies and making bottles at the same time. It was just these very real videos. She got super famous. Got like 8 million followers on TikTok. And after a year or two, she decided, “I’m going to take my daughters off of TikTok and Instagram and everything.”
Maia Knight: They’re toddlers now and I have decided to not show them anymore. I’m making a choice for my daughters to protect them. Am I going to lose followers? Yes I’m going to. Am I going to lose 8 million followers? I hope not.
Fortesa Latifi: And there was a huge amount of backlash to that. And it was fascinating because I think there were several camps. Some people were like, “How dare you? We love them. We’re their TikTok aunties. You can’t do this,” which like, parasocial. Yeah. And I’m sure I’ve talked to other huge creators who have taken their kids offline and they told me that reactions like that totally solidify their choice and they’re like, this is why I’m doing it.
And then there was another camp who were like, “Maya has been exploiting her kids and now that she has this huge like brand, she’s taking them off, but it’s too late.” Which like, I don’t really understand as a concept. It’s like, do you want that to happen or do you not? I think there’s this like purity test kind of thing. Like there’s this idea. among detractors that if you ever show your kid online at all, you are evil and immoral. And I totally do not believe that.
And then there are people who have become moms in their influencing careers and have never shown their kids at all. And that’s really fascinating to me as a reporter, because a few years ago there was never a question about whether an influencer would show their kid online or not. Like if you were having a baby, like that baby was gonna be in a ton of content. But now when a public facing influencer is pregnant, there is the question of like, “Which camp kind of are they gonna go into?”
Morgan Sung: Right, I remember when family vloggers would announce that they were pregnant again, they would start an Instagram account for the fetus, post ultrasounds, they were posting the kid before they were even born.
Fortesa Latifi: Yeah, yeah, and narrating like the fetus’s thoughts and like
Morgan Sung: Yeah, like I can’t wait to meet you all. It’s like that is a six-month-old fetus.
Fortesa Latifi: Yeah, no, that kind of stuff has definitely fallen out of favor. Although, I don’t want to make it seem as though the majority of influencers aren’t showing their kids because they are, definitely. But there is this growing contingent where they’re not. And this is even happening among regular people. It’s not only influencers, it’s regular people who have a couple hundred followers who are like, I don’t really want to put my kid on Instagram or on TikTok. It’s interesting because I’ll interview these parents and I’m like, why did you not want to put your kid online or why did you not want to announce your pregnancy? And they have like specific reasons like online footprint which again, we were not talking about a few years ago or like worries about AI, but there’s also just this like sense of like uneasiness and just being like, “Why would I?” Which is fascinating to me.
Morgan Sung: I mean, you just had a baby, so congratulations, by the way, and you also fell into that camp of like, not announcing your pregnancy, you kind of just hard launched with like a baby. How did you come to that decision to never post your child’s face online?
Fortesa Latifi: Yeah. You know, I thought about this a lot. And obviously I was doing like a lot of this reporting on influencer kids and like what their lives are like. And not that I’m an influencer in any way, but like I said, kind of the way that influencers live their lives trickles down to the rest of us, like plebeians. And so we were all kind of just becoming more aware of like privacy. And when I was pregnant, I… just had this gut feeling that I just didn’t want anyone who didn’t know me in real life to know. And even now, I feel so strongly about it that I don’t want her to be on the internet and that I don’t want information or photos of her to be on the internet.
Morgan Sung: Yeah, I mean. There’s also a lot of discussion about whether or not you can talk about your kids online or write about parenting without exposing your kid. I mean, what are your thoughts on this?
Fortesa Latifi: I am very much trying to figure this out because I have benefited so much from the writing and the content of other moms specifically and like being able to watch really personal moments in their lives and have them talk about postpartum depression or their struggles with sleep training or whatever it is and like I have learned things about their kids. Like, I have benefited so much and I’m sure they benefited from sharing it. And I don’t think that we need to go back to a time when moms were not allowed to talk about what motherhood and parenthood is like. And I’m saying moms, because most parenthood content online is by moms. I’ve heard this from other creators too, is that they try to think, what will my kid think about this in five years, in 10 years, in 15 years?
And I’ve also talked to kids of those first mommy bloggers and – I’m not saying this is the experience of every kid of a mom blogger, but the ones that I’ve talked to are like, “It is incredible to read how my mom felt when she was raising me and what she thought.” And they have these like incredible records, you know? So I also, I don’t want to take it too far on one side either.
Morgan Sung: Can you speak to the way that this industry and just overarching culture is changing the relationships between kids and parents?
Fortesa Latifi: It’s just so complicated and obviously parents have to make choices for their kids that the kids might not agree with later. But I think how many choices has really just been exacerbated by the internet and by the way it’s able to change people’s lives. And that’s the thing is I hear from a lot of parents who are like, “My kid is begging me to start a YouTube channel, like my kid wants to be a YouTuber and influencer.” And like yeah, that I understand.
And like, from the kids point of view, like, why wouldn’t they want to, you know? But I think the parent has to make the best decision that they can at the time. And I think sometimes those decisions change, like you see with parents changing their minds later and taking their kids offline. And I think as a culture, just like generally, we need to be more accepting of people like changing their minds.
Morgan Sung: This is one of those internet rabbit holes that ultimately just doesn’t have a single answer at the end. These laws are a start, but enacting real change also involves a larger cultural shift in the way that we consume and post content. Remember Caymi? She’s the former mommy blogger kid who grew up and became an advocate for child influencers. She thinks kids should be allowed to exist without a camera in their face. And if you’re an influencer kid, here’s her advice to you.
Caymi Barrett: As you get older, you’re gonna meet so many people who are so different from, your parents are so different from the people who have viewed you your entire childhood, and they’re going to see you for who you are instead of seeing you for what your parents posted. I think it’s really important to literally be a kid, like, by yourself, at school, even if you have a friend that you trust to talk to about this. It’s so hard carrying all of it on your shoulders alone, but you don’t have to. And I wish that I had known that as a kid. Yeah, we’re fighting for y’all. We’re not gonna stop.
Morgan Sung: For now, let’s close these tabs.
Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our Producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show. Sound design by Maya Cueva and original music by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard.
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