Family-centered content creation is an overstuffed toy chest of contradictions. Its meticulous mise en scène is that of candid, improvisational home life. Its ostensibly D.I.Y. output is financed by brand partnerships and affiliate marketing. It takes private and noninstrumental moments of childhood—potty-training mishaps, menarche, barfing—and makes them public and transactional; see, for example, the prominent mommy vlogger Aubree Jones, whose tween daughter’s first period was effectively sponsored by a feminine-hygiene brand. Jones’s seventh child, born last year, is named Disney. If “Infinite Jest” were a conjuration spell, it would manifest a momfluencer.

The most successful and lucrative family vlogs are indiscreet almost by definition—and yet the wrong kind of indiscretion can derail the whole gravy train. The vlogger Jordan Cheyenne, for one, wrecked her sharenting career by accidentally posting footage of herself coaching her son, who was distraught over the family’s sick puppy, to make a specific kind of sad face for YouTube. (“Act like you’re crying, really quick,” she prompted him. “I am crying,” he wailed in reply.)

Perhaps the strangest paradox of the sharenting economy, however, can be found simply in the staggering number of views, subscribers, and advertising dollars flowing toward content that is excruciatingly boring when it is not excruciatingly uncomfortable. In her new book, “Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online,” the journalist Fortesa Latifi acknowledges that even some of the most popular sharenting content, which can net its creators millions of dollars a year, is “objectively not that interesting” and “almost wildly mundane.” The young stars of these videos might be opening Amazon packages, sitting in a dentist’s chair, lip-synching to Morgan Wallen in an all-white kitchen beneath a giant box-pendant light fixture, or barfing. The mystery of why anyone would watch these displays is compounded by how little we know of the watchers themselves or of how their views are monetized, because social-media platforms are generally reticent to share demographic breakdowns of user data and ad revenues. Or, as America’s greatest advertising mind, Don Draper, once said, “Who knows why people do what they do?”

We know a little, though. We know that pedophiles make up a disturbing proportion of the audience for family- and child-centered social-media content, and that the advent of generative A.I. has turned these images and videos into potential fodder for child sexual-abuse material. (Last month, a jury in New Mexico found that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, failed to protect young users from sexual exploitation and ordered the company to pay three hundred and seventy-five million dollars in damages; Meta plans to appeal.) Bots are often in the mix, too, along with the hate-watchers who populate the “snark communities” devoted to family vloggers on Reddit. But, when Latifi conducted her own survey of hundreds of fans of sharenting content, she identified another, perhaps overlooked category of viewer: a child, teen, or young adult searching for an outlet from a lonely or volatile situation in their own home. The “presentation of perfect family life from vloggers,” Latifi explains, “was how they achieved that escape.”

“Like, Follow, Subscribe” is decently reported, if clunkily written; it lacks the legal and philosophical acumen of Leah A. Plunkett’s “Sharenthood” or the sociological insights that Kathryn Jezer-Morton brings to her studies of momfluencers. The strongest and most original passages of Latifi’s book, however brief, are devoted to her survey participants, who say that clicking on kidfluencer content helped them feel like “part of a community,” even like “part of their family.” One of these fans, who described herself as a onetime “isolated homeschooler,” told Latifi, “It was my way of experiencing the world when I was stuck at home all day.”

Ironically, this isolated homeschooler was likely watching other homeschoolers. Traditional school systems are not a draw for mega-momfluencers such as Hannah Neeleman, of @BallerinaFarm (nine children, more than ten million Instagram followers); Jessica Ballinger, of @BallingerFamily (six children, more than three million YouTube subscribers); or Kristine Pack, of @FamilyFunPack (eight children, more than ten million YouTube subscribers), all of whom have homeschooled. Aubree Jones, in a 2023 post on her TikTok account (more than two million followers), offered three reasons that she homeschools, starting with “efficiency”—she boasted that her kids could complete their daily schoolwork in two hours or less, and suggested that an average day at a traditional school stretches to six or more hours to provide “day care” to working parents. Two was “flexibility”: Jones can choose what her children learn and, just as important, when they take vacations (which generate great content!). Third and last was “mass shootings.”

A fourth reason, obvious but unspoken, is that homeschooled kids have more time and availability to make stuff for the family vlog. In this respect, power sharenters may homeschool for the same reason that schools in farming communities used to close down during spring planting and fall harvests: so that the kids could stay home and work.

The social-media ascent of the religious-conservative “trad wife,” and of the von Trapp-size brood skipping blondly behind her, is inextricable from the material conditions necessary for a typical family-vlogging operation, in which a stay-at-home mother is the main producer-director and, ideally, adds fresh infants to her cast of characters on a roughly biennial schedule. (Several of Latifi’s sources in the family-vlogging industry believe, incredibly or not, that some sharenters “are explicitly choosing to have more children for brand deals.”) In its specific appeal to evangelical Christian and Mormon communities, including the semi-apostates of what’s often referred to as MomTok, mommy vlogging has striking parallels with multilevel marketing: both industries offer money-making opportunities that are supposedly compatible with traditional homemaking, and both demand constant leveraging of personal relationships in order to achieve and sustain success.

What makes sharenting far more ominous, of course, is that its practitioners must chase the mood swings of the social-media algorithm if they want to extract maximum value from family life. Positive pregnancy tests and squishy newborns usually deliver strong returns. So does footage of a child in physical or emotional pain. As a lower-tier mommy vlogger tells Latifi, “The videos that got the most eyes on them are the ones that had the bloody noses, or the broken arms, or the emergency room visit, or whatever.” One of the pinned posts on the Instagram page of Jamie Otis Hehner (a million followers) is a video of her toddler son suffering a febrile seizure as one of his siblings sobs in the background.

The abundant risks and perverse incentives of the sharenting industry have, in recent years, inspired some well-meaning legislation. In 2023, Illinois became the first state to pass a law explicitly intended to safeguard the earnings of kidfluencers, requiring that a percentage of profits from monetized content be placed in a trust until the child reaches the age of eighteen. Since then, several more states—including the nation’s two busiest sharenting hubs, Utah and California—have either passed new laws or amended existing ones to similar ends, extending the same protections to the child stars of social media that have long been in place for their counterparts in film and television.

But the texts of these new laws—which are heavily predicated on a kidfluencer’s willingness to sue his or her own parents—are at turns vague, confounding, and possibly toothless. Utah’s law, which came into effect last year, specifies that family vloggers “shall use the formula E = (A/T) * (Q/S) * (M/2) or the formula E = 245 (A/T) * (1/X) * (M/2) to determine the qualifying minor’s earnings”; this alphabet soup of variables requires tallying “all paid minutes featuring any qualifying minor.” As is the case in other states, Utah not only puts parents in charge of this complex bookkeeping but also appoints them as their children’s trustees—and all in the name of protecting children’s earnings from greedy parents. The fox is still guarding the henhouse, but at least now the hens can sue.

Some legislatures are attempting to find additional legal remedies for former kidfluencers who believe that they were harmed by oversharing parents. Utah and Minnesota have recently codified formal processes that allow minors to request the deletion of content in which they appear, but these seem open to any number of challenges on First Amendment grounds. Arkansas’s Child Content Creation Protection Act, which will take effect in July, makes it “unlawful to financially benefit” from airing “any visual depiction of a minor with the intent to sexually gratify or elicit a sexual response in the viewer or any other person.” This provision, which is aimed at parents who share images of their underage daughters in bikinis and leotards for a monetized audience of perverts, describes an objectively abhorrent phenomenon, but in inevitably subjective terms.

As more and more kidfluencers come of age, and as they confront all that may have been lost or broken in their childhoods, they are likely to find that the law is an imperfect instrument for restitution. Multiple U.S. Supreme Court decisions, dating to the nineteen-twenties, have strongly favored parents’ rights to determine the best interests of their children, as the attorney Shreya Agarwala explained in a superb 2025 article in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. Privacy law may apply to, say, a stranger who broadcasts a toddler’s febrile seizure to a potential audience of millions, but the same child generally cannot claim a legal right to privacy from his mother or father. Similarly, a minor may feel that her reputation has been permanently warped by embarrassing childhood footage of her tantrums or bathroom accidents, but, Agarwala writes, defamation law is a bulwark against falsehoods, not against the disclosure of true events that your parents immortalized for clicks. Agarwala briefly mulls whether public-health campaigns on the dangers of sharenting might be more effective than legal action—and the answer may well have been yes in a pre-COVID, pre-R.F.K., Jr., era of institutional trust.

Maybe it’s not too fantastical to hope for a surprise shift in the Zeitgeist, one that compels members of the family-vlogging élite to start withdrawing their kids from view. Maybe quiet parenting, like quiet quitting and quiet luxury before it, could catch on as a meme among key influencers. Maybe concealing one’s children from social media could become a status symbol, and putting them on public display could acquire a useful stigma—not that I’d want to wish disgrace on mommy vloggers. I’d rather not know anything about them at all. “It’s a dark place to be,” a former sharenter tells Latifi, “watching other women do things.” ♦