One mother posts a video of her older son suffering a medical emergency and another of her newborn with his private area exposed. Another mom who admits to sharing the content that garners the most views: “the bloody noses, or the broken arms, or the emergency room visit.” An aspiring mom-fluencer “[focuses] on strategy, posting consistently … attempting to capture viral content.” The teenage daughter of yet another vlogging family feels “relief” when her mother isn’t around. She’s sometimes “paranoid” that too many moments of her life will be recorded and broadcast.
Welcome to the world of family vlogging, a dark corner of the internet where parents—mothers and fathers alike—document almost every minute of a child’s life into social media content. Once the kids reach adolescence, some ask their parents to stop. Some moms and dads agree—but others refuse.
The consumers of this content range from everyday moms to disparaging Redditors and pedophiles. They eagerly consume other families’ lives, participating in the multibillion-dollar industry supported by the companies that sponsor these posts, and the social media platforms that host them.
This is the ecosystem that journalist Fortesa Latifi describes in Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online. She introduces the contours of this complicated sector, where intimate family relationships are transformed into marketable content for public consumption.
Latifi has covered the family vlogging sphere for Teen Vogue, Cosmopolitan, The Washington Post, and other outlets. Her book features her candid conversations with influencer families that illuminate this parental subculture in which content ranges from anodyne celebrations of kids’ accomplishments to shocking, private posts that raise questions about vlogging’s potentially harmful effects on these superstar children.
I spoke with Latifi about vlogging’s impact on modern motherhood and the unnerving world revealed in her book. Our interview has been edited and condensed.
Finley Williams: When a non-influencer mom watches family content, is it the voyeurism or rubbernecking that you describe in the book, or is it that they want to see another mom going through the same thing or feel inspired?
Fortesa Latifi: It’s both. Especially when I was a new mom and I was watching these creators, it was that I felt that the entire world was still turning, and I was still, and I was in this world that no one else was in except for these moms online who were also obsessed with breastfeeding and nap times and getting your kid to sleep through the night. It felt like they were the only other ones on the journey with me even though I have an incredible village around me, but no one else was in the postpartum period with me physically and literally. But when I got on my phone and I saw other moms, I did feel less alone. But then again, there are also creators that I’ve followed or that I lurk that it is more of that car crash thing where I’m just like, “What are they doing?” I’m just fascinated by how different their motherhood is than mine and the choices that they make.
Tell me a little bit more about how content creation comes to define a vlogging family’s life and an influencer mom’s own relationship with parenthood.
It’s very complex to change a familial relationship to a business relationship and to suddenly feel like you owe your fans something that you previously only owed your family, which is your attention. I can imagine that if you suddenly have thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of adoring fans, that feels great, especially if you are “just” a mom who is often sidelined by the rest of society. That must feel really good, and I think leaving that behind would be really hard. Something that stuck out to me with that interview with that mom was she was like, “Sometimes I’ll buy dishes now and I’m like, do I really like these dishes? But if I posted a photo of the dishes and people were like, ‘These are so you,’ that would really confirm to me that I did like the dishes.” It’s this fascinating way that influencers live their lives online, but it’s a two-way mirror; it helps them understand themselves, too.
I grew up on social media and so I’m familiar with what can feel like an obligation to sometimes portray an idealized version of myself, even though I am not an influencer. Have the platforms’ pressures and incentives that led certain moms to become influencers seeped out to other parts of the internet and caused non-influencers to overshare?
We all feel that pressure to post. I feel that pressure because all of my Instagram and social media is focused on my career. But it’s funny—even my mom, who is not in any way an influencer, and is only on Instagram and Facebook—it was my birthday a few weeks ago, and my mom was like, “Do you think that we should post something for your birthday? Can you write something for my Facebook?” I feel like she always feels like she has to post something on our birthdays, and it’s like, why? And it’s not unique to her, and it’s not strange that she feels that way. It was my daughter’s birthday this weekend, and I don’t even show her online, but I was like, “That’s weird if I just don’t post anything.” I posted something with her face not showing, and I was like, “two years of motherhood,” and it feels like we have to validate ourselves in that way and exist in this other universe. It is a very strange feeling.
Parent influencers insist that they’re on social media because they’re proud of their kids or they want to inspire and comfort other families. But they hardly ever say that their motivations are financial. If family vloggers owned their monetary incentives, would that change the relationships with their audiences or the stories they tell themselves about content creation?
It is really hard for family vloggers and mom influencers to say, “Hey, I’m doing this for the money.” Anyone really in any career has a hard time admitting that, but I think if they admitted that the money is a big factor in their careers, that would be admitting to what everyone thinks of them, which is that they’re willing to exploit their kids for money. That would be incredibly painful, so they have to kind of create all these different reasons that it’s not about the money or that it’s about something else.
Maybe we could have a more honest conversation if they were willing to say, “It is because I am making this much money.” Some people who I talked to would say, “I can’t make this much money in another career,” and I really appreciated that candor. But if everyone were to say that, then it would be really hard because it would be basically saying, “The detractors are right about us, and it is for the money.”
Some elite family vloggers hire nannies, housekeepers, production staff, and marketing companies. They can earn hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars leading non-influencer moms to think: “I can be like that. Why aren’t I like that?” How should viewers think about their relationship to influencers?
It’s difficult because the job of a good influencer is to make you feel like you’re part of their family or to make you feel like you’re their friend. So it’s not like I look at people who feel that way and I’m like, “You’re silly or you’re dumb.” You’re having the reaction that they want you to have and that they work really hard on you having. Who am I to say? Maybe these influencers really do feel like their viewers are parts of their families.
There is a really strong parasocial relationship, but it also rings hollow because in a fundamental way, it is a business. Do viewers understand this contradiction?
They technically know at the bottom of their hearts that it’s a business relationship, but they often think that their relationship with that influencer is an exception. This is something that I saw throughout my interviews with fans. They would say, “I think that family vlogging is wrong,” or “I think that it can be exploitative, but this person does it differently and my fandom of them is different.” There’s this feeling that there’s an exception.
Is there a safe or right way to do family vlogging, one that protects kids, respects their privacy and autonomy, and inspires non-influencer moms without making them feel inadequate?
There’s ways to do it better. I don’t know that there’s a way to cover all of the bases that you said because that’s a really, really tall order. The best that parents can do is make decisions for their own kids and unfortunately, that’s part of the deal of childhood is that your parents consent to things without your consent. That’s just the inherent nature of the parent-child relationship. And then as you grow up, you have to grapple with the decisions that your parents made. But I think the difficult thing about being a family vlogging child or an influencer child is that you have to do that growing up and grappling in public. It’s not a tightrope that I would want to walk because it’s so difficult and it’s so rife with so many different moral and ethical quandaries that, for me, it’s just better not to give it a go.
