Growing Up in Front of a Camera- When Children Become Content

Caitlín Quinn

We are living in a new era of social media, one defined by constant visibility, sharing and the quiet erosion of privacy.

Everyday life now unfolds in public, with ‘Day In The Life’s’, ‘Get Ready With Me’s’ and intimate routines taking over our feeds. Over time, this culture has normalised the sharing of moments that once belonged behind closed doors, encouraging us to document ordinary moments in extraordinary detail.

Within this atmosphere, sharing children has become innate. Parents post milestones, routines and private moments with little hesitation, a practice that has now been labelled ‘Sharenting’. For a generation that has grown up alongside social media, this behaviour often feels natural rather than deliberate. What began as sharing with friends and family, however, has expanded far beyond its original scope, as content has become visible in ways that have never been experienced before.

Crucially, this culture of everyday ‘sharenting’ has paved the way for the rise of family influencers, allowing the public consumption of childhood to feel normal and dangerously entertaining. When influencers share intimate details of family life with a swath of strangers, we rarely stop to ask the difficult question- is this actually right for us to be watching?

When everyone shares, no one pauses. However, childhood must not be reduced to a lifestyle aesthetic, and relatability cannot justify exposure. As children increasingly grow up in front of a camera, the law has been slow to confront what this shift means for their rights, privacy and protection.

At the heart of family influencing lies the absence of consent. Children do not possess the cognitive capacity to meaningfully understand what it means for their lives to be shared with, in some cases, millions of strangers. They cannot grasp the permanence, scale or long-term consequences of growing up online.

Despite this, a common defence is that children ‘enjoy’ being on camera, but enjoyment is not consent and childhood preference has never been the benchmark for determining what is in a child's best interests. Children also enjoy skipping school and eating sweets for breakfast, yet parental responsibility exists because children do not understand long-term consequences!

As Creator Bobbi Althoff noted, “I’ve decided to make it my job to entertain people but it’s not my kids’ job”. Althoff’s decision to preserve her children's privacy reflects a recognition often overlooked in influencer culture that children will not remain children forever. They deserve a ‘blank slate’ to form identities unshaped by a digital footprint of their lives since birth.

A further troubling aspect of family influencing is the absence of any meaningful boundary between public performance and private life. Comparisons are often made to child actors, yet the distinction is clear. Child actors perform on regulated sets, within limited hours and crucially, they go home when filming ends. Influencer children are unfortunately awarded no such boundary. Their home becomes the set, and they effectively become the props as McCarty stated, “it's like living in a movie set all day, every day”.

This erosion of boundaries is particularly important for children, as the home traditionally functions as a child's primary space of sanctuary. The home should be a place of privacy, safety, comfort and rest, and constant filming erodes this role. With tripods in the corner, Santa reactions, morning and night-time routines framed as content, wholesome memories are transformed into public entertainment.

Importantly, while audiences see a short, curated clip, what remains invisible are the repeated takes required to produce that ‘natural content’.

There is no clear line between living and performing. Children do not clock in and clock out, they grow up under observation, creating a reality that is increasingly reminiscent of The Truman Show, except that unlike Truman, these children are aware of the camera and yet remain powerless to escape it!

The consequences of online exposure do not require celebrity-level fame to emerge. Bullying, both online and offline, can arise even when a parent has a relatively small or local public platform.

The internet functions as a permanent record and when intimate details of a child's life are publicly accessible, they can shape how that child is treated by their peers. Children whose family life and moments of vulnerability are shared online may find this information weaponised in schools where classmates have unparalleled insight into their private lives. As CNN reported, oversharing has led to situations where “bullies used information to mock” children.

These risks intensify with larger platforms. Children associated with popular influencer accounts vicariously become public figures, subjected not only to peer bullying but also to hostile commentary from strangers, media scrutiny and online ridicule. Comment sections become spaces of judgement, where children, who never chose to be visible in the first place, are criticised, compared and even mocked. Even fleeting childhood moments can be transformed into viral content, as evidenced by Molly-Mae's daughter Bambi, whose embarrassing moments have circulated widely online.

Beyond bullying, online exposure creates tangible safety risks. When routines, school uniforms and familiar locations are posted to public feeds, strangers are provided with information that would usually be considered private. It is increasingly common for members of the public to recognise children they have never met, simply because they see them repeatedly online.

These risks are sadly not confined to public spaces. Influencers, including local creator Annalivia Hynds, have had to publicly condemn strangers arriving at their homes. However, these incidents expose a troubling paradox. When family life and locations are consistently shared for content, privacy is often sidestepped rather than safeguarded. Wanting privacy is legitimate, but it cannot coexist with sustained public exposure. Once the home is made visible, the boundary between private life and public exposure becomes increasingly difficult to defend.  

These dangers are further amplified by emerging AI technologies. Recent controversies surrounding AI tools, including X’s Grok, have highlighted how publicly available images can be manipulated and sexualised. Once a child's image is online, control is lost. Disturbingly, the Children’s Foundation reported that 50% of children's media shared on paedo-criminal forums have been initially posted by their own parents. Whether parents intend harm is irrelevant, the possibility that a child’s image may reach dangerous hands is now an unavoidable feature of public posting.

A new era of child labour?

The monetisation of family content raises an uncomfortable and often overlooked issue. When children regularly feature in revenue-generating content, are they participating in play or in work?

While often framed as ‘normal family life’, the reality is hard to ignore. Where parents profit because their children appear on screen, those children are contributing economic value.

Yet despite this, children remain unrecognised as workers. Within the UK, decisions about labour, exposure and earnings rest almost entirely within the discretion of parents who act both as their children’s bosses and caregivers.

This imbalance has prompted growing legal concern. In the United States, states such as California and Illinois now require that a portion of income generated from online content must be set aside for the children featured in it. While these measures are a step in the right direction, they remain limited, leaving most children worldwide without any financial protection at all.

More importantly, financial safeguards fail to address the real harms. As creator Easom warned, “any money will be greatly overshadowed by years of suffering”, highlighting that lost privacy, safety and childhood cannot be compensated by money.

Financial regulation may determine who gets paid, but it fails to address the fundamental question of whether children should be on our screens at all.

Crucially, warning signs already exist. The experiences of YouTuber family channels offer a stark reminder of the harms that arise when childhood becomes content.

Former child stars of YouTube have increasingly spoken out about the damaging toll of growing up in front of the camera. What makes the current moment of social media stand out is that platforms like TikTok have made content creation more accessible and easier to monetise. A single viral video to transform family life into a career almost overnight!

In its most extreme form, the dangers of unregulated family content were exposed by the case of the ‘8 Passengers’, a popular family vlogging channel whose creator was later convicted of child abuse. While not representative of all family influencers, such a case must function as warnings rather than anomalies.

Most strikingly, those who lived this reality as children are now urging lawmakers to intervene. As the eldest of the 8 Passengers children warned legislators, “there is no ethical or moral family vlogger”. These are pleas from the very unprotected individuals whose childhoods were turned into content.

We must not wait for another generation of children to grow up as victims before we make changes!

Despite the ever-increasing scale and relevance of this issue, the law has failed to match the pace of influencer culture, and it is not due to a lack of awareness. A House of Commons committee identified child influencers as a legal grey areain 2022, warning that children featured in online content were left without meaningful protection in relation to pay, privacy, consent and working conditions.

Four years on, social media has only grown, and yet the legal landscape remains largely unchanged, a situation the committee aptly labelled as ‘Lights, Camera, Inaction’.

While the UK has long-standing child labour laws, they were designed for a pre-digital world and do not apply to user-generated content. As a result, the children who appear daily on our screens are not recognised as “working children” and are denied the safeguards afforded to child actors in traditional media.

International examples demonstrate that regulation is both possible and necessary. France has taken a proactive approach, becoming the first country to enshrine “the right to be forgotten”, allowing child influencers to request the removal of content featuring them. This reflects the understanding that children cannot fully understand the permanence of their digital exposure. While such measures are not without limitations in an era of screenshots and re-uploads, they underline the crucial awareness that children's rights online must not remain a “lawless area”

The UK’s continued ignorance is increasingly difficult to justify. It is now time for the UK to regulate children online, to ensure no vulnerable child slips through the cracks.

While influencers are central to this debate because of their reach, the issue is not exclusive to them. A broader culture of sharing has made children increasingly visible, and we all play a role in sustaining it. Every view, like and share rewards a system that profits from childhood exposure without offering protection in return.

As the law continues to lag behind culture, responsibility does not rest solely with legislators. It also lies with the public to question what has become normalised on our feeds.

Childhood must not be entertainment. As the Data Protection Commission has urged, we must learn to ‘pause before we post’. The warnings have already been given- responsibility now rests with both law and society to ensure children can grow up away from the lens.