--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The holidays are finally here. Time to get together with family, maybe hang out with the little kids in your life. Just don't be surprised if some of them are now influencers. Survey says more and more kids want to be influencers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A recent study found about one in three American kids between the ages of 8 and 12 aspire to be either a vlogger or a YouTuber. More and more kids consider themselves influencers.
--:-- [Music continues in the background]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hi guys, welcome back to our channel. And parents are doing a lot of the legwork when it comes to curation. There's even a name for the practice. Sharenting. Don't know if the term is going to stand the test of time, but there's a lot to consider here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kids are too young often to understand what is happening to them when they are being sharented. Even if they do understand, they have no legal recourse to give consent or not give consent. The perils of parenting while sharenting coming up on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Didn't know that. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. and with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com. Support for this show comes from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, But are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained, we're going to spend some time this episode trying to wrap our heads around some of the moral quandaries at play when you turn your child into a social media celebrity. It's very much a thing, as you will soon see. But first, let's just define an essential term.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: Hi, I'm Leah Plunkett, and I'm the author of Sharenthood? Which is all about... Sharenting. All the ways that parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, coaches, and other trusted adults share children's private information digitally.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kids are too young often to understand what is happening to them when they are being sharented. Even if they do understand, they have no legal recourse to give consent or not give consent.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: For parents who may over-sharent, their children don't have any means of giving feedback to their parents, let alone putting up any boundaries around the extent to which their private experiences may be shared and in some instances monetized.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're going to hear more from Leah later on the show, but we wanted to start with a case study. So we reached out to a mom who's raising a little influencer.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: My name is Mai Nguyen, and I'm known as MySassyGirl, like M-A-I SassyGirl on Instagram. And I guess across the board.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mai's got a decent sized following, but it pales in comparison to her daughters. My daughter, Zoe in the City, her Instagram's more like monetizing business.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: How old's your daughter Zoe? She's 10. She's been on Instagram since three.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow. Yeah, we started her Instagram when she was three, but like he was kind of on mine as a baby.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: Hi, guys. Welcome back to The Zoe Show. So today I'm going to interview my little sister, Amelie. And yeah, so. I was late to the gram. I was a BlackBerry user like forever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So is it safe to assume that when you got Zoe on the gram at three years of age, she didn't really know what Instagram was?
--:-- Mai Nguyen: Um, yeah, she didn't know what it was. She just, she was just herself. Like we didn't, you know, make her do anything.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we noticed that like when she took pictures, that she had this like vibe to her. Like she was just like really like serious face and we thought it was funny.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: So we're like, hey, so why don't we just like, you know, dress her in her personal style clothes and like let her pose that way and like just post it for fun.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then I do have a background in influencers and things. So I kind of like went with their formula. And I guess that's when we started gaining followers because people were like, oh, my gosh, who is this child? Oh, my gosh, this is how I would totally wear that.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: So would you rather be a pen or a pencil? A pen or a pencil?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's a really good question. I prefer to write in pens, but pencils seem to last longer.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: So I'm going to go with wood and lead pencil.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, sometimes just like the feel of them is just really nice.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: In 2015, you open up Zoe's account, Zoe in the City, with zero followers. In 2022, now that she's 10, seven years later, how many followers does she have?
--:-- Mai Nguyen: So I would say the most followers she's received is probably like 155,000.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: Today we are going to do a half-bun tutorial with my mom. So here we go. She's in a movie now that released in the last few months. Oh? Yeah, she was in Bullet Train. Whoa, she's in Bullet Train?
--:-- Mai Nguyen: Your daughter's in Bullet Train?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. She has a very small part. It's like 15 seconds. But you know it's her.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: It sounds like you've had this incredible success, and I'm sure a lot of parents in your community are probably a little jealous that your kid gets to do all these amazing fun things and you're probably building an incredible trust fund for her.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But was there ever a point where friends of yours or family members were like hey this is kind of weird that you just like doing so much on social media with your daughter who has no idea what you know you actually doing with the photos you take of her or the videos you take of her?
--:-- Mai Nguyen: I feel like, well, we've always been very communicative with Zoe. Like everything we do, we like we tell her where it goes. We show her where it goes or what she's shooting for.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She's very... Yeah, but she doesn't have a lot of agency. Like she doesn't understand it. She's like a child.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: Yeah, I guess so. And I guess I would say like, for instance, the first time we took her to Coachella, like we got a lot of comments from people like, how could you take your kid there? There's like people use drugs there or people don't dress appropriate there. Like, why are you exposing your kid to like like that environment?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it's like, wasn't Coachella always like a family kind of music festival? Like, I don't know.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: But like, this is a different thing I'm asking about, I think, which is sort of the monetization of your child, because one day Zoe's going to be 20 and maybe then something happens in her life where she thinks, oh, man, I wish my my whole childhood wasn't, you know, a journey that everyone can go pull up whenever they want because the Internet is forever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, I think that's the misconception because I don't share everything. People might think that I share everything, but we don't because she has a completely normal life at home.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: I feel like from age seven on, she understood. You know, she understood that this is like sort of work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People always ask me, Zoe, how are you growing so fast? Well, it's simple. I drink milk.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: The California Milk Processing Board, also known as the creators of the iconic Got Milk, by partnering up with No Kid Hungry to help provide up to 1 million meals to kids in need.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It created opportunities for her, and she became privileged in a way that she got invited to things, and she received a lot of gifts.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: I think people just don't understand, and so they will just kind of assume, like, oh, you're forcing your child to do this. But it's like, for us, we didn't force her. She kind of fell into it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't know if you can tell the difference. Yeah, help us understand the difference, because when she's three years old, you know, a three-year-old does what his or her parents tells them to do.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: If they're not enjoying it and they just, like, act out and they're just not cooperative in the situation, like, we don't do it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, if we needed to shoot for a campaign and she just was not feeling it that day, we're not going to shoot it. We're not going to force her to, like, wear the clothes that she doesn't want to.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: If something's uncomfortable, we're not going to do it. So we do leave things in her court.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For us, like our intention to do this was not for Zoe to make money. Like we were just doing this for fun.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: And I thought it was an amazing stepping stone for her to open opportunities for her, which it has, right? Because, I mean, how many kids can you say have become Instagram famous and then are now getting to be actors?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Of course, now it's like more and more, right? I don't know. She's not a diva or anything. If you meet her, she's like the sweetest kid. She's so grounded at home. she's like super nerdy. It's just so funny.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: It's like Hannah Montana. And I hope it stays that way. But I guess there is the potential that it doesn't. Right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm sure you're aware of that. You know, a lot of child actors, for example, have had really tough periods once they come of age.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: No, I'm not worried because I feel that I'm a good enough parent to tell when like things are not okay.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But so I do everything I can to make sure that we're not forcing Zoe into anything and that everything she does is because, you know, she's cool with it and she wants to do it.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: And there's been some research that, you know, Instagram is bad for girls, especially their self-esteem, their self-image.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are you at all worried about that? Like, so Zoe doesn't look at my phone unsupervised.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: I let her look at Reels once in a while, but She's always looking at like aesthetically cute things or like animals or, you know, so that's what I love about her because she's not into like those TikTok dances or like pranks and stuff.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like I make it very clear that I don't like when they look at the prank stuff because it's not like nice.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: You know, it's not like it shouldn't be funny. She doesn't even like want a phone yet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so I feel very grateful that she doesn't want a phone yet. And so I feel like when she gets to middle school, maybe, you know, she might need one because I don't want her being left out and not having one.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: But that's what I'm afraid of when middle school comes around and it's like the freedom of having a device.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, you just have to deal with it. And I guess building the trust with your child and like trusting that they will come to you if they're not like okay with something or how they feel is like the key.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: The other side of this is the money. And it sounds like you're making lots of money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How do you avoid getting into sticky territory with, you know, money that your child is making you, but making because of you?
--:-- Mai Nguyen: It's separate because if it's on Zoe's account, it's her money. Right. So basically everything goes to her.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the expenses from that campaign, like the photographer or like the editing and like those little things like comes from that money.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: Like it's like a commission taken out. So we take out those expenses, but the rest of it goes to her. Everything goes into her account.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you have haters? Do you have people who talk smack about like the influencer world you've created for your family in the comments or is it all Posse vibes?
--:-- Mai Nguyen: We don't have people sending us weird stuff in the DMs or anything. And that's another thing is like the creepy pedophiles and things.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Aha. So we're very we're very private.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: What do you mean you're very private? You have a public Instagram for your kid.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We don't share where we live. We don't share our house. We don't share.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: Oh, I hope not. Yeah, we don't post things like where we are live, you know?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Unless it's a place that's like private and people can't get in.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: But like we don't share her school stuff. We don't share where she goes to school.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Of course, in the beginning, she was wearing sunglasses all the time. That's been her signature.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: But people didn't realize that it was intentional because I read somewhere that, you know, pedophiles, they connect to you through your eyes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whoa. So when you posting headshots of your kids that are looking straight at the you know like straight ahead like those accounts are the ones that the pedophiles are following because they feel like the kid is connecting with them
--:-- Mai Nguyen: But like for us this is so dark I mean it stuff you have to think about right You might think like posting a picture of your kid in a bathtub is innocent but no, like you should not be sharing your naked child on any, even if it's your Facebook, you know, you never know where that stuff goes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It sounds like you've considered a lot of the darkest elements at play here, from creepers to financial conflicts to the mental health of your daughter.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: In five years, in 10 years. Here's a question apart from all of those things, and then I won't challenge this anymore, I promise.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you ever feel like all the time Zoe spends taking photos for the gram and for the brands and even making cameos in Bullet Train, which sounds so fun, I have to say, takes away from the time she could have spent on like a seesaw or hanging out with her friends playing Pokemon or something like that?
--:-- Mai Nguyen: No, if she wants to have a play date with her friends, she can. We go to Disney like every week. Every week? Yes, we go weekly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I like love my kids and I want them to have a childhood, right? Zoe takes martial arts every week and, you know, we do private lessons at a park and I take my little one and we go to the park after, you know? We go to Boba after. Like we do everything that a normal kid would do.
--:-- Mai Nguyen: I don't know. Like what else is there? Like what does it mean to like let your kid be a kid? Like to send them outside and play with rocks? Like, I mean, I don't know.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If Zoe in the City is going to Disneyland every week, I stand down.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My, you've done it. People say that. They're like, let your kid be like a kid. And then when I post them at Disneyland, you spoil your kids. I can never do it right, you know.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair. Oh, yikes. Or forgetting sunscreen, so now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. Learn more at schwab.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Go back to the Zoe show. I just went grocery shopping and I want to show you what I got.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained, we've had the case study. Things are going well for Zoe in the city and her mother Mai, at least for now. But what happens when this goes wrong? When it goes wrong, it can look like a lot of misery.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: Sharenthood author Leah Plunkett is back. And that misery can take different forms. So one very public example of commercial Sharenton going wrong was the Daddy05 YouTube channel, which was a so-called family prank channel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I got a prank for Cody. I bought this here, invisible ink, and I'm going to squirt it all over his carpet and start flipping out.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: And viewers began to notice that one of the children was pranked. I don't think it was actually at all funny. And neither did a lot of viewers because they noticed that this one young boy was on the receiving end of his family's behavior more than others.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that his reactions were showing real emotional distress.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: Yes, you did. Yes, they did. They did it. We didn't do this. Make sure it doesn't stop recording. You two did this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so viewers of this pretty popular, I think least half a million viewers at its peak, maybe more, give or take, they actually alerted that Child Protective Services and the jurisdiction this family lived in and Child Protective Services did get involved.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: Unfortunately, that misery doesn't have an expiration date because even if a channel is taken down, once digital content winds up anywhere online, you need to assume that it is never going to go away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You lose control of where it goes, who can see it, and how long it will live.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: So sadly, the misery doesn't have an end date even when the kids grow up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Someone who grew up on the first phase of the Internet and whose mother shared all of their private moments on the Internet. 100 percent exploiting your kids if you're making content with them. 100 percent.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: And what are the ethics of this? Do parents have their kids sign contracts? Do the kids always know that it's a business? How does it work?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is wide, wide range. Because this is essentially an unregulated industry, there are not comprehensive, meaningful, enforced legal requirements for parents to get any sort of buy-in from their children.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: Unlike the context when a child is a performer in a more traditional media platform for instance on the Broadway stage or on the silver screen or even it sounds almost quaint now but even a 20th century style reality TV show there are labor laws that will speak to the protection of child performers
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But because commercial sharenting falls into this gray area is it a business or is it just your private life And you as a parent are talking about your private life on a publicly available social media platform.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: And if you happen to pick up a little money, that's great. But it's your home and it's your kid and you get to decide what you say or don't say about them online.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because we don't have regulation, parents have to really examine their own ethical framework.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: I think a lot of people have heard allusions to child actors going through some of this stuff that we're talking about here with regard to parents stealing their earnings and laws that were set up in place to protect those earnings and protect the rights of child actors.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Has any of that translated over to kids who are creating stuff on social media?
--:-- Leah Plunkett: This is still the Wild West, but there are some heartening trends. For instance, there has been some great youth-led activism out of Washington state in the last legislative cycle where a wonderful youth activist was trying to get the Washington state legislature to pass a version of these child performer laws to specifically include kids who are appearing in these kinds of commercial sharenting enterprises.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what House Bill 2032 does, the account has to be monetized, first of all. So the text says that the number of views received per video segment on any internet platform or network meets the platform or network's threshold for generation of compensation.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: Or the vlogger receives actual compensation for video content equal to or greater than 10 cents per view.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is growing awareness by all stakeholders, lawmakers, regulators, educators, parents, teens and youth as they are getting older and looking around maybe at their own past experiences, maybe at their friends' experiences, or just at the experiences of others in their generation and going, wait a second.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: These devices that we think of as being just part of our everyday surroundings, our laptops, our tablets, our phones, and we can do cool stuff on them and maybe we make a little money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Forbes has published a list of the highest earning YouTubers, and on top is, get this, an eight-year-old boy who reviews toys.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: And we should not stay in a Wild West space where children's labor, Because even if you're just a baby sitting there eating your cereal and your parents are getting a hefty sponsorship deal from the cereal company, that is labor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You are performing an act. The set may be your high chair and the producer director team may be mom and dad, but that's still labor. And some of that money should be going into a trust for you the same way that it would if you were sitting in that high chair on a Broadway stage or a Hollywood lock.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: All of us as parents are under so much pressure every day to do our best to be our best to do our best job raising our kids I have so much empathy for myself and all the parents out there just trying to navigate this Wild West.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I would hope that parents who are listening who are engaged in commercial sharing, parents or others who are listening who are not engaged in it but are curious about it, really take the time to educate themselves before sharing any content, but also to give themselves a lot of compassion and understanding because this is a tough, space for all of us as parents and families to be in.
--:-- Leah Plunkett: I'm Leah Plunkett, and I'm the author of Sharenthood? Which is all about... Sharenting. All the ways that parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, coaches, and other trusted adults share children's private information digitally.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our show today was produced by Victoria Chamberlain, fact-checked by Matthew Collette and Laura Bullard, and mixed by Paul Robert Mounsey.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for them. I edited the rest of the team at Today Explained, include Siona Petros, Hadi Mawagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Halima Shah, Abishai Artsy, Miles Bryan, and my co-host, Noelle King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our supervising producers, Amina Alsadi, Afim Shapiro is our director of sound.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassan, We're on the radio in partnership with WNYC. And Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Happy Thanksgiving. Back in the feed, Black Friday.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today we're making shimmy ramen soup. Step one, water in the pot. Can someone open this for me? Curly left my hand. Does it look good enough? Next, boil the water. Teeth break. Mommy has to go put it in the pool now. Burn out the deep. And there you have sherry ramen.
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