Written by Ahan Dhar
In recent years, family influencing has become one of the most fascinating, profitable, and perhaps ethically dubious realms of social media content creation. “Family influencers” document their daily family life and post the videos online, often featuring their children and their “routines, adventures, and milestones.” However, while family influencer content is usually innocent and lighthearted, the behind-the-scenes of the families’ shared lives can be much darker.
For example, the 2025 Hulu documentary Devil in the Family revealed the abusive underbelly of youtuber Ruby Franke’s family channel. Franke, who endorsed strict parenting methods in her family-friendly content, was arrested with her partner on charges of child abuse after her 12-year-old son escaped from their home, looking visibly emaciated and wounded. The police later found Franke’s 9-year-old daughter in a closet in her partner’s house, in a similar mistreated state, contradicting the wholesome image that Franke crafted for her channel.
While Franke’s story may seem like an extreme example of how family influencing can be misleading, a slew of “kidfluencers” have discussed their negative experiences being a part of family influencer content. Kidfluencers’ stories have sparked discussions on the need to regulate digital family content. While testifying to call for more protections for kidfluencers, Shari Franke, the oldest of the Franke children, declared to the Utah legislature that “there is no ethical or moral family vlogger.”
Discourse regarding the protection of children in the spotlight is not new. Numerous legal professionals have advocated for greater protection of children in the entertainment industry, especially as more former child-stars, like Jennette McCurdy, expose the exploitation they experienced from both the industry and their parents, the latter of which stems from their involvement in the industry.
However, the entertainment industry is at least somewhat regulated—though arguably inadequately—by federal labor laws and their provisions regarding child labor. Unfortunately, these laws do not reach the digital family content space. Children in family vlogs are not contracted for their work and are instead simply filmed while living their regular lives. Child influencers consequently lack any legal protection in most states.
Because the participation of children in family content creation is unregulated, children can be exposed to “long hours of filming, invasive privacy violations, emotional manipulation, and potential exploitation by their parents or guardians who control the content and revenue of the vlogs.” With more situations like Ruby Franke coming to light, many states are realizing the need for comprehensive protections for children and have drafted bills to address this issue.
On July 30th, 2024, Illinois became one of the first states to pass legislation that seeks to protect children within family influencing settings, and contains many provisions that are present in other states’ enacted laws and many states’ pending bills. Though the Illinois law is a relatively broad act entitled Child Labor Law of 2024, it specifically includes language regarding “vloggers” and “online platforms” in order to regulate family influencers.
The Act defines an “Online platform” as any public-facing website or application, including social networks. It then goes on to define “Vlog,” as “content shared on an online platform in exchange for compensation.” This is particularly interesting because it implies that the act will only target content that is monetized, likely in order to limit its scope to content that can be equated to a paying occupation.
The Act separately defines “Vlogger” as “an individual or family that creates video content…in exchange for compensation” and includes any corporate entity “assuming the name or identity of a particular individual or family for the purposes of that Content creation.” By including corporate entities, the Act acknowledges that many family vloggers are sophisticated and professional, further emphasizing a need for regulation in the first place.
The act does go out of its way to mention that a “Vlogger” does not include “any person under the age of 16 who produces his or her own vlogs.” This carves out a space for children driven content—made on the child’s own volition and on their own terms—that would likely not run into the same issues of abuse and exploitation seen in family vlogging channels.
The meat of the Act, however, comes in Section 95 and Section 100, regarding “Minors featured in vlogs.” These sections first lay out a standard amount of time that is required in order to deem a minor to be considered “engaged in the work of vlogging.” To qualify, within the previous 12 months, the minor’s likeness, name, or photograph should be present in at least 30% of the vlogger’s compensated video.
This section is particularly interesting because of how broad this is: 30% is not even a majority of the content, and it specifically reaches the use of even the minor’s name or photo. The Act measures content percentage “by the percentage of time the likeness, name, or photograph of the minor visually appears or is the subject of an oral narrative in a video segment, as compared to the total length of the segment.”
This fact that a simple mention of the child’s name in family content counts as inclusion of the minor highlights the legislature’s desire to protect children in family influencing settings. The legislature effectively regulates any content that capitalizes off of the regular presence, physical or not, of children in content, the impacts of which could go beyond designated family vlogging content.
Any content that features children beyond a certain threshold, whether deliberately or not, could be impacted by the Act. This might force creators to be more aware of how frequently their children are present in their content. While this seems expansive, the Illinois legislature may have intended to reach as many children featured in monetized content as possible through this.
Regardless, Section 95 and Section 100 primarily set up recordkeeping and compensation schemes in order to prevent the financial exploitation of children. Section 95 requires all vloggers whose content features a minor to keep a variety of documents pertaining to their vlogging and revenue, and mandates that they provide them to the minor on an ongoing basis.
These documents range from the number of vlogs that generated compensation, the total number of minutes each minor was featured in vlogs during the reporting period, and the total compensation generated from vlogs featuring a minor during the reporting period.
Though requiring that the adults provide these records to the minor seems strange, it serves as an enforcement mechanism and provides the minor with a private right of action. Section 95 states that “if a vlogger whose vlog content features minors…fails to maintain the records…the minor may commence a civil action to enforce the provisions of this Section.” Potential suit serves as a way to urge adults in family vlogging settings to keep a comprehensive record of the revenue received from their vlogging.
Furthermore, Section 100 requires that the adult set up a trust fund for a minor—who meets the content percentage threshold—to ensure that they are compensated. It mandates the vlogger to set aside gross earnings on the video content “to be preserved for the benefit of the minor upon reaching the age of majority.” If a vlogger violates this Section, a minor can commence an action to enforce the provisions and can be awarded actual damages, punitive damages, and potential litigation costs.
Trusts like these help prevent financial exploitation that arises from family influencing. An issue critics have with family influencing is how its potential for monetization pushes parents “to take on more of a business management role, encouraging the creation of content for monetization, rather than focusing on the traditional role of a parent.” Consequently, children can experience a lack of trust in their parents, who “exploit them for financial or personal gain.”
Though parents would still be monetizing off of filming their children with this regulation, mandating a trust fund can build back trust between children and their parents. As a result, children will feel less like they are being used against their own will for the benefit of their parents.
Most of the following enacted legislation, including that of California and Utah, include very similar provisions regarding trust accounts and financial transparency. Five other states are considering bills and amendments with comparable language and structures. However, while this seems to be a sign that minors in family influencing settings are going to be protected, there still remain doubts about the effectiveness of these bills.
The first doubt pertains to the efficacy of the acts’ enforcement mechanisms. It is difficult to determine if these acts can or will meaningfully help minors because of how recently they were passed. There seems to have been no litigation resulting from such acts, and it is unclear when we would first see litigation, or what the outcome would look like. As legal scholars have pointed out, such laws will “need regular reviews and adjustments,” especially in light of “evolving standards, research, and technological advancements.”
Furthermore, while these acts go after the financial exploitation resulting from family vlogging, the psychological impacts and privacy violations have little to no remedy. Utah’s and Minnesota’s acts do have a provision allowing minors to request the deletion of content they are unhappy with once they are 18. Though this can help rectify some of the minors’ personal rights violations in family influencing—including their complete lack of control over the content posted—this is only in effect once they are 18, and minors will potentially have to deal with the psychological fallout of having unflattering or embarrassing representations of them on the internet for years.
Though some legislators across the country have acknowledged the financial vulnerability of children in family vlogging settings, it is imperative that they recognize their psychological vulnerability and step in to protect their development.
States need to assure that adults who choose to involve children in social media are protecting them from harm and ensuring “their best interests and well-being.” Legislators need to account for the “holistic development of children” and their complex needs if they want to meaningfully protect minors who are thrust into the digital spotlight.
Though there has been widespread support for regulating child influencer spaces, there may still be some pushback. For example, regulating the posting of family content could implicate freedom of speech issues, seeing as such content is protected by the First Amendment. Parental rights in general may be threatened, and this is something seen to be implicit in the Fourteenth Amendment, “providing deference to the decisions of parents in most matters.”
While these constitutional concerns may have some weight, the need to prevent the financial exploitation of children, coupled with the “child’s growing interest in maintaining their privacy rights separate from the rights of their parents,” justify passing such legislation.
Though greater doubts of the ethics of family vlogging may never disappear, legislators still can—and should—take the requisite steps to at least make it a safer practice.
