In 2014, Kristine and Matt, parents of five young children, posted a 15-minute video on YouTube. “24 Hours With 5 Kids on a Rainy Day” was the first blog to appear on their channel, Family Fun Pack. It ties together the fragments of the most ordinary and boring activities that make up a child’s life: eating, dressing, playing, practicing the piano, playing more, story time before bed. Watching this feels somewhat like watching a home video—except I don’t know these kids, and their parents are trying to sell me stuff. The “unbreakable, colorful cereal bowls” that children eat from, for example, are attached to the caption. Over the past 12 years, the vlog has received over 316 million views.
Kristine and Matt, who do not share their last name publicly, have been on YouTube since 2011, when Kristine uploaded a video of her twin boys getting into bed. As he tells journalist Fortesa Latifi in a new book Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influence Kids and the Cost of Online ChildhoodHe “didn’t understand the privacy settings” and only intended to send the video to his mother-in-law. Soon, it had 8 million views. “Everything spread from there,” Kristine says, which is putting it mildly: The Family Fun YouTuber now has 10.5 million subscribers and 15.9 billion lifetime views. One marketer estimates that the channel brings in about $200,000 a month from YouTube’s AdSense revenue-sharing program, plus whatever the family makes from brand endorsement deals, affiliate links and more. Cameos.
The Family Fun Package is at the top of the family influencer industry, where parents invite social media followers into their family’s lives with regular streams of content. Over the years, Kristine and Matt have continued to grow their brand on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. They’ve also had three more children since that first rainy day blog—children who have never known an undocumented life. In 2024, Kristine filmed their second child’s potty training in a 20-minute video complete with corporate links to cotton underwear and a Fisher-Price plastic toilet. The moment YouTube highlights as “most played,” Latifi notes, is Kristine describing a toddler having an accident.
This kind of runaway growth in search of viruses is an example of family influence, Latifi writes. For years, she’s been talking about the influence of families and mothers—writing about, for example, TikTokkers posting #dayinthelife videos of their babies and toddlers, or telling the stories of children whose entire childhoods have been recorded with a click. In Like, Follow, Subscribehe writes of what happens when “a family moves from its initial state to something more like a business plan.”
Latifi’s book also raises urgent questions for anyone navigating social media. Family influencers and mothers are on the Internet; even if you don’t think of yourself as a viewer, you might be surprised when you check your feed. The rise of these video monetization risks discouraging viewers who may consider the moral implications of “share”“-which, in its most advanced form, has enabled and concealed great harm. The most famous case may be that of Ruby Franke, an early and successful family blogger now convicted of child abuse. Latifi, who has spent years interviewing influential parents and children as well as researchers who are concerned about the effects of the practice, stops short of the study. But Like, Follow, Subscribe paints a picture that is disturbing enough to ask hard questions about what we enjoy watching on our screens. This content isn’t going anywhere—tech companies continue to defy regulations, and the financial incentives are compelling enough to get parents to put up with significant risks for their children. The only people who can reduce it are the viewers—by choosing not to watch it.
It all started, Latifi explains, with mom bloggers. In the early 2000s, women used the democratic format of blogs to talk about previously silent topics. These mothers shared difficult and personal thoughts about topics such as breastfeeding and being upset with their children, but were largely unpaid. Even when they started taking out banner ads and brand promotions, Latifi writes, mommy blogs sold were different from the mommy influencer pages and family blogs of today. In the blogosphere, “it seemed like the children involved in the story were secondary,” she explains. Over time, the focus shifted from reflections on mothers to staged photographs of children’s lives.
Social media influencers benefited more than mommy blogs, in large part because posts featuring children attract attention. A Pew Research Center analysis of YouTube videos uploaded by the most closely watched channels in the first week of 2019 found that videos featuring children under the age of 13 were viewed three times more than videos that did not feature children. A YouTube strategist tells Latifi that blog families know the videos that perform best include “content where a child is sick or hurt and content about pregnancy or the arrival of a new baby.” Children’s most vulnerable and embarrassing moments bring more comments, and brands to want children in social media advertising and sponsored content. An Instagram and TikTok influencer mom who doesn’t show her children’s faces online tells Latifi that she has turned down or lost deals with brands and diaper, baby food and toy companies because of her decision.
Much of what family lobbyists and moms post—weekly grocery deliveries, time-lapse kitchen cleaning videos, bedtime routines—are mundane. That culture is, in fact, an appeal: “We want to see how other families work and measure them against ours,” Latifi writes — a natural and relatable impulse. However, after conducting an informal poll, Latifi realized that for some viewers, especially children, watching family influencers offers something completely different. “I was a young child, depressed, lonely, and financially poor,” wrote the interviewer, who watched the same family every day after school. Watching them “made me very happy because for a little while, I could escape my bad home life and see how other children were enjoying their lives.”
A video of a mother creatively comforting her baby can feel like a lifesaver for a struggling parent. Latifi admits that this is why he sings: He wrote Like, Follow, Subscribe during and just after pregnancy, and includes many articles about watching mom influencers and family bloggers in tears from breastfeeding at night. “It cannot be overstated how much other moms sharing their experiences have helped me through my first foggy days of motherhood,” she writes, making her strongest point in support of this economy. Perhaps understandably, he is very sympathetic to the family’s choices in his book. On the one hand, this seems to allow him to get influencers to open up to him; its reach is amazing. On the other hand, it seems to prevent him from fully integrating the implications of his reporting and research.
As Latifi explores the industry, what stands out most is how this content is made, and how often children are tricked into acting. A former nanny of an influential family tells Latifi that the young child in her care struggled to distinguish between being allowed to play with her toys freely and playing with certain toys in a certain way on video. In the most revealing interview in the book, a parent who started a now-defunct family vlog that brought in more than $1 million a year explains that they would bribe their children up to $1,000 to participate in a video. Although the family is no longer on YouTube, the children’s worldview still seems skewed. “They struggle a lot when things don’t go their way, or they don’t get what they want, or they don’t get bribed to do what other kids are expected to do,” the unidentified parent tells Latifi.
The dangers of sharing don’t just come from within the family. The scariest chapter in the Like, Follow, Subscribe it focuses on abusers looking for influencers’ posts featuring children, and publicly posting images of children that have been found on the dark web and transformed using AI into child sexual abuse material. Yet often in the book, even when influencers are aware that adults are using their children for sexual gratification, they sometimes come up with dubious excuses to continue publishing.
Evidence that Latifi collects Like, Follow, Subscribe can easily support the conclusion that the influence of the family is not moral, it should stop altogether. Parents who follow algorithms on social media are losing their children’s privacy, well-being and safety. Their home becomes a place of unlimited work where there is no protection of other people, and where the child’s primary caregivers are also their bosses. Seven states have now passed laws to regulate family influence, but these laws often ensure that parents set aside a percentage of their income to pay for their children. Latifi’s sources indicate that many of these children are already being paid—usually in the form of bribes. In any case, the laws give parents the responsibility to comply and calculate their children’s income correctly, without external enforcement.
Latifi is not clear on what to do with this evidence. In extending sympathy to lobbyists, he may be giving them too much credit. She repeatedly refers to how mothers who have few other career options have carved out hard-won financial stability through accounting for their children, positioning influence as a viable career path. He concludes the book by throwing up his hands when faced with moral dilemmas. After admitting that he’s “talking in circles,” Latifi finally says that he couldn’t do it himself.
The question of whether parents should enter this world is not the only—or even the most—important one; only a small fraction of people raising young children put them online even as a profession. More important is the question of what their audience should do. Courts have begun punishing tech companies including Meta and Google for addictive and dangerous features on their platforms, and for failing to adequately protect child users from sexual predators, but regulations that force these platforms to prioritize content that features children do not appear to be explicit.
I’ve written before about the effects of family influence, so I wasn’t afraid to note, while working on this review, that I still followed at least five different accounts that posted monetized content featuring children. In fact, I had recently watched parents who have millions of followers tell the horror story of the birth of their premature baby, who already had an Instagram account even when he was in the NICU. I had been following this couple for years, fascinated by their witty videos about the differences between Italian and American life, and drawn into their intimate stories about a high-risk pregnancy following years of fertility problems. As I waited to click on the YouTube ad to enter their birthday vlog, I suddenly wondered why I was still watching. Honestly, it was for rubberneck people whose lives were very different from mine. For others who watch to feel less alone, or to find a role model for how to manage labor, or to escape their family life, letting go can be more difficult. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be the right thing to do.
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