“Like, Follow, Subscribe” is decently reported, if clunkily written; it lacks the legal and philosophical acumen of Leah A. Plunkett’s “Sharenthood” or the sociological insights that Kathryn Jezer-Morton brings to her studies of momfluencers. The strongest and most original passages of Latifi’s book, however brief, are devoted to her survey participants, who say that clicking on kidfluencer content helped them feel like “part of a community,” even like “part of their family.” One of these fans, who described herself as a onetime “isolated homeschooler,” told Latifi, “It was my way of experiencing the world when I was stuck at home all day.”
Ironically, this isolated homeschooler was likely watching other homeschoolers. Traditional school systems are not a draw for mega-momfluencers such as Hannah Neeleman, of @BallerinaFarm (nine children, more than ten million Instagram followers); Jessica Ballinger, of @BallingerFamily (six children, more than three million YouTube subscribers); or Kristine Pack, of @FamilyFunPack (eight children, more than ten million YouTube subscribers), all of whom have homeschooled. Aubree Jones, in a 2023 post on her TikTok account (more than two million followers), offered three reasons that she homeschools, starting with “efficiency”—she boasted that her kids could complete their daily schoolwork in two hours or less, and suggested that an average day at a traditional school stretches to six or more hours to provide “day care” to working parents. Two was “flexibility”: Jones can choose what her children learn and, just as important, when they take vacations (which generate great content!). Third and last was “mass shootings.”
A fourth reason, obvious but unspoken, is that homeschooled kids have more time and availability to make stuff for the family vlog. In this respect, power sharenters may homeschool for the same reason that schools in farming communities used to close down during spring planting and fall harvests: so that the kids could stay home and work.
The social-media ascent of the religious-conservative “trad wife,” and of the von Trapp-size brood skipping blondly behind her, is inextricable from the material conditions necessary for a typical family-vlogging operation, in which a stay-at-home mother is the main producer-director and, ideally, adds fresh infants to her cast of characters on a roughly biennial schedule. (Several of Latifi’s sources in the family-vlogging industry believe, incredibly or not, that some sharenters “are explicitly choosing to have more children for brand deals.”) In its specific appeal to evangelical Christian and Mormon communities, including the semi-apostates of what’s often referred to as MomTok, mommy vlogging has striking parallels with multilevel marketing: both industries offer money-making opportunities that are supposedly compatible with traditional homemaking, and both demand constant leveraging of personal relationships in order to achieve and sustain success.
What makes sharenting far more ominous, of course, is that its practitioners must chase the mood swings of the social-media algorithm if they want to extract maximum value from family life. Positive pregnancy tests and squishy newborns usually deliver strong returns. So does footage of a child in physical or emotional pain. As a lower-tier mommy vlogger tells Latifi, “The videos that got the most eyes on them are the ones that had the bloody noses, or the broken arms, or the emergency room visit, or whatever.” One of the pinned posts on the Instagram page of Jamie Otis Hehner (a million followers) is a video of her toddler son suffering a febrile seizure as one of his siblings sobs in the background.
The abundant risks and perverse incentives of the sharenting industry have, in recent years, inspired some well-meaning legislation. In 2023, Illinois became the first state to pass a law explicitly intended to safeguard the earnings of kidfluencers, requiring that a percentage of profits from monetized content be placed in a trust until the child reaches the age of eighteen. Since then, several more states—including the nation’s two busiest sharenting hubs, Utah and California—have either passed new laws or amended existing ones to similar ends, extending the same protections to the child stars of social media that have long been in place for their counterparts in film and television.
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