Mar 28, 2022
Child Exploitation with a Parental Twist: Family Vlogging and its Danger to Children
Growing up is complicated and risky enough without also living inside a Scare Tactics-style spin-off of The Truman Show.
Author’s note: In an effort to not continue the spread of this type of content, links to the exact videos and channels mentioned will not be provided.
Have you ever heard of ‘sharenting’? You’ve likely seen it before. Sharenting refers to the act of parents oversharing content of their children on social media. It goes beyond baby photos sent to extended family group chats or on private Facebook pages. It’s the sharing of each and every moment seen as important to the parents — which are not always seen as important to everyone else. It’s using social media as a personal daily journal about your children. In a mutated way, it’s family vlogging.
With family vlogging channels, the main draw is the children. That’s what distinguishes family channels from couple channels, and there’s a huge market for this. Children, of course, enjoy watching videos from other children. Most people love seeing babies and small children; they’re adorable and trigger positive chemicals in our brains. What’s wrong with making videos about your daughter’s fifth birthday or your son’s park playdate? At first glance, it’s easy to think family vlogging channels are a fun idea. But when the daily lives of children are put out as content for an uncontrollable audience, they are thrust into a new world of risk, all at the hands of their parents.
Nothing is Private
When you are a lifestyle vlogger, your life and your job are one and the same. Any and every moment is up for the camera’s grab; whatever it is, that might be what the people want to see. What you reveal about yourself is a choice, but when you’re a toddler, you don’t have that control. Children cannot consent and have no real ability to stop their parents from posting whatever they please.
You can’t talk about family vloggers and not talk about the ACE Family. Consisting of the ever-controversial parents, Catherine and Austin McBroom, and their three young children, the ACE Family channel began as a couple channel back in January of 2016. Their first daughter was born that May — their second was in 2018, and their son came in 2020. With pregnancy announcement “pranks”, multi-part birth vlogs, parenting videos, and their usual, child-focused content, the entirety of the children’s lives has served as YouTube content. Reaching ten million subscribers in two years and having nearly 4.5 billion views to date, it’s almost terrifying how many people have seen these children from before birth to now.
8 Passengers is a channel run primarily by the mother, Ruby Franke. She and her husband, Kevin, have six children and almost 2.4 million subscribers to date. Arguably the most controversial family channel, the Franke parents have faced backlash for publishing very questionable content of their children. The debatable slew of period and sex talk, “embarrassing” doctor visits, bra shopping, school trouble, and punishment videos are still up on their channel, hundreds of thousands of views and all. One vlog where Ruby attempts a “birds and bees” conversation, the children repeatedly say they do not want it to be filmed, but she continues. The sensitive nature of the happenings seems to mean nothing to the parents; if anything, maybe it just means money and attention.
Emotional Damage for Views
The harmful nature of vlogs about a girl’s first period might be disputed, but the iffy content does not stop there. A number of family vloggers have made names for themselves by either committing or exploiting overt child abuse.
CJ SO COOL is a family channel run by Cordero James Brady. Notoriously a prank channel, Brady’s “pranks” have gone what almost anyone would consider to be too far. One so-called prank sees Brady lighting firecrackers in his sleeping children’s room, then laughing as they cry and saying, “They think someone was shooting.” In another, very infamous video, Brady shows himself putting laxatives in his two young children’s ice cream. The video continues to show the children, a boy and a girl, crying and complaining of stomach pain. Gruesomely, Brady continues to laugh and film them on the toilet, still crying and trying, to no avail, to close the door and keep him out. Outrage at the video culminated in a short suspension, but the channel is still active today. Both videos, however, have been deleted.
The infamous, now-removed DaddyOFive pages were masterclasses in the darkness family vlogging can contain. While Mike Martin did have five children who all were the victims of “pranks”, two had a different mother. The mother of Cody and Emma was not the one on the family channel. Knowing this makes the quantity and severity of pranks played on them, primarily Cody, even more unsettling. The children are yelled at, cursed at, pushed, encouraged to slap each other, only to get yelled at for doing it. The video that broke the camel’s back was an invisible ink prank; Heather, the mother, begins the clip talking about how Cody once spilled ink and had to pay for it. For this video, she will spill disappearing ink on the carpet in his room and accuse him of doing it. We watch as she screams, “Get your f — king a — up here!” and as both parents shout at a crying Cody, who is yelling, “I swear to god; I didn’t do that!” His face is red, his voice and movements are highly distressed. The parents then laugh and reveal the trick, Mike teasing, “You just got owned!” as the child looks no less uneasy. The parents have later tried to claim their videos are completely faked, made with the children’s “consent”, but this would make their channel built on simulated child abuse. That is not much better.
Both the Bradys and the Martins were investigated by police and child protection due to their channels. Emma and Cody were returned to their biological mother, and the parents entered Alford pleas on two charges of child neglect in 2017. It is unclear if Brady faced any legal repercussions.
When They Grow Up
This generation is the first to experience the chance at their entire life being viewable online. Beyond the immediate embarrassment or harm that befalls some of them, what do we expect them to do when they become older teens and adults, and this content is out there? Have the McBrooms considered the impact ACE Family content will have on Elle and Alaia’s future personal and professional relationships? There is no way around the horror that the youngest Franke children will experience when they learn just how many views videos of them bra shopping or getting sex talks have. In the same way that victims of sexual abuse are newly traumatized by learning that images or videos of their victimization are still present online, the children of family vloggers will have to deal with the invasive, humiliating, and often abusive content of them that can never be completely wiped from the Internet. Not only might children of family vloggers suffer from the events shown in the videos, but they have to accept that those events were also shared with the entire world by the people who are meant to love and protect them the most.
Online safety has become an increasingly hot topic, as it should. Child entertainment labor laws do exist, such as the Coogan Law (officially the California Child Actor’s Bill), but they do not apply well, if at all, to the vlogging world. Arguments can be made about how much of daily vlogging can be considered work. More could be made that the channel is the parents’, so any and all AdSense should go to them, not the children. But at the end of the day, which favors children’s safety: allowing these channels to exist as they do or intervening to stop this train from derailing any further?
