Family Influencers Look Good — But Kids Pay the Price, New Book Says

On April 2, Aubree Jones, a Mormon mom influencer with more than 4 million social media subscribers, posted a video in which she and her husband, Josh Jones, and their seven children stand together in the hallway of their house. Everyone is grinning. White text above them reads “We have an announcement… We’re expecting…” Josh lifts their little white dog into the air from where she was hidden behind the gaggle of humans; she kicks a little, clearly not thrilled at being airborne. “Puppies!!!” the final caption reads.

The short video may seem innocuous but, like so much family influencer content, it’s a rich text once you begin to dig into it. Until the reveal, for instance, the older kids hold their awkward poses, smiles rigid, while only the toddler at the bottom right seems free to look bored and distracted. What are they all thinking? What were they doing before being called in to help their parents earn a living by shooting the video? Then there’s the pregnancy announcement itself, which — along with birth, newborn, and baby news — is some of the most successful content you can post as a family influencer. Sure, it’s a pregnant dog, but you don’t know that until your view has already been captured and counted.

I learned about Jones and her family — specifically, about the sponcon she made preparing a “period kit” for her oldest daughter — in Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online by Fortesa Latifi. I’ve been following Latifi’s journalism for years in The Cut, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, and elsewhere, and have been fascinated by her coverage of the influencer sphere in particular. I devoured this book, her first, which is a must-read for anyone curious about the inner workings of influencerdom writ large and the family aspects of it in particular.

Latifi begins by taking a look at the precursor to the momfluencers: the mommy bloggers. In the mid-2000s, mothers took to the internet and “wrote long-form, heart-plundering reflections on pregnancy and motherhood and what their lives looked like after having children,” Latifi writes. “They were honest about topics that had only previously been discussed privately, in hushed tones. They wrote about hating their husbands and struggling with postpartum anxiety and the feeling that their lives were over. It was a revelation. More than that, it was a revolution. It’s not hyperbolic to say that mommy bloggers not only changed the way we talk about motherhood but also provided a career path for the influencers of today.”

But the internet evolved — it got faster and more accessible and as smartphones came around, visual media became prized above longform writing. At the same time, companies realized they could harness the popularity of these blogs and turn them into advertising real estate. Over the years, the community aspect of blogging gave way to the monetizable engagement-bait we see now. Where mom bloggers were writing about themselves, their own experiences, today’s family influencers are instead focused on their children, who are fundamental to their content.

What does it mean to feature one’s offspring online? To monetize them? To turn their lives into content and thus, in a sense, into work? Do the children know when they’re working versus when they’re playing? Can these kids meaningfully consent to what’s happening? And what about the kids who then become influencers in their own right, both as minors and then, later, as legal adults? These are the questions at the center of the book, as its title conveys. While Latifi is pretty clear about how upsetting she finds it all, she’s also transparent about how complex these situations are, how much of this is uncharted territory that people are figuring out as they go along.

Bethanie Garcia, for example, started her blog “The Garcia Diaries” in 2014 when she was a teen mom. Now in her 30s, she told Latifi, “The fact that with no college education and with five children now, I can support my family, it’s truly wild and a dream come true, and I never could have possibly imagined it all.” Yet she’s also been the subject of a snark subreddit for years now in which former fans or outright haters follow her every move in a kind of anti-fandom obsession. “It all just kind of freaks her out,” Latifi writes, “and it’s even made her have fleeting moments of wanting to stop being an influencer altogether. But how else could she make $500,000 a year?”

Is the tradeoff worth it? Losing your privacy — and creating a space where your children lose theirs — in order to support yourself? Many young people, at least, seem to think so: In one survey from 2023 (updated from the numbers that Latifi cites from a 2019 survey in her book), 57% of the Gen Zers asked said they want to be influencers. Meanwhile, 41% of adults said they’d choose it as a career.

And there’s so much more beyond the issue of privacy. Latifi explores how and why there are so many Mormon influencers and how their brands are, in a sense, the ultimate form of proselytizing (the Mormon church even pays some of them). She examines the moments that made some parent influencers change their minds about sharing their children’s lives. And she reminds her readers of the vast invisible network of labor that powers the seemingly picture-perfect lives we see while we scroll: the nannies, the cleaners, the tutors, the teams of people who take over the nitty-gritty of editing and posting and replying, none of whom are ever featured or credited in the images and videos.

One of Latifi’s sources, the neighbor of a prominent vlogging family, is especially annoyed by the fact that the family “sells courses based on how to organize your life and your household as a parent of multiple children. What’s not included in those courses? Any mention of their nannies or cleaners.”

The world of family influencing is a baffling one to many of us, and yet its allure is unmistakable — it’s the allure of cold, hard cash. Like so many American grifts, it sells us the idea that we, too, might only be temporarily embarrassed millionaires; we could post and post and post and maybe, just maybe, win the viral lottery. But chances are we won’t, and Latifi knows it. Throughout her excellent debut, she contextualizes parental choices within the capitalist hellscape we’re stuck in without undermining the potential harm to their children. Some tradeoffs, she ultimately tells us, simply aren’t worth it.

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‘Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online‘ by Fortesa Latifi is out now, via Gallery Books.