Australian families are making big money from posting their children on social media, but at what cost?

They play with toys, try new foods, model apparel and show off their dance moves. For brand advertisers, child influencers are the holy grail: they’re cute, trusted and worth every dollar. So it’s not surprising that in Australia, and across the rest of the world, some parents are making a career out of sharing their children’s lives online with millions watching at home. The most prominent family influencers, with hundreds of thousands of followers or more, can now reportedly earn upwards of $10,000 per sponsored social media post, while global marketing revenue from broader social media influencing is expected to rise from $6 billion in 2020 to a staggering $24b this year. The reality is, engagement goes through the roof when kids are the stars and posting children online to attract subscribers, brand interest and sponsorship deals is now a viable career path for some parents. Kellie Elliott’s Instagram account Perth Mum Adventures is full of photos of her children enjoying fun activities around Perth. The 35-year-old mother of four from the Rockingham area is a leading promoter of WA locations and events for families and has been running her wildly popular blog and Instagram account @atperthmumadventures since 2017. “Back then, I felt like Perth was always getting such a bad rap with people saying it was boring and there is nothing to do and it inspired me to start sharing our little adventures online because I was always getting out of the house with my kids to playgrounds and we were exploring great places in Perth together all the time,” she told The West Australian. With nearly 11,000 followers, Ms Elliott doesn’t make a ton of money from brand work, but she is gifted lots of family-friendly activities — from free meals at restaurants to fun weekends away. Her account makes about $15,000 a year and she describes it as a “side-hustle” that is supplementing her income from her full-time job as an office manager. She knows Perth mums who are earning at least $400 per post. Ms Elliott said when she started documenting their family activities, her children were all enthusiastic participants. Being a family influencer provides her children with many new and exciting opportunities, she explained, and it has been a positive experience overall. Highlights include free family holidays and testing the rides ahead of the Perth Royal Show — and she said her kids thought it was “pretty awesome” to skip a day of school for it. “We’ve done so many fun things including staying at a little farm in Toodyay together where the kids had so much fun riding their bikes and we lit a fire and roasted marshmallows together,” remembered Ms Elliott. But despite limiting what she shares about her children online — including their surnames, precise address and the schools they attend — she said there had been a handful of negative experiences that she didn’t see coming. In 2019, when a photo of her two-year-old son went viral after Emma Wiggle re-posted it, Ms Elliott was bombarded with cruel messages. “He was just a little boy wearing his favourite Wiggles costume but being a boy in a dress I received so much negativity and hate and because of that I nearly closed my page down because the comments were so terrible,” she said. “Since then I’ve learned to just block people like that immediately and take no notice of their nasty comments.” Once, a man Ms Elliott did not know came up to her at Hillarys Boat Harbour asking if he could have a photo with her and the children. He had no children with him and although he was very polite, the encounter felt uneasy. “It made me realise that I don’t actually know who is following me online and into the real world,” she said. “After that, I stopped doing live content and decided not to tell people which events I was going to be at.” Then, when her daughter started high school a group of girls found Ms Elliott’s social media account and screen-grabbed images, including one of her daughter in swimwear. “They were saying she needed to go on a diet and things like that which was ridiculous because first of all she definitely didn’t need to lose any weight and second it was an innocent picture of her enjoying a holiday with her siblings,” Ms Elliott said. Ever since, her daughter has looked over her mother’s images and chooses which ones of her, if any, appear online. Parent influencers often point out that the kids are having fun and benefit from the perks — and this may be true for some depending on where they sit on the influencing spectrum, noted Dr Catherine Archer, a social media researcher at Edith Cowan University. But it is too difficult to say what extent, if any, is safe when children are used to generate profit on platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, she added. The risks to children include attention from stalkers and paedophiles, as well as exploitation and abuse from adults who run the channels and who may push their kids to the limit to create more content and attract higher engagement. Perth influencers like Ms Elliott strive to do the right thing by their children by never posting anything too radical, listening to what their children want and only choosing experiences that are fun for them. But Ms Archer said children can be exploited by over-zealous parents trying to tap into the profitable, woefully unregulated, child-oriented influencer industry. Now-disgraced YouTube ‘mommy blogger’ Ruby Franke made viral videos about her six children and ‘wholesome’ life — until she was jailed for child abuse. Popular influencer Piper Rockelle’s mother Tiffany Smith was accused of “emotional, verbal, physical, and at times, sexual abuse” in a bombshell lawsuit in 2022, filed by a group of child influencers she managed. In 2017, Michael and Heather Martin who shot to fame under the name DaddyOFive, were sentenced to five years of probation for child neglect after viewers raised alarm over their treatment of their children in videos. While these are all extreme cases, Dr Archer said they raise important questions around the impacts the influencer economy has on children, especially given kidfluencing is a “huge growth industry” in Australia and overseas. Her concern is the lack of regulations and the possible long-term impact on children’s lives. Both YouTube and Instagram now prohibit accounts by individuals younger than 13, but she noted many child influencer accounts are run by their parents — primarily their mothers — which still creates risks for the children involved. “It might start off as fun for children but it then becomes work when you are bringing in the bigger amounts of money and have become beholden to the brands,” Dr Archer explained. “You have to keep going and doing different things to get the clicks and keep the viewers and the issue here is it involves children.” She pointed out that children whose daily lives are filmed for online content are not protected by the same regulations that safeguard child actors from being overworked or exploited. “There should be some regulations in Australia to protect children and at the moment there is nothing,” she said. “It’s also pretty impossible in Australia to remove images given these feeds have to be public to reach the audiences and get the numbers. This may also draw men to look at the children and that’s when things really start to become uncomfortable.” A recent investigation by The Wall Street Journal found that an alarming proportion of people following kidfluencers were in fact grown men. According to Nicola Watts, managing principal at O’Sullivan Davies Family Lawyers in Perth, child influencers are becoming more common in Australia, but laws to protect them appear to be lagging behind. “The law moves much slower than social media,” she said. Some WA parents do take legal action to ban or limit family members posting photos of their child on social media. “This is becoming increasingly more common,” revealed Ms Watts. “I have not seen it with respect to an influencer yet, I have only seen it when one parent has added the children to posts with a new partner and, or, their kids.” And, she said the court will often grant orders which limit the publication of images of children, along with who can view them. Injunctions tend to be granted because of the “unknown long-term psychological effects of such exposure” for the child, she explained. “The whole basis of family law is to protect the rights of the child and to ensure their safety,” said Ms Watts. “Parents selling their children’s images for a profit does not ensure their safety nor protect their rights to privacy.” In WA, she said if a parent found themselves in a situation where they disagree with their child’s image being used on social media, they may be able to apply for an injunction in the Family Court to prevent the other parent using the child’s images on social media for profit. Another avenue is to attempt to obtain a family violence restraining order in the Magistrate’s Court. Interestingly, the Family Court does not consider “innocent or well-meant behaviour” relevant when it grants the orders. “The objects of the family law legislation are to ensure the best interests of children are met, including by ensuring their safety, and by giving effect to the Convention on the Rights of the Child,” Ms Watts explained. “Even if a child says they ‘like it,’ if they are not mature enough to understand the possible long-term consequences of such exposure, the child’s view is unlikely to hold much weight. “In my view, if asked to decide, unless the court has psychological evidence that prolonged social media activity for profit will not affect the child in any way, which I think is unlikely, then the court is likely to make an injunction stopping a child’s image being used for commercial purposes, if one parent is opposed to this.” Clinical psychologist Dr Danielle Einstein said that adolescence is a critical stage for identity exploration. But when parents leverage their children’s personal life for monetisation on social media, this process can be stifled. London-based mental health expert Ankita Guchait wrote in The Conversation about the harm of “parentification”, a dynamic in which children take on adult responsibilities to meet a caregiver’s emotional or practical needs. In kidfluencing households, she explained, this often manifests as performance pressure, public exposure, and the internalisation of adult expectations — without the maturity to cope. She said when children are finally given the space to make mistakes or exist offline, they may realise they no longer know who they are — only who the algorithm wanted them to be: cute, funny, and obedient. “These dynamics are especially damaging when the entire household income is dependent on the child’s online presence,” she added. “Children may be unable to speak up without jeopardising their sense of safety, their relationships, and even the family’s financial stability.” Dr Einstein said child influencers are not mature enough to properly understand the implications of having their image and personal information shared online. “Children used for content online can become a shopfront and a piece of the family income,” explained Dr Einstein. “There is the issue of their own privacy and how they want their peers to see them. “Images can also be dredged up later and used against the child to bully them. And, when a young person has an online identity, they can become pre-occupied with it. “This distracts them from creating meaningful relationships in the real world which shape their core identity. “It’s really important that we recognise, as parents and as a community, the harmful effects of online identity on emotional development. “This investment in online identity isn’t helping children — instead it is stifling their maturity and stunting their growth. We see greater concerns about attractiveness among girls reliant on social media for their online identity. “We also know influencers are seeking treatment because of the toll it takes on their emotional state and their friendships at school or university.” Some former child influencers in the US whose childhoods were splashed all over the internet have come of age and are fighting back and pushing for stricter child protection laws. “Kids who have grown up online are starting to reflect and some are not always happy about their experience,” noted Dr Archer. Ms Elliott revealed her eldest child wanted to step away from appearing in her content once he was in high school — a decision she fully supported. “I am also very selective about who I work with so when I am asked to promote things like laundry liquid, I know my kids don’t want to sit there and pretend to put laundry liquid into a washing machine, so I say ‘no,’ Ms Elliott said. “I never make them perform, dress up or do anything that makes them feel uncomfortable, which would not be authentic anyway, and even though I know some influencers out there do these things, I would be too concerned it could be harmful to the kids. “If something doesn’t interest my kids, I won’t do it because I don’t want to force them — I only do things that they find enjoyable so all they have to do is have fun. “My kids are 100 per cent living their best lives.”