Before the Covid year, a lot of individuals found peace and gainful employment off social media. Many did not care about whether or not they could earn from putting their faces out there, even if you told them such an opportunity existed on the internet for their kids as well. They were more invested in their physical jobs and treated social media as a place where they could come cool off some steam.
Then, the Covid year came and a whole lot of people were forced to sit at home for at least six whole months. This spiked an increase in the number of people interested in creating content, especially since they all thought earning a side income or followership from just dancing online, cracking jokes, and engaging in the messiest drama, was better than being idle.
As the year went by, more people kept adopting social media as a place to make ends meet, and somewhere in the middle of this, parents decided that their kids were the ultimate tools for gaining engagement, gifts, and a full income from this gold mine called the internet.
You could open an Instagram business page today and you would see an under-10-year-old child consistently being used to advertise a product that is in no way related to their age or interests. You could also go through the social media pages of popular celebrity couples and realize that their only child has become the center of their content, and the number of videos they churn out sort of proves their need to gain social media validation and money through that kid, which is clearly a form of exploitation.
Even worse, couples who have just given birth to their babies have made it a habit to create an Instagram page for their one-day-old kid who probably wouldn’t have loved to be an internet favorite, or even an extrovert like their parents have already dictated for them. These parents call for attention to the pages created and decide the social lives of their kids without proper thinking.
I’m not saying it’s wrong for parents to want to set up their children for life with the opportunities that present themselves, but it is important to know that it’s very difficult to prioritize privacy and safety when one starts receiving so much engagement and significant income from their child’s content. In fact, it would be harder to consider the child’s needs over all the juicy offers and incentives the content brings, and we see this happening a lot on the internet.
Many of these children who have been turned into content creators are constantly harassed by perverts. So many unsolicited comments are sent to their pages by random strangers on the internet, and there’s just no privacy for these kids in most cases. Even the kids may grow up without the desire to be all out in people’s faces, but the fact that they live under their media-obsessed parents makes it harder for them to say NO to creating content. All of this could be dangerous, and somehow, these parents fail to understand it.
Given the many disadvantages, I would advocate for the erasure of kids as content creators, especially for video content. But if they must, their engagement on social media should be seasonal. Their entire lives should not be put up every single week or day on the internet for strangers to see, follow, or dissect.
I also believe that children should be at least teenagers before they become part-time content creators. Even then, they should be supervised at all times until they become adults. If they ever do decide at any point to leave content creation, it should be accepted without any withdrawal of privileges or exertion of control over them. I admit this might be difficult for parents who have built their lives on the internet, but I do hope that they can begin to protect their children more, even if it means ditching the social media incentives to prioritize the well being of their kids.
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