The Children Are Not for Sale: Stamping Out the Monetized Sharenting Entertainment Industry and Rehabilitating Parental Rights

Abstract

Saving the children is once again on the sociopolitical docket, and the legislature has an opportunity to enact legislation that might actually save children. A pertinent child welfare concern shared by psychologists, child advocates, and the Federal Government today is an increasing youth mental health crisis and overwhelming evidence that social media use is a primary cause. Meta has even joined the cause, launching a public relations campaign voicing its openness to congressional reform. Additionally, the bipartisan “Kids Online Safety Act,” is pending in both the Senate and House of Representatives as parallel bills S.1409 and H.R. 7891, respectively. This is a bipartisan effort to pass evidence-based regulation aimed at protecting children by supporting parental rights. Despite this progress, there is one extremely big gap in this piece of legislation that runs the risk of undermining it entirely, a generational gap.

Children who were raised on the internet are now parenting on the internet. When a parent posts pictures, videos, or publicly discusses their child in detail online, this is called “sharenting.” In practice, sharenting can refer to a range of content. Some forms include high levels of child participation, such scripted skits with their parents. Others involve passive participation, such as parent incorporating filming into their daily routines. Online posts divulging stories with identifiable information or repurposing of already existing photos of the child is a common form of sharenting. Scholars in law and psychology problematize excessive sharenting for contributing to harm already associated with general childhood internet use: reputational harm, privacy risks, vulnerability to harassment and cyberbullying, or simply amplified general embarrassment. Although those sound like harms a parent would intuitively avoid, the unregulated rollout of the internet is likely to blame for the public’s unhealthy relationship with it.

As technology rapidly developed over the past several decades, the social role of the internet has been a loose cannon. Sociological shifts in internet use impacted different age demographics at different developmental moments. For example, the Millennial generation ranges from people born in roughly 1981 through 1996, and Generation Z (“Gen Z”) ranges from people born in 1997 through 2012. At-home computer use increased in the 1990s at a fast pace with two percent of American households having internet access in 1992 and twenty-six percent in 1998. By 2007, sixty-four percent of teens ages 12-17 reported to engage in some form of content creation, ranging from blogs to online communities to publishing works of art. That same year, Facebook started incorporating user data into a user-targeted advertising structure and YouTube introduced in-video advertisements and its paid Partner Program. The average teen’s diary and locker room discussion became a marketplace overnight without any real means of understanding the implications of this shift. This same cohort is now in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. Many still use social media as a form of diary or group discussion, but now the topics of discussion include their children. Although this narrative thread is not the only explanation for the proliferation of sharenting, a successful legislative agenda that aims to protect children’s online safety needs to take the history of the internet into account.

An unregulated internet helped create a generation of parents primed to share an unsafe amount of information about their family life and seamlessly transitioned into an infrastructure that facilitates monetizing that habit. Increasingly, parents who post pictures and videos of their kids are gaining lucrative mass followings for the content they post. Parents can profit off of this following by teaming up with a given social media platform to get a share of related ad revenue from the platform, or get paid directly by companies to discuss their products in their family posting. Parents can also use a subscription model in which followers pay to get bonus content, though Meta announced efforts to crack down on this specific method in response to criticism that its predominant content and clientele sexualize children. When follower counts start reaching the thousands or millions, children can turn into an online celebrities. Child-rearing is becoming a form of self-expression in an era in which online self-expression is a viable career option, all while more and more commerce is online. The result is a new entertainment industry in which parents combine their parental liberties and freedom of expression to commodify their parent-child relationship: the Monetized Sharenting Industry.