Sharenting and Kidfluencers: Children’s Online Image Rights

A TikTok creator said in an interview that her five-year-old begged her to stop filming their morning routine because classmates kept repeating lines from the videos at school. The mother laughed and called it adorable. I saw that clip during my digital ethics seminar last semester and felt something shift in how I understood privacy. My professor paused the video and asked whether a kindergartener truly had the power to consent when a parent's income depended on their face staying online.

That question stuck with me because my own childhood photos sat in albums my mom controlled, but this generation grows up with millions of strangers watching them eat breakfast. Children today appear in posts before they can speak, yet they hold no legal right to remove that content once they understand what exposure means. I believe kids deserve enforceable control over their digital presence, especially when parents turn them into revenue streams.

I never thought much about sharenting until my roommate Clara mentioned her younger sister, who is eight now and discovering that her entire childhood exists on Instagram. Clara said her mom posted nearly every day when her sister was born, tagging brands and joining giveaway loops for diaper sponsorships that never came. Her sister found the account last year using her friend's phone and cried for an hour seeing herself potty training in a post with two thousand likes. That story made the abstract concept real for me. Sharenting means parents share details, images, and stories about their children on social media, sometimes casually and sometimes as content strategy. Kidfluencers take it further, with children becoming the face of family vlogs or dedicated accounts that attract brand deals. Some of these kids generate six-figure incomes before they learn long division, and the money usually stays with the parents since child labor laws have not caught up to digital platforms.

The core problem is consent, which children cannot meaningfully give when they depend entirely on adults for survival. In my communication theory class this semester, we spent two weeks on power dynamics in media production, and I kept thinking about family YouTube channels. A seven-year-old might say yes to filming a mukbang video because they want to please a parent or because they like the attention in the moment, but they cannot predict how that video will follow them into job interviews or romantic relationships fifteen years later. I watched a documentary segment about a teenager who discovered her parents had monetized videos of her having tantrums and struggling with a learning disability when she was four. She described feeling violated, but the videos remained online because she had no legal standing to demand removal. Her parents argued they owned the footage and had worked hard editing it. That imbalance shows why consent from a child, even an enthusiastic child, does not equal informed agreement. They lack the context to weigh future harm against present fun.

The financial incentives make everything worse because parents start seeing their kids as content rather than people. My economics professor mentioned last month that some family channels post daily to satisfy algorithmic demands, which means children work schedules that would illegal in a traditional acting job. A second-grader might film for three hours after school so their parents can upload before the evening traffic spike, and no agency monitors their welfare. I read about one former kidfluencer who said her parents homeschooled her mainly to remove scheduling conflicts with filming, and she spent more time under ring lights than with friends her own age. The money flows into family accounts with no legal requirement to set aside earnings for the child, unlike the Coogan Law that protects young actors in Hollywood. When a childhood becomes a business model, the child's needs get weighed against engagement metrics and sponsorship contracts. Even loving parents might convince themselves that more filming is fine because it funds college or vacations, but the child never agreed to trade privacy for a nest egg.

Some parents argue that sharing their children online is no different from previous generations keeping photo albums or showing home movies to relatives, and I understand that instinct. My mom has pictures of me in the bathtub as a toddler, and I am not traumatized by their existence because only a few family members have seen them. The difference is scale and permanence. A photo in an album stays private until someone physically shares it, and even then it reaches maybe dozens of people. A post on Instagram can be screenshot, archived, and spread to thousands or millions without the original poster's knowledge. One parent I read about deleted her daughter's photos after the girl turned ten and asked her to stop, but by then the images had been reposted on random accounts and weird forums. The internet does not forget, and children should not have to spend adulthood chasing down their own baby pictures on strangers' hard drives. That permanence changes the stakes entirely.

I now think children need legal rights that kick in as soon as they can articulate a preference, maybe around age seven or eight when they understand what the internet is. They should be able to demand removal of content featuring them, and platforms should be required to comply within a set timeframe even if the parent objects. Some of their earnings should go into protected accounts they access at eighteen, similar to child actors. I know enforcement would be complicated, especially across international platforms, but the current system leaves kids completely powerless. My little cousin is six, and my aunt posts photos of him constantly, always with his full name and their city tagged. I asked her once if she worried about his future self wanting privacy, and she said he loves the camera now so it must be fine. But now is not forever. Kids grow into adults who might not want their potty training or first breakup immortalized for an audience. Giving them rights over their image would not end family sharing, but it would mean they eventually get a say in their own story, which seems like the minimum we owe people who never asked to be content in the first place.

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