GenZ Voices Essay Contest Winner - Shreya Nallamothu

“And don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe!”

For ten-year-old Everleigh Smith-Soutas, her weekdays are consumed by that phrase. She is the LaBrant Family’s eldest daughter and host to 13 million subscribers on their YouTube channel The LaBrant Fam. Uploading morning routines, prank videos, and her dance solos, Everleigh has had much of her young life posted to YouTube. Everleigh is one of many child influencers—children with large social media presences that generate profit— on the platform. 

Family vlogging has been around since YouTube’s inception in 2005, and it’s a wildly lucrative industry. As the algorithm nudged viewers towards kidfluencers, engagement rose and a single post’s earning potential exceeded tens of thousands of dollars. Now, these children who’ve been broadcasted online since 2005 are starting to grow up, and GenZ is seeing what’s behind the camera. Often, children are forced to in appear content produced by their parents, filmed during vulnerable moments, and stripped of their privacy. It’s a new form of child abuse being recorded, edited, and uploaded to the Internet.

Then 6-year-old Everleigh told that her dog was being given away, and her subsequent devastation uploaded to the Internet. YouTuber Jordan Cheyenne was caught coaching her crying son to pose for a thumbnail. Videos of kids at the pool in bathing suits have chillingly high view counts. Just this past September, mommy vlogger Ruby Franke was arrested and charged with six counts of child abuse. As a growing number of children and evidence come forward about child influencing and sharenting, more people are recognizing the damaging impacts it can have.

Generation Z is the first generation to grow up in the digital space. Our embarrassing photos are no longer held in photo albums, but suspended in pixels on Facebook pages. In fact, to the average child already has over a thousand images of themselves circulating online by the time they turn thirteen. And with the rise of generative technologies like artificial intelligence, it’s easier than ever to manipulate summer-camp-snapshots into stolen identities or explicit images. Child influencing and sharenting are issues that have uniquely shaped our generation and how we interact with technology.

When I learned about kidfluencers, I instinctively ran to child labor legislation to see what it had to say about them. Google, however, didn’t match my fervor. My search simply “did not match any documents.” So, I began combing through existing child labor laws and watching more family vlogs than I’d care to admit. I wrote a legal memo that explained the problem and reached out to the Illinois Senate Labor Committee to find someone to sponsor the bill. Soon after, I began working with Illinois State Senator David Koehler and his staff to draft and file Senate Bill 1782, a bill to protect the income child influencers earn. It requires vloggers to set aside a certain amount of money each month in a trust account for children to access once they turn 18, similar to the 1930s Coogan law.

The bill passed unanimously through the Illinois Senate and was signed into law by Governor Pritzker in August 2023, making Illinois the first state in the nation to protect the income that child influencers generate. But, the most meaningful moment of my journey with SB1782 had come long before: in an interview with the Washington Post, Senator Koehler said that he didn’t know what child influencers were before I brought the issue to him. We need to hear the voices of Generation Z: their involvement in government is not merely a choice, but a necessity to ensure that our policies are well-informed, equitable, and lasting.

As important as SB1782 was to legitimizing the child influencing industry, there is still a lot to be done to continue protecting young people online. For example, France’s 2020 child influencing law not only protects earnings, but also regulates the hours kidfluencers can work and gives them the option to have their videos taken down. We need to address the mental and emotional impacts of having your every move broadcasted online. Until child influencers are given the same rights afforded to children working all other fields of entertainment have, the long-term consequences of growing up as a child star will never be prevented. To fully address the complex challenges faced by child influencers and young content creators, more comprehensive legislation is needed. 

The emergence of child influencers and the world of family vlogging on platforms like YouTube and TikTok have allowed Generation Z to raise critical questions about the welfare and rights of young people growing up in the digital age. By bringing these issues to the attention of legislators and the wider public, we can make real progress in safeguarding the rights and well-being of child influencers. Childhood is irreplaceable. It does not have a dollar amount attached to it, and it certainly shouldn’t be sacrificed for one.

Written in October 2023 by Shreya Nallamothu, a junior at University High School in Normal, IL.