00:06:36.860She's the researcher from the Annenberg School of Communications at UPenn.
00:06:40.560Over the course of Emily's research into social media influencers, she heard over and over again that influencers felt an intense and almost crippling pressure to post more and more about their kids.
00:06:55.140They know that they are part of this industry and the structure that incentivizes them to share more vulnerable content and more personal stuff.
00:07:23.100They don't really have the capacity to understand what this sharing means.
00:07:27.000And in some ways, none of us do because we're kind of in uncharted waters as far as sharing so many images and videos of children online on these platforms where we don't really know what's going to happen to this content in the future.
00:16:32.640When I was filling Glynnis in on the conversation I had with Joe Livingstone,
00:16:35.700we realized we both had some very strong reactions to these ideas.
00:16:40.120When Joe Livingstone started talking about the worst parts of us, us as in the collective us, I started thinking about the worst parts of me, of myself, and the things that I don't like to admit, like the fact that I do actually like posting pictures of my kids, and I do get some weird dopamine hit when I get a bunch of likes on them.
00:17:05.100I think there's some normalcy to that, right?
00:17:07.340Like when we were kids, if we were in the school play or a concert or whatever it was, or even when I was a competitive swimmer and my mother would come and watch, like, of course she was so excited when I won.
00:17:19.860And of course she wanted to tell people.
00:17:21.980And her doing so made me feel better because it made me feel seen and it made me feel appreciated.
00:17:28.200And, like, what happens in social media, though, is that those natural reactions are blown out to such unnatural proportions that the effect is, like, I'm taking this thing that's completely normal, being proud of my child and wanting to share that, and, like, I've turned it into a monster.
00:17:50.780And is that monster going to eat up me and my child?
00:30:10.140But for real, I for real think we're about to get a deluge of these sorts to the point where it'll be like, here's yet another child actor with their terrible story.
00:30:20.440To be fair, I've interviewed more than 100 mom influencers at this point. I don't think any of them that I've talked to are bad parents. They do tell me they set up boundaries. They do tell me that if their kids don't want to be in a photo, they don't force them. Again, this is just what people are telling me. I don't know.
00:30:37.220But the fact is, there's no laws. There's no regulation of this industry the way that there is of, say, the film industry and the TV industry. But the film and TV industry was not always like that. I actually talked to New York Times reporter Sapna Maheshwari, who's covered the influencer industry, about the fact that this is the Wild West when it comes to child labor laws.
00:31:00.160There's really no safeguards in place for children who are appearing in this sort of
00:31:07.880media and this sort of marketing. There aren't that many rules generally for kids in terms of
00:31:15.180how they get paid as actors, but there is a law that came up a lot in my reporting called the
00:31:22.100Coogan Law. As Sapna explained this law to me, and she explained it for way longer than we're
00:31:27.880including in here, it became clear that this could be one of the guides that could help us
00:31:33.460figure out how kids on Instagram could stay protected. The Coogan Law is named for a former
00:31:39.800child star whose parents actually spent all of the money he had earned by the time he turned 21.
00:31:48.240And it basically says that some amount of a child actor's earnings have to be set aside in a trust.
00:31:55.660These rules don't apply to children influencers.
00:31:59.100And I think this is a case of laws not keeping up with technology, where these are kids who
00:32:06.480are being employed by brands in the same way a child actor in a television commercial would
00:32:12.480be, but they're not subject to the same protections around their earnings.
00:32:17.380Little more history on the Coogan Law.
00:32:19.260it was established way back in 1939 by a kid who was featured in a charlie chaplin movie
00:32:26.660that's when hollywood was still a pretty young industry much like the influencing industry today
00:32:32.800and it's making me think about how influencing should enact these laws
00:32:36.620now now before it gets ahead of itself before things get bad lindsey lohan jody sweeten bad
00:32:47.160Leah Plunkett just kept stressing to me that this conversation is well overdue.
00:32:53.080It has happened so fast that I think it has taken us all a little bit of time to even really
00:33:00.160recognize that sharenting, however you define it, whether you take my broader definition or
00:33:05.220narrow it to social media posts by parents, it took us a while to even kind of label it.
00:33:11.200Leah Plunkett did label it, and that's a start. But there probably needs to be more.
00:33:16.220all of this is showing me that we are raising a generation of children who will never have a
00:33:23.300choice about whether or not they want to be on the internet it's a given for them that almost
00:33:28.320from the moment they come out of their mother's bodies or sometimes even in utero that they have
00:33:33.100a digital footprint and that's even more true for children of influencers there's probably going to
00:33:39.960be some consequences to that. There are several different types of impacts of this digitally
00:33:48.900sharented or born sharented, you might say, generations might have. The first would be
00:33:56.480those consequences that are criminal, illegal, or otherwise dangerous. And so one example is
00:34:04.720identity theft, the more information you have about someone's intimate details. And we are
00:34:12.140putting all of that information out about our kids. And so unfortunately, given the big data
00:34:18.200breach world we live in, it is really not hard for identity thieves to take information about
00:34:24.540these born sharented kids and get credit in their name. But there's a deeper threat here.0.91
00:34:30.400a threat to how these kids are going to grow up in the world.
00:34:35.700You heard Lou, the child of a former mom blogger, the one on TikTok.
00:34:40.940There is a very real effect on kids' emotional and psychological development.
00:34:47.720These seem to be traumas that stay with children for a very long time.
00:34:54.260This is actually the one that, for me, matters the most,0.99
00:34:58.100is what the born-sharented generation will experience in terms of developing their own sense of self
00:35:06.220and by extension their own relationships with people now and in the future.1.00
00:35:12.460It's really dangerous for kids when their ability to play, to just move through the world,
00:35:20.800I don't just mean like play dolls or play trucks, but to experiment and to be themselves
00:35:26.220and figure out who they are is being scripted by a company that doesn't know them, isn't
00:35:33.820designed to support their well-being or psychological development, but has a profit motive.
00:35:39.460I think there's a good chance that we will look back on this period 5, 10, 15, 20 years
00:35:45.260from now kind of the way we looked back on the era before seatbelts were mandatory or
00:35:51.500when smoking everywhere was still okay.
00:35:53.840But I'm in some ways even more nervous that what's going to happen is that we won't get there.
00:35:59.620What we do as parents, commercial or otherwise, is modeling a certain type of digital citizenship for our kids.
00:36:09.400And they are going to take their cues from us.
00:36:13.480And so the line for me between what we do about our kids and then what we set them up to do about themselves, that's a tricky line.
00:36:23.840What concerns Leah Plunkett the most is that we're setting our kids up for a whole new