Christoper Robin Milne is a famous example of having one's childhood turned into content, although obviously nothing anywhere near as pervasively as happens with attention-starved "influencers" leveraging their children for a dopamine rush:
Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content
121–130 of 243 posts
Re: Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content
#122I'm here for the cynical take: the size of the issue depends on whether it's successful. Lots of childhoods suck, and lots of parents make bad decisions. "My childhood was made into content and all I got was this multi-million dollar inheritance" doesn't sound too bad. Plenty of people have worse childhoods and don't get a penny.
The implication of your take is that we should exploit children as much as possible because it might pay off big, as long as we don't cross the line into "worst childhood of all time".
Not quite (because the chance of success is very small), but if you're a successful influencer and then exploit the fact that you have children for even more growth, the trauma is probably small and the therapy is easily covered with the amounts of money you're making (which makes SWE salaries look tiny in comparison).
It's not positive, but it's "I have a splinter in my finger" relatively to what many (most?) children experience who don't grow up in the top 1%.
There's another post on the front page currently about over 100 kids who were illegally employed in hazardous jobs, and yesterday we had an article about laws being proposed to remove the hourly limits on child labor. I think the children affected by those things would prefer to have had their face on their mommy's instagram and never have to work a day in their life over working in a meat sanitation plant from their 13th birthday on.
It's all relative, but I guess that's an unpopular opinion. Maybe most here feel closer to the kids on instagram than those in the meat packing plant.
Re: Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content
#123This article unfortunately doesn't cover a much darker part of the TikTok children: exploitation of the children for the titillation of online creepers. The Some Place Under Neith podcast goes into this extensively [their "Parasocial Pits Of Hell" series]. It's completely legal to vlog your children in swimming outfits or a similar level of skin exposure, have the children sing or perform for their "fans", and encour…
I have weirdly mixed feelings on your comment. - I agree that parents who publicize their children on social media are massive creep in my opinion, who do a massive invasion of the child privacy. That should almost be illegal in my opinion since the child can't consent. - At the same time saying that no skin should ever be shown ever because "it titills sexual creeps" is a dark road that points in a direction which i…
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Re: Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this has been a source of hurt feelings for my parents, my wife's parents, and the parents of many of our peers... Facebook-addicted Boomers literally crying, "But everyone else gets to put up pictures of their grandchildren!"
Grandparents have shared photos of their relatives, just usually through wallet photos in the past, email maybe later - so it probably feels like a small delta on that. Probably doesn’t help more of their lives are spent online than in person now. I’d been printing off photos in various sizes (wallet to 8x10) and sending them along to my parents/grandparents - but it does take more effort to follow through. I do post…
We upload and organize our family photos in a private Flickr album, and the grandparents have access to that. The presentation is beautiful and I update it at least once a month, so they should be able to enjoy it. If they pull up the album on their phone to show off some photos to a friend in-person, like they would've done in the past with a wallet photo, we're fine with that. Unfortunately, what they really want is the shower of Likes and comments from their 1,000+ Facebook "friends" (and God knows who else with their privacy settings).
Re: Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grandparents have shared photos of their relatives, just usually through wallet photos in the past, email maybe later - so it probably feels like a small delta on that. Probably doesn’t help more of their lives are spent online than in person now. I’d been printing off photos in various sizes (wallet to 8x10) and sending them along to my parents/grandparents - but it does take more effort to follow through. I do post…
We upload and organize our family photos in a private Flickr album, and the grandparents have access to that. The presentation is beautiful and I update it at least once a month, so they should be able to enjoy it. If they pull up the album on their phone to show off some photos to a friend in-person, like they would've done in the past with a wallet photo, we're fine with that. Unfortunately, what they really want i…
I was also using iCloud shared photo album which was great until my mother switched to an android phone (in addition, lost true Facetime support which was also a bummer)
Ironically she switched to an android phone because she had too many photos I think and was always running out of storage. Of course the new phone had no photos, and her old phone would have been just fine if she was happy to start over too.
Re: Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content
#126Christoper Robin Milne is a famous example of having one's childhood turned into content, although obviously nothing anywhere near as pervasively as happens with attention-starved "influencers" leveraging their children for a dopamine rush: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Robin_Milne
Similarly, Dennis Ketcham, son of "Dennis the Menace" author Hank Ketcham:
Re: Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content
#127I have some good friends who've gone the other way: they've asked that there be as close to no photos or videos of their child on any social media as possible. They don't post about him online, and they keep pictures of him in photo albums. When he was born, they asked all of us to please refrain from taking photos of him without their permission. I completely support this and I intend to do something similar for my…
100% on the same page here, I plan on doing the same, and my sister does the same thing with her kid. Seems so weird to freely share intimately private pictures of children, family scenes, etc. on the open internet. They used to be tucked in grandma's photo album under the living room coffee table.
Re: Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Supporting your parents financially is just part of life for a lot of people, some even get a lot of happiness out of it. Yeah, lots of people find happiness in things done with consent. Those same people find unhappiness, resentment, and anger when those same things are done without consent. Consent matters! Children are not born owing their parents anything. This take is disgusting, frankly, because it ignores th…
> Children are not born owing their parents anything. Yes they are. That is the function of children with respect to parents in the circle of life, just as it is the function of parents to care for children. Not all obligations are ones you voluntarily undertake. Of course there are boundaries to the scope of that obligation. But those are defined by society, not "consent." The problem in Claire's story is that the p…
Going into parenthood with that mentality is a surefire way of making sure the children won't care at all about that "obligation".
People take care of their families because of a bond that has nothing to do with blood. That bond is uniquely about mutual feelings and as a parent we have only a few years to make that bond last a lifetime.
If it's formed on top of obligations and resentment it'll break the first chance it gets. Just take a look at one of the kids in the article: she probably had a great life materially, but the minute she turns 18 she's willing to never talk to her parents ever again.
Re: Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
The implication of your take is that we should exploit children as much as possible because it might pay off big, as long as we don't cross the line into "worst childhood of all time".
Not quite (because the chance of success is very small), but if you're a successful influencer and then exploit the fact that you have children for even more growth, the trauma is probably small and the therapy is easily covered with the amounts of money you're making (which makes SWE salaries look tiny in comparison). It's not positive, but it's "I have a splinter in my finger" relatively to what many (most?) childr…
I think you're misunderstanding the realistic state of child influencers. These children have no guarantee of access to any money they "earn", and also the chance of earning that much is quite low. Just like most influencers, most of them don't make anywhere near a fulltime income an adult could make even on minimum wage, but are left with lifelong distortions of how to be a person that have to be unlearned.
I don't think it's reasonable to excuse or downplay exploitation of children in one way because exploitation of children occurs another way elsewhere. We can argue against addressing harm to children because other harm happens to children all the way down to the source of Omelas's good fortune if you like, but I don't think this results in positive societal outcomes.
Re: Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might well be right, but it's odd when you really think about it. We're allowing behavior we deem immoral or harmful to happen in cases where we think it makes our entertainment a bit better.
You are making a moral judgement and applying it to everyone -- but I think you are in the minority in thinking that. Most people don't see children actors and think of them as being harmed and the production immoral.
I believe the parent comment's point would be better formulated as: We make an exception for child actors but do so thoughtlessly; if we applied the same lines of moral reasoning that leads us to prevent children from working elsewhere, many of those lines would prevent us from making an allowance for paid child actors. But we fail to make the application of those lines of reasoning in this case because of cultural loopholes and blinders, not any limitation in the reasons themselves.
The one line of reasoning I can think of that does limit itself in this regard is the one says "there are no good adult substitutes for child actors, hence an exception," but this is a very cynical moral ground for child labor laws, as there are probably many potential exceptions that could be forced here that we would find profoundly repugnant and we would have to abandon that line of reasoning or be forced to admit we are more interested in industry outcomes than the welfare of children or our moral worth.