What If The Kids of Social Media Families Go After The Hate Sites And The Trolls, Instead of Going After Their Parents?

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Back in France

Hello! After 3 weeks away, I’m back in France. I want to give a heart-felt and sincere thank you to everyone who supported this book tour. I felt your support so much and the tour was wildly successful. My recent posts on Instagram feature each tour stop if you’d like to get a sense of what they were like.

I LOVED the work I was able to do for the last three weeks, but it also feels really good to be back. My arrival home coincided with sunny days and an urge to do some Spring Cleaning, so if I’m not answering your DMs, it might be because I’m cleaning out the fridge, and tackling the ironing. : )

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Pearl-Clutching About Social Media Kids

This article found its way to my feed yesterday. TW: A woman was investigated because of hundreds of harassment tweets she sent to the McCann family; the woman killed herself days after the investigation began.

The article left me thinking about how some people do a lot of pearl-clutching about the children of mommy-bloggers and social media influencers. They are sure the children of these social-media families will grow up to hate their parents, will write a tell-all book, will never speak to them again. I have at least two thoughts in response to that idea.

First take: While I know this has already happened more than once on TikTok — a child of a social media family describing how much they didn’t like how they were raised online — from what I can see, it’s happening in the same proportions as kids in not-social-media-families talking about how they didn’t like how they were raised.

The percentage of social media kids who grow up to hate their parents or didn’t thrive because of their parents’ decisions, seems like it will be the same percentage as kids-in-general who grow up to hate their parents or didn’t thrive because of their parents’ decisions.

In these discussions, people often draw a parallel to child stars, and I think the parallel works to some extent. There are a LOT of child actors. I just re-watched Season Two of Grey’s Anatomy from 2005 — 27 episodes with dozens of child actors appearing. I didn’t recognize a single one of the kids as an actor I know today, but maybe some of those kids (now adults) are still acting 18 years later? How many of them resent the Grey’s Anatomy acting experience their parents facilitated or allowed? How many will write a book like Jennette McCurdy’s memoir? Perhaps a percentage of these kids hated it. My assumption is most did not.

I think that maybe a better parallel is a family business. Family businesses are quite common and may look different than is generally pictured. Did you see the movie, Turning Red? Meilin Lee’s family had a business giving tours at their shrine, and middle-schooler Meilin was expected to help with this in a significant way.

There are all sorts of family businesses. I grew up working on the family businesses my parents created, and never knew a life without that. Some of my happiest childhood memories are seeing my family working together for a common purpose. I suppose it’s no surprise that I would also create family businesses as an adult.

The family business parallel fits better in my mind than the child actor parallel, because there are specific safeguards in place in Hollywood productions to protect child actors — amount of hours that kids can work, funds that go to a protected account for the child and can’t be used by the parents, schooling requirements, etc. But social media work, and other types of family businesses, don’t really have these types of protections built in.

Maybe brands who want to work with social media families should require some industry standards for the specific families they choose to work with, in the same way that both brands and content creators have to follow FTC guidelines about disclosures.

It also occurs to me that when someone has a strong reaction to seeing social media families online, they may be filtering that through their personal opinions about what privacy means. Back in 2006, when I first started Design Mom, I talked with many fellow bloggers about using our kids names online versus using pseudonyms.

I remember being confused by the discussion at first. Just a year earlier, when I was working as an art director, I had talked with a coworker about a Top 30 Under 30 article, and how we would be so excited to be featured in that way. If a major media outlet was going to share a feature article about me and my career, I certainly would want them to include my family. So if I would want an outlet like the NYTimes or Forbes to publish my children’s names, then why would I hesitate sharing them on my brand new blog that literally no one was reading? To me, it didn’t seem like a big question at all.

But in the discussions with fellow new bloggers, I learned other people felt the exact opposite. They wouldn’t share their kids’ names on their blog, and if the NYTimes happened to reach out, they swore they wouldn’t share their kids’ names with the NYTimes either. They would rather not be featured at all. I learned privacy means something different to different people.

My second take: Instead of writing tell-alls about their parents, I think we may see social-media kids write tell-alls about the harassment their family endured from comments, DMs, and anonymous message boards. I think we may see more articles like the one I referenced above, where an “anonymous” person, who wrote hundreds of posts attacking a particular family (or families), has their real identity revealed and is taken to task for it.

I sometimes think about this in the case of Hey Natalie Jean. She was run off the internet after 800+ pages were written about her and her family on a hate forum. So many people critiquing every aspect of her life, talking about how she was an unfit parent, predicting her child would be taken by CPS. Her sin that brought on all this hate? She wrote a lifestyle blog, had excellent taste, and had started to make an income from her writing.

If her kid ever learns the troll discovery techniques taught on Tiktok, perhaps some of these anonymous people who relentlessly attacked her will face an unwanted spotlight.

If I'm her kid, I imagine I'd want to know who these people are that spent literal years attacking my mother, spreading vicious lies, destroying her blooming writing career, causing a mental health crisis, and breaking up a family. Why did these strangers do it? Why have they never apologized or faced consequences?

At one point, these anonymous trolls led a campaign to give 1-star reviews to Hey Natalie Jean’s just-published book of essays. If I'm her kid, and I’m now grown and I read my mom's awesome book, and I learn about this campaign, will I be angry at my mom? Or will I direct my anger at the anonymous jerks who tanked my mother’s book for absolutely no reason?

The first big mom-blog wave was during the mid-2000s. Back then, the pearl-clutching worries about the first wave of social media kids sounded exactly like the current pearl-clutching about Youtube families and TikTok families. I've met quite a few of the now-grown-up social media kids from the first wave, and they seem to like their parents just fine and are happily going on about their college and post-college life. I don’t think the pearl-clutchers got it right back then. Are today’s pearl-clutchers getting it right?

My point to all this: If there's going to be a kid-generated-backlash to mommy-blogging/influencing/vlogging, don’t be surprised if it’s not directed at the parents, and instead is directed at the “anonymous” people who spend their lives attacking the social media families.

What’s your take? Do you know anyone who has spent time writing on the hate forums (reddit, gomi, etc.)? If their identity was suddenly revealed, is there anything they’ve written that would prompt an investigation or a lawsuit? And what do you think about the parallel I drew between social media family businesses and other family businesses? Does it ring true for you?

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That’s all for now. Happy Spring! I hope you are having a wonderful week. Feel free to comment on anything I mentioned above, or whatever’s on your mind.

kisses,
Gabrielle