By Jocelyn Anderson
Since social media has been around, there have been many family content creators that share their family’s life online. There has also always been a controversy around these creators, where some are saying that posting one’s children’s online is a form of exploitation since the families can get paid large amounts off of using their child without the child really being able to protest.
A lot of people see this as forcing your kids to work because families take all the money and not let the children decide if they want to be on camera or not. Many parents have also shown very personal parts of their child’s life, like potty training, first crushes, puberty talks, and tantrums. As this first generation of content creating kids grow up, people are interested to see if they are embarrassed of any of the things their parents posted or if they resent their parents for it.
Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, passed a law in 2024 to help the concerns surrounding child content creators. This act went into effect on January 1st, 2025, and it ensures that the children are getting paid for their work.
There are laws for child workers, like actors or reality TV stars, that require their parents to put a percentage of their earnings in something called a Coogan account, which only the child can unlock and withdraw from once they turn 18. The new Child Content Creator Rights Act requires something similar; this act makes parents of child social media influencers or content creators in California put 65% of their earnings into a Coogan account for them to receive when they turn 18. This only applies to children that are in at least 30% of the social media content on a certain page.
Some content families are not happy with this law and seem to be trying to escape it without outwardly saying it. The main way these families are escaping this law is by moving out of California.
Content creators like The Labrant Family, Brittany Xavier, and Cecily Bauchmann have relocated to Tennessee since the passing of this law. Each of these families have expressed their own concern for a different issue with their current home and framed this as why they had to move.
Many viewers of these channels have caught on to this and have been calling these creators out in their comments and with TikTok videos. Viewers are still expressing their concerns for the children and are really worried about how these kids’ lives are off camera since their parents are escaping laws to protect them.
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