With the recent arrest of family vlogger Ruby Franke on six felony counts of child abuse, many people are starting to more closely scrutinize family vloggers/parent influencers as a group, as well as think more critically about their role as consumers of such content.



A particularly extreme example of the rush to turn everything into content went viral on Twitter recently, with a user named Yasmin sharing a screenshot of a TikTok video showing a mother holding a newborn accompanied by the caption, “Refresh with me 5 hours postpartum.” Yasmin wrote, “Monetising your child literally 5 hours after they were born. These babies are living the truman show lol.”


@thealexanderfamilyy Birth vlog will be on our YT soon, you know where to find the link #momsoftiktok #postpartum #pregnancy #alexanderfamily #momlife ♬ original sound - The Alexander Family


The video was uploaded by the Alexander Family in late September. The family has more than 700k followers on TikTok and over 13k on YouTube and has uploaded countless videos about pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing, and marriage, including three birth vlogs for each of their three children.


Almost everybody was in agreement that it’s weird as heck to turn your child into content so soon after they’re born. As one Twitter user wrote, “That baby didn’t have a digital footprint for 5 whole hours, that’s a record in this day and age.”


@danii.barr #stitch with @The Alexander Family #screammovie #VozDosCriadores ♬ original sound - Danielle barr


The reception over on TikTok wasn’t much more positive. One person who stitched the video joked, “Wake up baby kont-ent it’s time for your mandatory 2 hours of ring light exposure,” while another TikToker decried the video as gross and said, “This baby is five hours old, it has less rights than a child actor.”



Others drew comparisons with a video of a family taking their premature baby to Target an hour after they left the NICU, with the father shown holding the baby up in the air with one hand. Or as one TikToker rightfully put it: “I’m convinced a lot of y’all just had kids for content.”


People like Mom Uncharted are doing their part to combat child exploitation on social media, but it’s definitely an uphill battle when family vlogging is so normalized and accepted. All children grow up eventually, however, and it’s very likely that as more children who saw their childhoods turned into content on YouTube and TikTok age into adulthood, the more horror stories we’ll hear.


In other words, unfortunately, all of this is also probably only in its infancy.