An Urgent Question for Anyone Who Uses Social Media

In 2014, Kristine and Matt, the parents of five young children, posted a 15-minute video on You Tube. “24 Hours With 5 Kids on a Rainy Day” was the first vlog to appear on their channel, Family Fun Pack. It splices together snippets of the utterly ordinary and frankly boring activities that make up a kid’s life: eating, getting dressed, playing, practicing piano, more playing, story time before bed. Watching this feels somewhat akin to watching a home video—except I don’t know these children, and their parents are trying to sell me things. The “unbreakable, colorful cereal bowls” the kids eat out of, for example, are affiliate-linked in the caption. Over the past 12 years, the vlog has received more than 316 million views.Kristine and Matt, who don’t share their surname publicly, have been on YouTube since 2011, when Kristine uploaded a video of her twin toddler boys putting themselves to bed. As she tells the journalist Fortesa Latifi in the new book Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online, she “didn’t understand privacy settings” and simply intended to send the video to her mother-in-law. Soon, it had 8 million views. “Everything just spiraled from there,” Kristine says, which is putting it mildly: The Family Fun Pack YouTube now has 10.5 million subscribers and 15.9 billion lifetime views. One marketer estimates that the channel brings in about $200,000 a month from YouTube’s AdSense revenue-sharing program, in addition to whatever the family makes from brand-sponsorship deals, affiliate links, and Cameos.The Family Fun Pack are in the upper echelons of the family-influencing industry, in which parents invite social-media followers into their family’s life with constant streams of content. Over the years, Kristine and Matt have continued growing their brand on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. They’ve also had three more kids since that first rainy-day vlog—kids who have never known an unrecorded life. In 2024, Kristine chronicle