The Sunday Story: Permission to share
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Am I shark? O and this is the sunday story. So as you might know, I have three Young kids, and they love social media, and I take out youtube. All of they especially love these videos of other kids and their families.

They are all over social media now, like parents sharing every part of the kid's life, posted videos of their kids playing with new toys, are doing pranks or having these lavish birthday parties. Sometimes, you know, something bad happens like a child breaking their leg or something. And I have seen this.

It's not great for the kids. But honestly, IT seems like even though there is the worry and the trip to the doctor, they can make some good country. How and that can be quite profitable.

There's money to be made from product placement as as m use. And that's great for the parent. But what about these kids? Like what are they getting out of all of this online exposure?

Initial hardi is a free less journalist in berkely, california, and they've been looking into this very question. Welcome to the park is in sha. thanks. We're taking the time to chat.

thanks. I sure.

So this kind of like posting a family videos on social media has become so popular that it's got its own name right.

yeah. So the practice is now commonly known as parenting. So you know, when parents share everything about the experience of parenting or raising a family online, but before sharing, ting was a term, there was what we called ma mi blogs, and they kind of really got this whole trend started.

But but you're like A A pretty Young journalist, if I can say that respectfully. So how did you get interested in this topic? You know, on like raising kids on the internet.

Well, I was a little bit like your kids. I asia, I grew up on the internet and I wanted to be online. I had youtube accounts where I would make silly videos with my friends. I had the agency and the ability to delete those videos when I got older, and I started to cringe at the content I made when I started seeing kids on my social media feed today as an adult, I was, you know, first amused by them, but then I realized that the accounts that they were being featured on were not their own and and they didn't have the agency I did growing up to take down any content that they didn't want online anymore.

So what thing about this is that even though it's like happening all over the place, is still like fairly new generally like I wonder you able to find a lot of information about like the impacts of this.

Yeah, the lack of information actually really surprised me. The experience of these kids is often being gay, kept by their parents. And you know, though IT seems really hold some on its face, there is definitely a power dynamic there. I also started coming across stories of family bloggers that we're darker and less wholesome. And that troubled me, especially when I realized to that the really created accounts we see online, they added out those less perfect moments.

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's going to be harder to sell a video if you have to keep going and I don't anna do this. I'm tired. Um I would assume like that the upside for the parents least is that they can probably make some good money like that's what I think what i'm looking at this like bacon, and that may be the justification for you got ta get out here, make these .

video totally. And you know, it's worth saying that along with the real downsides I found reporting this story is also true that blogging and blogging have been beneficial specifically to mom searching for a community to share their experiences about the struggles and joys of motherhood, which can kind of .

be isolated. And that's where the story, that job report IT begins. right? right?

I interviewed one of the first really successful mommy bloggers. SHE called herself self the queen of the mommy bloggers. SHE said that the blog was really instrumental for her when he was a new mom with a crying baby. Lots of dies and no sleep.

Everything hurts. Everything is messy and dirty. And I know I was so bewildered in early motherhood.

That's other armstrong. She's been in the news lately because SHE recently died by suicide. When I spoke to her last fall, our conversation was about her writing.

Two decades ago, he had one of the hottest st. Blogs on the internet. IT was called do stock calm, and IT was an outlet for the chaos SHE felt as a new mother.

After I had my first kid, I realized that the only way that I was gna survive was writing about IT. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't have friends who have babies. My mom was not in town. I was alone.

and I was writing about IT and IT. Turns out there were a lot of other moms out .

there having similar frustrations. I took off everybody, god this with each other. We can say, this is hard. What do we do? What are the answers and laughing about IT?

That's what made her blog such a success. IT became a place for new moms to commiserate and either was candid, even cross sometimes. But he told IT, like IT is these days, either said, it's a whole different story.

I look around a instagram today if everything is just extremely clean and polish.

SHE said. Mommy, blogging today isn't about finding community. It's become way more commercial, you know, picture perfect.

I imagine that there's probably a lot of quiet depression going on with women scrolling through all the really pretty things on instagram. And in interest in wet.

this shift in the mommy logging space started when advertisers saw just how many moms were clicking on blogs and they wanted to get in front of that. Audience, too, had their experiences this change. First hand, as her blog's audience grew, advertisers started to reach out to her, and the money was enticing. But that meant SHE had to do product placements, and her kids could no longer just draw pictures at home. Instead, they'd go to a duck out condo that somebody rented out for them and use art supplies that a brand had given them and pose for pictures and .

just became as a drug. And my kids like, okay, we just just want to watch you a show and do some arts.

Ultimately, this trend towards brand sponsorships since the iro countertops in a maculate homes IT became too much. It's what LED her to walk away from her influencing gig but either maintained that her kids were fine being part of her blog IT was never .

don't write about me like everybody early on was like, okay, these mommy blogger are gonna they're crucifying their children, hope their children would be so said that they read about them.

My kids do .

not care at all at all.

I asked .

either .

if a thirteen year old child might be willing to talk to me about their experience being featured online and he said, maybe. But when I followed up with either about the request, SHE stopped responding to me. I was able to use clues from other's blog to track down her other kid, her nineteen year old daughter.

I knew her full name from the blog leda. At least armstrong and I found out that he was going to drug university through some comments I found on a subset where people talk about the things that mommy bloggers like either post. I basically punched that information into google, and there he was. So hello, how's IT go in?

It's pretty good. It's pretty good at how .

are you we got on a zoom call in march and need to push back on her mom's claim that SHE didn't care at all about being written about online is he has had photos .

where where I was like, can you take this down? Sometimes she's like, okay but sometimes like SHE gets weird about .

IT leader says he gets IT. IT made a lot of money for the family, and he saw first hand how IT helped her mom, you feel supported, and how IT also helped out their parents too.

I do think that like IT was hard not being able to like consent to that kind of thing. I think maybe like he had asked permission to post certain things, I feel that would maybe feel more secure.

Leader says the blog was kind of a double edge sword. There were some really cool moments where leader would feel almost famous, but like a famous person, there were also times where SHE didn't recognize herself.

I would read stuff and I would be like, I definitely never said that. I was little frustrated because, like, I have all this content being put me on line and sometimes just not even accurate to embarrassing.

And this has caused some anxiety leader worry sometimes about whether this digital footprint might limit the opportunities available to her. She's thinking about IT as he starts applying to jobs and internships.

I think it's scary to think that like I can be judged off of.

And there are other ways that leader doesn't feel safe online. For instance, SHE doesn't have the anonymity that other kids do when they first create online profiles.

I'm tagged in a photo, and then I get so many follow request from all these random adults.

That's why leader make sure all of her social media accounts are private.

I know that if I like on private, my account, like so many random people would follow me, and I don't know. I feel about that.

You're listening to the sunday story will be right back.

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We're back with the sunday story leaders .

among a growing number of people struggling with this dilema. I actually first heard about this problem through someone named lew. There are non binary native american part mariaba part hope by an indigenous pacific islander. Er lew also asked that we only use first names for them and further, mom jody, due to concerns for loose safety based on past experiences related to the blog. They're currently living in colorado and when they're not dancing in denver, they can be found walking their dog.

His name's monty, but that also means his name's montrevor space for her mag. 我， mont.

I met up with luu in colorado springs to talk about momma blogging because, like leader, loose mom also had a blog for my mom.

The blog was her, her coping mechanism for everything he was going through. As far as being a military mom.

loose mom jodie was blogging around the same time that hetherton blog, duce was in its heyday. Though jodi's blogs didn't have the millions of followers that hetherton blog did, wild stock m was tightly created for its audience. Loose mom could let IT all hang out.

He was practically raising her five kids by herself. So that was what the community was for her. The community that presented itself to me was a little bit darker and a little bit more inappropriate.

because lew is pretty Young, just nine when the blog began.

So I got more creepy requests, more adults who were building relationships and accessing that information online. These adults .

would reach out to love online. And like many other kids growing up in the late nineteen, two thousands loose spent a lot of time on the computer. They played games, frequented chat rooms, and sometimes lui even comment on their .

mom's blog, silly stuff, like high mom, or like fark humor, or, you know, this is rocky, and i've taken over rocky.

That was the name of the family dog, but I was also what the family called lw. When they were growing up, their mom's audience would use lose user name, which was attached to these comments to track you down on other sites, chat rooms, to start conversations like.

oh, hey, how's your mom? At first.

IT wasn't completely obvious to love who these people were supposed to be. They were strangers, but they already .

had all of the names to people in our family, and like places that we'd been what was going on. So IT felt way more intimate than IT really was.

Lue talks about IT like a warped pair social relationship. That word is usually used to describe those one sided relationships where fans believe they have a real connection with a celebrity, but in this case, the power dynamics are all jumbled. U wasn't a celebrity. They were just a kid.

There is no way for that child to have autonomy in that situation. They don't have the facility to cut off that interaction. The power is on the other side, with whoever consuming the .

content and those adults controlling the conversation. They would message lou in these online chat rooms and then the'd suggest to move to phone or video calls. And on these calls, who says, there was a lot of .

a lot of flirting. If you look so great in this picture, I wonder what you would look like without this on.

And now you can even see how some of these adults were glooming them by trying to build trust.

People wanted like saying that they wanted to be there for like emotional support or like .

I see what you're going through because lu was going through a hard time and strangers online could see that from how their mom talked about them on the blog like there's this one blog post that leu remembers vividly to this day.

I think it's called sagging, a rocky style.

Jodie had written IT after he had caught lw using her underwear. One day online, SHE built up this funny, exaggerated scene. But what loose mom didn't show what .

was actually going on was my laundry was downstairs in the laundry room in a moderate ile, and I had nothing clean to wear, and I was so desperate for something clean that I stole her underwear.

What jodie published on her blog, this funny slice of life, was actually a much darker narrative behind the scenes.

There was just this twilight zone kind of feeling IT was crazy making I felt nuts all the time. And then when the kids got to that post, oh my god, that was rough. That was, that was a big garden.

This would happen with blog posts. Lew remembers walking down the hallway at school and hearing other kids and .

White ring loud enough for you to hear, like gross, gross, gross. Or like, here are your parents got like the .

persona loose mom created for them online was impacting lose real life and their sense of self. Luo od grown up with a blog around IT was a fixture of their childhood, another sibling they can't really recall a time without IT and sometimes IT became hard to tell where lew ended and rocky, their online persona began.

It's not even fictional character that i'm dealing with in in unpacking, in unraveling is this version of me that my mom's policies and made very permanent in its like feeling like a bird in a cage with the mirror who says IT wasn't .

the only reason but IT was one of the reasons that contributed to them dropping out of high school soon after lew moved away from home. But we realized that the situations they were moving into were not always safer. Years of being approached and appropriately, online had lowered their guard for creeps in real life. The first place they moved into after leaving home seemed really good. On paper there .

is this guy who was like, oh yeah, I A deployed soldier, my wife and my thirteen month looking for roma and someone to help clean up around the house.

But then luo says the husband started to cross boundaries.

Immediately he went intelligence as if I wanted to call him master, like if you wanted to sell me a ms. outfit.

This was awful and disappointing to do, but I wasn't necessarily new.

This is fine. This is how I used to being talked to. Unlike like lu .

and leader stories are just the beginning. I mean, have you been on social media? It's full of kids being featured by their parents online.

So I just wanted note that today is the first time that I ve introduced myself with my legal name. And three years, because i'm terrified to share my name because the digital print I had no control over exists.

This is calm. When he was a kid, he was also the subject of a mommy blog. And I actually reached out to her for an interview for this peace, but he never got back to me.

What I did find was her public testimony for washington state house bill sixteen twenty seven. IT aims to protect the interest of minor children who are featured on four profit family blogs. Here's calm at the hearing on february fourteen and twenty twenty three.

when I was nine years old, the intimate details of my first period were shared online. At fifteen, I was in a car accident in which the fire department had to come with the jaws of life to remove a car door off of my leg. Instead of a hand being offered to hold a camera, wish shopped in my face.

My first year in high school, I had a severe case of mercy, which had me in out of the hospital for three months, all of which was posted and over exaggerated on social media. When i'd returned to school, my math teacher who had seen my mother's posts were taught me and tell kids to stay away from the infected girl, which LED to peer bullion's decline of my mental health. I was inevitably LED me to dropping out of school. mr. German, in ranking members of the committee, I lead you to be the voice for this generation of children because I know first hand and what it's like to not to have a choice.

The washington bill has stalled in the state legislature, but a similar bill in linos was approved ba lawmakers earlier this year, and the governor is expected to sign IT into a law. It's kind of a big deal because it's hard to make laws about parenting, and that's for a good reason.

Legislating parenting can quickly turn racist or zahovic, but family blogging is kind of, in its own category, a strange grey area where parenting and business overlap. Here's washington state representative Christine reads SHE sponsored how spill sixteen twenty seven and she's a mom who also sometimes features her kids online. The reality is our kids don't always get a choice though, and how they're included in an online presentation.

I know my kids don't. They get plaster on mail that I sent out every single summer, both the proposed laws in washington, and aim to provide children with the rights to their lightness or their image. That means they've get paid for participating in contact creation, you know, like how children and entertainment have been all this time.

Children on online platforms aren't usually considered to be in the entertainment industry, but that's what these bills would be changing. The fight we got to in that community was like, well, child labor laws should already cover this. But the reality is, child labor laws were written for physical workplaces, physical manufacturing exception.

Child labor laws never conceived of online brand profiles and content creation. Developmental psychologist, professor and british psychological society member john otes knows this all too well. He's been working with children in media settings for much of his professional life.

He even helped create regulations in the U. K. A safeguard child actors taking part in performances on the stage and the screen.

But before we even began our in interview, he mentioned there really just wasn't much research done into children on the internet. In this context, it's hard to get access. I can relate to that I reached out to so many current parent influencers for this story. Not one of them got back to me.

I guess that fears would be that IT might show that their work is more harmful, perhaps that they would like to believe IT is according to oats.

There's an inherent power and baLance when IT comes to children who are featured heavily on their parent social media.

children are almost inevitably empowered. If an adult awesome to do something independent on the dynamics of the high sold, that is not necessarily going be free to say no.

Where oats has had most of his experience in the professional media spaces of film and television, parents of child actors play a really important role. Ideally, they act as a buffer between the productions interest and the child's needs, but when the parent becomes a producer, as is the case for most social media influencers, this relationship is distorted.

I was an unacceptable conflict of interest.

Old recommends that influence their parents who want to feature their children on their platform responsibly. They should take the same approach that a more professional media organization, wood, when working with minors.

the top principal is respect for autonomy, dignity and privacy.

There maybe some parents who don't know the harms associated with social media exposure, but there are a parents outsides who don't .

necessarily have the children's best interests love.

This is where legislation may help. At the very least, IT will make parents think twice about what they are posting. When I reached out to lose mom jodie to get her comments on lose experience with the blog, jodie said, quote, leu fuel traumatized in scar by my blogging and I accept the fault on quote, SHE says SHE doesn't consider her blog to be a mommy blog.

Jodie says that while SHE did post about her kids, the blog was mostly about her own thoughts and experiences. SHE says when her kids were Young, SHE would edit or delete posts if her kids asked her to. SHE says that lew never told her that they were being bullied or getting approached by strangers because of the blog.

If SHE had known, SHE says he would not have ignored that. SHE says that SHE didn't realize that we had any issue with what he had shared about them until two years ago. Two years ago is when loo posted their first tiktok about this experience. This is how I actually first encountered them myself.

Have you ever wondered what I was like for the kids who were posted online in those mommy blogs and like Oliver, social media and all that does? Hi, I am a twenty eight .

year old who is still struggling .

um with the ways that that impacted me.

Love that viral on the APP. After posting a series of videos on this topic, they got a lot of likes and comments and follows. The videos somehow even made their way back to lose mom. And luu only knows this because their mom wrote them an apology that SHE also posted to the .

blog but that was the damages already been done. I'm sorry you feel that way kind of a policy. So I know like there are people who harassed her um about IT, like just by the nature of the way, the internetworking. So our quality was a response to that .

was there and a little bit of, I don't know, satisfaction from where you heard that they were embarrassed because that kind of also how you about is child .

sometimes absolutely was super validating even just to care that he is frustrated. My mom a little bit like, okay, I reclaimed a little bit of the power in this space.

But soon this experience started feeling familiarly invasive, like people on tiktok would seek out their mom's blog, even when lew explicit asked them not to.

IT felt very similar to the of these people. They're watching me for entertainment and they're not here for me. They're here to consume what i've gone through as as something to pass the day.

Today, lew has taken down most of their tiktok videos. They realized that what they were seeking with community, but not this kind, not the kind that they had known growing up when I met up with lew in colorado springs, they had just come back from a trip with their partner, communal and a group of friends to a small mining town nearby called Victor. In Victor, colorado, there is a school for sale originally built in the eighteen hundreds. It's got tall ceilings and big windows and soccer fields and eleven bedrooms. It's the kind of place you'd build the dance commune.

We all kind of for being to me and saying, like, what if we actually do this and we could actually do this maybe. And we're like, we'll have a painting room and we'll have a scoping room and we'll all, like get together and will dance in the main area, and then it'll be great these days.

This is how loose spends their time surrounding themselves with friends and music, trying to connect with their native culture, and spending their time in community, in real life. And they've kind of taken a break from social media too. If they do go back.

theyd want to be in the d hold in the camera, instead of there for in the camera.

This story was edited by queens suk kim and next to by cross half sherine mario marai and and assessment also provided feedback. IT was produced at the .

uc berkely graduate school of journalism.

I'm a shark. O and you've been listening to the sunday's story. This episode was produced by Andrew mambo and Emily silver and edited by junior ment IT was engineered by josh nawal.

Our team also includes henri hoi and Justin and our supervising producer is leana sim's m. And our executive producers, I am gucci. We love to hear from musa, please, and is an email at the sunday story.

And empire, or I jaso up first, will be back tomorrow with all the news. You need to start a week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

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