How the creator economy turned children into income streams while labor protections failed to follow them home.
I. The Childhood That Never Goes Off Camera
When twenty-one-year-old Shari Franke sat before the Utah Legislature’s Business and Labor Interim Committee in October 2024, she spoke first about the house in which she grew up.
For roughly seven years, her family’s daily life was uploaded to YouTube under the channel name 8 Passengers, an operation that amassed roughly 2.5 million subscribers at its peak and which Franke described as the family’s primary source of income. In that environment, Franke told the committee, the home ceased to function as a shelter from public scrutiny. Ordinary domestic interactions could become content at any time. When a child retreated to an upstairs bedroom, the physical door could close, but the expectation of being filmed remained. Franke described the role as a “24/7” obligation, saying the camera never truly stopped and that family life and public performance had become difficult to separate.
“I come today as a victim of family vlogging,” Franke testified. She told lawmakers she had received some payment for her work, but described those payouts as irregular incentives rather than a structured share of the income the channel generated. She recalled that she and her siblings were offered immediate incentives, including $100 or a shopping trip, to persuade them to participate in filming moments they found embarrassing or uncomfortable.
Franke’s appearance at the state capitol was notable because it stripped the discussion of internet glamour. Before the family’s public life collapsed amid the 2023 criminal child-abuse case that ultimately led to her mother’s conviction and imprisonment, the family had spent years operating in full public view through a popular, monetized YouTube channel. Millions of viewers followed what appeared to be an open, relatable chronicle of suburban American life.
Behind the scenes, participation and parental authority operated together. Parental direction and video production spoke with the same voice.
II. When Family Life Becomes Inventory
A channel often begins with a phone propped against a kitchen counter to record a child taking first steps, trying an unfamiliar food, or laughing in the backyard.
Algorithmic distribution changed where the recording went, creating new possibilities for its commercial use.
When parents began posting family routines publicly, audiences responded to what felt like candid domestic reality. For creators who build large parenting audiences, that attention can become commercially valuable through advertising, sponsorships, and platform monetization.
As channels accumulate followers, the nature of the recording often evolves. Producing content for an audience that expects regular uploads encourages structure. Creators begin planning around themes, testing different video titles, and looking for narrative hooks in everyday life. Such moments can become upload material: an injury requiring medical care, a disciplinary punishment, a haircut, or the emotional distress of an adolescent conflict.
The audience-engagement advantage of featuring children has documented empirical support. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence analyzed 2,597 Instagram posts across twenty-nine parent-influencer accounts followed by an aggregate of roughly 16.6 million followers. Within that sample, posts featuring children received approximately twice as many likes as posts without them. Likes are not revenue, but on platforms where engagement can affect algorithmic reach and commercial opportunities, higher engagement is one plausible channel through which a child’s presence translates into commercial value.
When an audience responds strongly to domestic footage, a household can develop a financial interest in maintaining regular video output. The adults handle business arrangements, manage sponsorships and platform relationships, and control the accounts, while the child’s presence can contribute to the engagement that makes those arrangements commercially possible.
III. The Consent Problem
Discussions about child influencers often turn on whether the child agreed to participate.
The reality inside a household makes that question difficult to evaluate. To speak of voluntary consent in an environment where the adult asking for the performance is also the parent who sets rules, provides emotional comfort, and funds the home overlooks the basic dynamics of childhood.
Young children depend on parents for direction, approval, and daily care, creating an inherent imbalance when participation is requested by the adults who control the household. In her legislative testimony, Franke described how children who hesitated were offered cash or gifts until they agreed to be filmed. As children mature and become more aware of the family’s financial dependence on regular video production, a request to participate can carry practical and emotional pressures that make genuine refusal difficult.
For young children, meaningful consent is especially difficult because they cannot fully understand the scale, permanence, and future consequences of public exposure. A ten-year-old cannot reasonably anticipate what it means for a video of an emotional breakdown or physical development to be archived, copied, shared, and remain accessible online for years. They cannot foresee how that footage might follow them into a college seminar, a first job interview, or a future relationship.
Research on adolescents’ experiences with parental sharing has found that young adolescents can become frustrated or embarrassed when parents share material they consider personal, unflattering, or inconsistent with the identity they wish to project. Policy frameworks published by UNICEF similarly emphasize that children have distinct interests in privacy, autonomy, and participation in decisions regarding what is shared about them online.
Parental authority is generally structured around the assumption that parents will act in their children’s interests. When a parent’s financial incentives become directly tied to the commercialization of the child’s daily life, that protective assumption comes under structural strain.
IV. Who Owns the Money?
To understand why contemporary legislation looks the way it does, it helps to examine one of the clearest earlier instances in which American law confronted this basic commercial friction.
In April 1938, former child star Jackie Coogan filed suit in California Superior Court against his mother, Lillian Coogan Bernstein, and his stepfather, Arthur Bernstein. Coogan had earned a substantial fortune during the 1920s after starring in films such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid. When he reached legal adulthood and sought his money, the dispute revealed that little of his accumulated earnings remained. Under California law as courts then applied it, a minor’s earnings were generally treated as belonging to the parents who had custody.
Coogan eventually settled for an estimated $126,000 after legal expenses and outstanding claims, but the public controversy prompted the California Legislature to enact the Child Actors Bill of 1939, commonly known as the Coogan Act. Later reforms, including legislation enacted in 1999, established the modern trust requirement: employers must deposit fifteen percent of a minor performer’s gross earnings into a blocked account for the child, codified in California Family Code Sections 6750 through 6753, with the funds generally preserved for the child until adulthood.
The significance of the Coogan framework was that it began separating a child’s earnings from unrestricted parental control. Later reforms, particularly those enacted in 1999, strengthened that separation by making earnings under covered contracts the legal property of the minor and expanding the trust requirement. The principle is the same one subsequent statutes are still adapting for a medium Coogan’s lawyers never imagined.
For decades, however, that legal protection was primarily tied to formal entertainment employment and contracts involving third-party production entities. Parent-run channels generally lacked the direct contractual relationship with the child that triggered the traditional Coogan framework.
That statutory boundary began to shift, unevenly, starting in September 2024, when California enacted Assembly Bill 1880, authored by Assemblymember Juan Alanis, which took effect on January 1, 2025. The statute amended Family Code Section 6750 to explicitly extend the Coogan Act to minors employed as online content creators under direct contracts with third parties.
Yet AB 1880 addressed the child who enters a direct commercial agreement with a third party. It left unaddressed a distinct family dynamic where the child never signs a contract at all, but simply appears in a parent’s video.
V. Labor Protections Stop at the Front Door
In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the relevant child-labor and performance rules were built around conventional employment and performance structures.
In the United Kingdom, a 2022 parliamentary inquiry by the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee identified a similar regulatory problem. The committee found that UK child-performance regulations, which place performing children under local-authority oversight and regulate the hours and conditions of their work, do not generally apply to user-generated content. That left children appearing in family-produced influencer content without the standard protections available to children working elsewhere in entertainment. The gap was especially significant because the existing rules were built around licensed performances rather than parents producing content about their own children.
In the United States, federal child labor policy under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 contains a similar blind spot. Under Section 3(l) of the Act, codified at 29 U.S.C. § 203(l), the definition of “oppressive child labor” exempts minors employed by their own parents in nonfarm businesses solely owned by those parents, outside of manufacturing, mining, and designated hazardous occupations. The exemption is generally understood to reflect the structure of family-owned businesses: a teenager helping at a parent’s retail counter or office did not receive federal wage-and-hour supervision.
In the creator economy, this exemption creates an unusual legal result. When a parent operates a monetized channel, the child appearing in the videos may not be performing an auxiliary task at all; the child can instead be the primary subject of the commercial content. Because federal child labor rules do not specifically address parent-run family-vlogging activity, they provide no straightforward regulatory framework for it.
Extending traditional workplace enforcement into private homes would raise additional Fourth Amendment questions. Government inspections of private premises are subject to constitutional safeguards, making a conventional workplace-inspection model difficult to transpose directly into a family home. The newer statutes described below instead rely on financial documentation, appearance thresholds, and trust requirements rather than physical inspection.
In August 2023, Illinois enacted Senate Bill 1782 as Public Act 103-0556, with its family-vlogging provisions taking effect on July 1, 2024, becoming the first state in the nation to establish financial standards for family vloggers. Those provisions were subsequently recodified in the Illinois Child Labor Law of 2024 as 820 ILCS 206 Sections 95 and 100. The statute established an objective threshold. The law applies if a child under sixteen appears in at least thirty percent of a vlogger’s compensated video content produced within a thirty-day period and the content meets the statute’s compensation or view criteria. In such cases, the vlogger must maintain detailed records and set aside a specified share of gross earnings in a trust account for the child, calculated based on at least half the percentage of time the child appears in the content.
California established a complementary model in September 2024 through Senate Bill 764, the Child Content Creator Rights Act, authored by State Senator Steve Padilla, taking effect on January 1, 2025. Under Family Code Section 6651, the law applies when a minor appears in at least thirty percent of the vlogger’s compensated content during a monthly reporting period, the content satisfies the statute’s view or compensation criteria, and the vlogger receives at least $1,250 in actual compensation during the month. SB 764 requires the vlogger to set aside sixty-five percent of the child’s proportionate share of gross revenue into a trust account.
In March 2025, Utah enacted House Bill 322, taking effect on May 7, 2025, creating financial protections, civil remedies, and a statutory right for adults to request the deletion or editing of social-media content in which they appeared as qualifying or market-value compensated minors. The measure followed public discussion over the treatment of children featured in family social-media content, including testimony from Franke.
The American statutes do not follow a uniform model. Financial protections have been the most consistent feature, while privacy and deletion remedies have emerged separately in some jurisdictions. Even where these laws address privacy or deletion, their core financial provisions focus on trust accounts and records rather than regulating the daily filming schedule.
VI. The Right to Take Your Childhood Back
While early American statutes focused primarily on bank accounts, France approached the issue through administrative oversight and parental image rights, while Minnesota later added a direct mechanism for controlling the digital record.
In October 2020, France enacted Law Number 2020-1266, taking effect in early 2021, regulating the commercial exploitation of children under sixteen on online platforms.
The French framework does not make adulthood the first point at which a child can exercise control over the use of their image or personal data. Instead, it creates administrative oversight before significant production occurs. When the activity falls within statutory thresholds based on the amount of content produced, filming conditions, or revenue, parents may be required to make a declaration or obtain prior authorization from the relevant administrative authority, complying with requirements concerning schooling, working conditions, and the child’s welfare, while depositing qualifying earnings with the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations for the child’s benefit. France extended this protective philosophy in February 2024 through Law Number 2024-120, which amended the French Civil Code to establish that protecting a child’s image is a shared parental duty and to require the child’s involvement according to age and maturity. It also allows a family judge, in a dispute between parents, to prohibit one parent from disseminating content about the child without the other’s authorization.
Crucially, the 2020 French law directly addresses privacy. Under the statute’s erasure provisions in Article 6, minors who appear in online commercial content can directly exercise their statutory right to erasure under data protection laws, explicitly removing the legal requirement for parental consent to execute that request.
In the United States, Minnesota adopted a distinct model. Its 2024 child-content-creation law, enacted as Chapter 103 of the Minnesota Session Laws and codified at Minnesota Statutes Section 181A.13, takes effect on July 1, 2025. Minnesota’s law prohibits minors under fourteen from engaging in covered content creation while requiring that a qualifying minor under fourteen who is featured by a content creator receive the proceeds attributable to that appearance. The law also provides a direct deletion mechanism: a minor age thirteen or older, or an adult who was under eighteen when their likeness was used, can require the removal of qualifying content. The statute provides civil remedies for violations.
This approach marks a transition in the debate. It recognizes that while earnings matter, the potentially persistent public availability of childhood footage presents its own long-term cost.
VII. The Children Grow Up
During the early development of the creator economy, public discussion was dominated by adults: parents defending their creative autonomy, marketing executives celebrating high engagement rates, and platforms expanding their advertising inventory.
That dynamic is shifting as children who grew up on camera enter adulthood and attempt to establish independent lives.
When a former child influencer turns eighteen, the transition to legal adulthood does not bring a clean break from the family business. In traditional entertainment, an actor leaves behind a production, a script, and a fictional persona. A person whose childhood was monetized online may reach adulthood with a persistent digital record tied to their real identity, including records of family life and, in some cases, medical information, disciplinary incidents, and other personal experiences.
Advocates like Cam Barrett, who grew up having personal and medical details shared publicly by her mother, have spoken to state legislatures and media outlets about the practical friction of this inheritance. Barrett has described the difficulty of establishing personal boundaries as an adult when classmates, romantic partners, and prospective employers may encounter years of unchosen personal history that was published before she could meaningfully control it.
Removing an original upload does not necessarily eliminate copies that have already been downloaded, reposted, or preserved elsewhere. An adult may find that recordings of childhood tantrums, illnesses, or private conversations remain searchable, potentially following them into college, employment, and adult relationships.
For these young adults, reaching the age of majority gives them legal control over their own decisions going forward, while offering limited mechanisms to address the fact that their formative years were already turned into a public catalog.
VIII. The Part the Law Cannot Put Back
The legal debate across the United States, France, and the United Kingdom reveals several different approaches to the commercialization of childhood. Illinois and California created specific financial protections for children whose participation generates income. France established administrative oversight of qualifying child-content production and strengthened parental duties around image rights. Minnesota restricted the participation of children under fourteen in covered content creation and created mechanisms for earnings and content control, while Utah added financial protections and a right to request removal of covered childhood content. Across the Atlantic, the United Kingdom has formally recognized a comparable regulatory gap without yet creating an equivalent statutory framework for children involved in family-produced monetized content.
A trust account can preserve money for an eighteen-year-old whose childhood participation generated economic value. A statutory deletion provision can give an adult a legal mechanism to demand that covered platforms remove specific content.
The legal system is better equipped to recognize an individual’s economic contribution after the fact than to protect a child’s interest in keeping early life uncommercialized in the first place.
Legislation cannot erase the memory of an audience that watched a child’s medical struggles or emotional distress. It cannot prevent copied footage from circulating in secondary archives, and it cannot retroactively restore the privacy of a household where personal moments regularly functioned as production material. No statute can retroactively restore the boundary the business model erased at the beginning: the boundary between a child’s private life and something that belongs to the public, the boundary that, in the Franke house, a closed bedroom door could no longer guarantee.
