The Tween Girl Influencer: Managed By Mommy And Followed By Adult Men

As a young child, I dreamed of being a princess or a famous movie actress. Today, kids dream about becoming famous influencers. 

Some parents, such as a Midwestern mom interviewed in a recent Wall Street Journal article, have taken it upon themselves to kickstart their dancing daughters' dream of becoming an influencer by creating a mommy-managed Instagram account for their preteen that has quickly garnered thousands of followers.

“We didn’t even have the page for a month, and brands were like, ‘Can we send her dancewear?’” the mom said in the article. “She became popular really fast.”

However, the mother quickly noticed an alarming trend – a majority of those followers were adult men. Many left unsettling public comments complimenting her daughter's appearance, and some even sent direct messages with links to porn websites. Despite acknowledging these concerns, the mother intends to continue managing her young daughter's account.

The Rise of Child Influencers

Since the rise of social media, parents have used it as a way to share their children's lives, starting from before the child is even born with pregnancy announcements and sonogram photos. Then come the birth announcements, the first steps, the first words, the first days of school, the first everything. This isn't just mommy bloggers or oversharing influencers; almost all parents do it, and so do daycares, sports teams, Girl Scouts, and schools. Everyone is posting photos and videos of children that will live online forever.

But many parents have taken it a step further, turning into mommy managers for child social media accounts, which is allowed under Meta so long as a parent manages the account. Nearly one in three preteens lists influencing as a career goal. 

“It wasn’t like I was trying to push her to be a star, but part of me thought it was inevitable, that it could happen someday,” a mom said in the Wall Street Journal article. “She just has that personality.”

The Dark Side of Child Influencers

The use of social media among children and the support from their parents is changing how children develop and view themselves. This trend is linked to increased feelings of loneliness, depression, and anxiety among children. The observable shift toward tweens, in particular girls, adopting more adult-like behaviors and appearances is apparent, underscoring the profound impact of social media on their development and on how they view themselves.

Then comes the issue of men using it as a way to view photos of young girls. In the investigation by The Wall Street Journal, one young girl’s dance Instagram account was found to have 92% men followers. This is not an uncommon occurrence for Instagram accounts of young girls. 

The men drive followers, engagement, and comments on the young girls' accounts. In photos found on an adolescent clothing company profile, men were seen posting heart-eye emojis and disturbing comments like “scrumptious” and “very spicy bikini bottom." 

The New York Times also investigated this issue of mom-run accounts of young girls being flooded with adult men followers. Part of The Times’s research was monitoring messages on the app Telegram, where they found men talking openly and sexually about the minors they watched on Instagram. 

"It’s like a candy store 😍😍😍," one of them wrote. "God bless instamoms 🙌," wrote another, as found by The Times.

"I really don’t want my child exploited on the internet," said Kaelyn, a mother in Melbourne, Australia for The Times. "But she’s been doing this so long now, her numbers are so big. What do we do? Just stop it and walk away?"

The answer should be simple: If men are actively commenting and saving photos of your adolescent daughter, your job as a mother is to protect her, and that does mean turning off accounts with large followings and missing out on brand deals.

But so many mothers don’t, which raises the question: What is the benefit of being a child influencer? Many of the parents point to the earning potential for their young daughters and the ability to save for college. However, the reality is most of these young girls don’t even make much from their male-driven fame, fame that their parents just can’t let go of. Most child influencers and their mommy-managers post in exchange for free or discounted clothing and have to pay for their own styling and photography. 

For parents to make more money, many of them began to offer subscription services to gain access to exclusive content that the young girls and their mothers create.

One of the accounts The Times looked at offered a subscription service advertising that the subscribers could message the minor's account anytime for $25 a month, adding, "You will have more opportunities for buying and receiving super exclusive content 😘."

Subscription services offer adult men, who are the majority of the buyers, direct access to the accounts of children. Men may begin to feel more entitled to access with the children or imagine a personal connection that can spiral out of control, especially from zealous and money-driven parents who may offer phone calls, guaranteed responses to their DMs, and even more suggestive photos of the minor in exchange for subscription fees or large sums of money.

On top of that, children may begin to feel as if their personal worth is tied to the comments and the likes that they receive on social media. According to the American Psychological Association, around the age of 10, adolescents begin to seek out social approval, including attention from their peers, and their brains begin to release the good feeling dopamine and oxytocin hormones in response to positive social feedback. 

The overwhelmingly positive, although creepy, comments from male followers on young girls' accounts might be conditioning the children to seek male approval, linking it to their sense of self-worth and social status.

One mom told The Times that her daughter, who spent her childhood posting pictures in bikinis online and is now 17, has “written herself off and decided that the only way she’s going to have a future is to make a mint on OnlyFans,” referring to a website that allows people to sell adult content to subscribers.

Mothers noted that they are reluctant to turn off comments as brands don’t like it and it decreases the engagement scores of their accounts, meaning that the children’s accounts won’t be as popular.

The Role of Parents

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect is that the mothers not only know that this is happening, but don’t seem to care. 

"The first thing I do when I wake up and the last thing I do when I go to bed is block accounts," said Lynn to The Times, the mother of a 6-year-old girl in Florida who has about 3,000 followers from the dance world.

“If you want to be an influencer and work with brands and get paid, you have to work with the algorithm, and it all works with how many people like and engage with your post,” said the Midwestern mom interviewed in the WSJ article. “You have to accept it.”

Another mother, Gail from Texas, described to The Times being desensitized to the men’s messages her young daughter's account receives. "I don’t have as much of an emotional response anymore," she said. "It’s weird to be so numb to that, but the quantity is just astounding."

One thing is just as clear as the appalling and egregious behavior of the pedophiles who follow and sexualize these young girls: Their parents not only allow this but actively promote it and make excuses to justify pimping out their daughters for mommy clout and some extra cash. They are just as much to blame for putting their daughters in harm's way of dangerous and disturbing pedophiles. And yes, that does make the parents wicked, fame-chasing, and narcissistic.

What is posted of their children is not easily expunged from the internet and will shape their lives permanently. We don’t yet fully understand the consequences of this new age of over-sharing and promoting young children as influencers. 

It's up to everyday people to call young influencers what it truly is: child exploitation. 

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