By now, you know
Zoella. When you hear the word “vlogger”, her squeaky-clean, baby-faced brand is exactly what comes to mind. But vloggers are varied. Older, rounder and balder individuals have also amassed millions of views, subscribers, and pounds on YouTube. But they don’t do it by filming 20-minute lipstick reviews. Instead, they film their children.
The daily vlogging of family life is nothing new.
The Shaytards, an American family with five children and over 3.7 million YouTube subscribers, have recorded every day of their lives for the past eight years. But family vlogging is on the rise and hundreds of Britons are now copying the Shaytards.
Jonathan and Anna Saccone-Joly have been filming their children Emilia and Eduardo
literally since the
moment of their births. Their daily videos, viewed by 1.1 million subscribers, showcase the realities of family life: cooking, shopping, bathing and eating. Loyal fans follow every move and some younger viewers even
write fan fiction about being adopted by the family.
At first glance, it all seems harmless enough. The family earns
thousands of pounds a year from adverts and product placements in their videos, neither Jonathan nor Anna need to work traditional full-time jobs. What parent wouldn’t want to get paidto spend every day with their young children?
The answer to that might be the parent who received a
card threatening to “gouge out” the eyes of their baby daughter. Or the parent who
was told that pictures of their naked child have been uploaded to paedophe websites. This might put many off daily vlogging, but neither event has deterred the Saccone-Jolys.
“I have never felt threatened,” says Jonathan, though he says he discussed these incidents with the police and his gated house is now surrounded by CCTV cameras.
Less immediately tangible than these threats, but perhaps no less serious, are the longer-term legal, moral, and psychological consequences to filming, and making celebrities out of, your children.
“Parents need to think very carefully about how the material they are filming is available for the world to see in perpetuity,” says Prof John Oates, a Senior Lecturer in the Child and Youth Studies Group at the Open University, and founder of the British Psychological Society’s Media Ethics Advisory Group (BPS). This year, he has represented the BPS in the UK government’s development of regulations to safeguard child performers.
“Some children are bullied simply because they’ve been shown on TV.” he says, “Footage of a child that might be fine aged two or three could be very distressing if it was available on the blogosphere when they were 12 or 13.”
The BPS’s list of potential harms – defined as “immediate or delayed, short-term or long-lasting effects” – is long.
“The first potential harm is simple emotional distress,” says Oates, “followed by harm to self-esteem, and a loss of a sense of autonomy.
“Mental fatigue is another problem,” continues Oates, “as well as an increase in a child’s generalised anxiety level, which could lead to general anxiety disorder.” GAD is a long-term psychological condition that causes an individual to feel anxious on a daily basis. It can lead to restlessness, panic attacks, or trouble concentrating and sleeping.
It’s worth noting that the children of
YouTube probably don’t face the same risks that drove traditional child stars like Lindsay Lohan or Macaulay Culkin off the rails. Oates explains destructive behaviour isn’t necessarily caused by the stress of being a child star. He adds if a child has a “secure attachment”, meaning they trust the adults around them to be a secure base in times of distress, potential harms can be alleviated.
Unlike traditional child performers, however, the children of YouTube are not currently subject to any psychological guidelines or legal protection.
In February 2015, the Department for Education updated their
licensing legislation for child performance, but specified “this does not extend to user-generated content, for example where young people or a family record themselves and share it on a website or social media”.
The current legislation states that children should not perform for more than six consecutive days, and children aged five to nine should not perform continuously for more than 2.5 hours a day. But it does not extend to user-generated content – the children of YouTube, who are filmed day and night, seven days a week, are not protected. They are also not protected from taking part in meet-and-greets and signings with fans at events such as VidCon, which have been known to last up to eight hours at a time.
When asked why the regulations do not apply to YouTubers, a Department of Education spokesperson said: “We trust parents to act in the best interests of their children.”
Though a nice sentiment, it seems perhaps a little naive, especially when there are financial gains to be made. Without legal protection, there is no guarantee that a child will see a share of these earnings. Nor is there any requirement for a child to consent to being filmed.
Jonathan believes his children do want to be part of his videos, though he admits Emilia, who is three, is more extroverted than one-and-a-half-year-old Eduardo. He talks happily about a recent
clip he filmed of her singing in a restaurant. “If she didn’t want to do it, she wouldn’t have,” he says, “My filming isn’t directional, it’s observational … I don’t make [the children] do anything.”
