In this exclusive excerpt from her new book, Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online, journalist Fortesa Latifi investigates why some momfluencers are now choosing to shield their children from the social media spotlight and what regular parents may want to consider before sharing family moments with an online audience.
Bethanie was only eighteen years old when she got pregnant and married in 2013. Her husband was working nights at UPS and she was lonely during her pregnancy. One night, she logged on to WordPress and started a blog called The Garcia Diaries.
The blog is suspended in time. The About section tells the reader that Bethanie is still married to her ex, Anthony, who she calls her high school sweetheart. In her first post, she introduces herself and her children: “My name is Bethanie Garcia. I have a nine-month-old daughter named Brooklynn Alessandra and am 6 months pregnant with a second daughter, Harlym. Close in age, I know.”
As I scroll through her blog, I see a post on Brooklynn’s first birthday party, advice for what to do when you can’t recognize yourself in the mirror anymore (yes, I clicked), and a recipe for bacon-wrapped chicken (I didn’t click). There are posts detailing her son Deuce’s path to neurosurgery and his healing, tips on how to get your toddler to nap, and six ways to style off-the-shoulder tops.
Today, thirty-year-old Bethanie, who is now separated from her husband and engaged to someone else, tells me the blog was “such a good creative outlet,” but it was also a vehicle for income. Just a few years after starting The Garcia Diaries, her ex quit his full-time job to become a stay-at-home dad so Bethanie could focus on her burgeoning blog.
Being her family’s breadwinner wasn’t something she expected as a young mom without education past high school. “The fact that with no college education and with five children now, I can support my family, it’s truly wild and a dream come true, and I never could have possibly imagined it at all,” she says.
Though she doesn’t post on her blog anymore, she has nearly 340,000 followers on Instagram, where she posts daily—and sometimes hourly—updates on what she’s wearing, what she’s eating, and what her kids are up to. Bethanie is astounded by her own success and grateful for the freedom her career as an influencer has given her, but she also worries that she has shared too much.
If she could go back, she says, she wouldn’t have ever shared her children’s names or faces. But now, there’s ten years’ worth of content online, so what is she supposed to do? She can’t change what she shared in the past (though she could choose to stop adding to it now).
“I’ve had situations where I’m like, ‘Okay, this doesn’t feel safe,’” Bethanie says. “For example, I was in the toy section at Target with my daughter in the cart, and my son was in the back part of the cart just sitting in there. I turned around for a second to look at something. My hands are still in the cart. While I was turned around, someone came up and was like, ‘Deuce, is that you?’ He was three at the time, or maybe four. It didn’t really faze him because he was a toddler. But it fazed me a lot because I was just, like, oh, my God. I jumped to the front of the cart to stand in between him and the person. I think they meant well, and they were just excited to see someone that they follow closely online in person. But for me, it definitely gave me pause. So that doesn’t feel safe to me.”
Bethanie goes back and forth “every single day” on whether she should keep sharing her children. “I think I know what the right thing is deep down, but I’m also so proud of my family and want to show them off,” she says with a self-conscious laugh. “I need to stop, probably.”
Bethanie hasn’t stopped sharing her kids online but in recent years, a growing number of influencers have. One of those parents is Maia Knight, a twenty-eight-year-old mom who rose to viral TikTok fame for sharing videos of herself single parenting her twin daughters. In early videos, Maia held an infant in each arm while preparing their bottles of formula. Each morning, she posted a video of herself running up the stairs to get the babies from their cribs, and viewers soon became attached to both Maia and her daughters Violet and Scout. (There was a long-running joke about the way auto captions would butcher Violet’s and Scout’s names that turned into fans calling them things like Scotch & Vodka and Silence & Violence and Salt & Vinegar. At one point, Maia even released merch with the nicknames on tote bags and phone cases.)
At the height of her TikTok fame, Maia had 8.1 million followers who tuned in to see what daily life was like for a young single mom of twins. I was one of them. When Maia came up on my For You Page, I was immediately drawn in. It was interesting to see a young mom handling twins, for sure, but there was something else. Maia most often appeared on camera in a sweatshirt and sweatpants, with her hair tied up in a bun. She looked happy and full of love but also stressed and exhausted. It seemed real in a way that other mom influencer content did not. And Scout and Violet were so cute.
Then in December of 2023, Maia posted a video announcing she was no longer going to show her daughters’ faces online. “I have been talking about and taking actions towards taking the babies off of social media for a year now,” she says, addressing the camera with her hair in its signature messy bun. “They’re toddlers now, and I have decided to not show them anymore. I’m not being forced to do anything. I’m making a choice for my daughters to protect them. I’m not, like, taking a big stance about showing your kids or not online, I’m just doing what’s best for me. It’s not that complicated, it’s not that dramatic.”
She goes on to say that she knows she’ll lose followers but hopes that the majority of “normal people” will understand her decision and support her regardless. And she had a message for detractors: “If you feel that strongly about a stranger that you’ve never met and the decisions that I’m making for my kids, maybe you should go to therapy.”
From then on, Maia never showed the girls’ faces again. If they were in her videos, they were either filmed from the back, seen from the side, or emojis were put over their faces.
This is what Dr. Michael Walrave, a professor of communication studies at the University of Antwerp, calls “mindful sharenting,” a practice that he says has become more common. “There is a social pressure on parents to show their performance as a parent online,” Dr. Walrave says. “Mindful sharenting— which can include photographing a child from the back or putting an emoji over their faces—can be a way to navigate the perceived risks of sharing your child online while still showcasing your experience of parenthood.”
The first TikTok video that went viral for Jillian Kalbaugh, thirty-nine, was one of her baby son sucking up a spaghetti noodle. “It went, like, super mega viral, like millions and millions and millions of views. I was like, ‘Oh great. My kid’s famous. Let’s ride this train.’” She adjusted her content in the hopes of hitting the viral lottery again, posting videos of her son trying different foods like chicken wings and lemons. On top of that content, she made daily vlogs about mom life.
Jillian is matter-of-fact about her ambition to be viral and profit off her content. “I guess I thought we would get millions of followers and start a YouTube channel and become super famous from that,” she says.
So many parent creators I’ve spoken to hem and haw—they never meant to go viral, they never expected to become famous, it was never their plan to quit their jobs. It’s hard not to be skeptical of that. But Jillian tells me straight up: She wanted to get famous. “It seemed like the thing to do,” she says, and I imagine her shrugging on the other side of the phone.
She focused on strategy, posting consistently three times a day and attempting to capture viral content. Sometimes it was fun, but sometimes it was really frustrating, like when she was directing her kids and they weren’t going along with what she had planned. “I tried not to be a director, but I had a set piece of content in mind, and I would be deleting and drafting and reshooting it, and it stopped being a natural moment,” she says.
Since her first viral video featured her toddler son trying new foods, she focused on making that kind of content, which left her older son on the sidelines. “My older son would hop in the frame and jump in and be like, ‘Hey’ or ‘Hi, everybody.’ I was like, ‘Sorry, this one isn’t about you’ and asked him to leave the shot. It was frustrating because I just wanted to get this quick little shot in so I could edit and post it and go about the other stuff. Then [I would] feel bad that my older son wanted to be in the spotlight and have attention. I was unconsciously pushing him aside so I could get the shot.” Jillian would explain to her older son that she had to film his younger brother at the moment, but she’d do something with him later.
Sometimes, her efforts would pay off, like when a viral video hit right and she got 5,000 new followers in one day. But she never quite took off like she was hoping to, only reaching 40,000 followers at her height.
Then a few things happened at once: Jillian got pregnant and she was “sick and miserable” which left her posting less and, the content she did post didn’t seem to perform well. “I know a lot of people have said this, but [the videos] just stopped getting views,” she says. The morning sickness and crushing fatigue of early pregnancy combined with her lower views made Jillian rethink her plans to become a famous YouTuber.
And then came the death blow: An anonymous TikTok user had liked one of her videos and Jillian found herself looking at the user’s profile picture, thinking the kid featured in it looked familiar. Then she realized “the profile picture was a picture of my son from a Christmas card a couple of years ago. It was so scary and gross. It’s hard to explain, it was just this feeling in my gut, like ‘Oh my god.’”
At the same time, the Wren Eleanor scandal, in which TikTokers targeted a mom influencer who regularly posted videos of her toddler daughter that could be considered inappropriate (like the child licking a popsicle) was taking over TikTok. The confluence of these factors helped Jillian decide what to do.
“I instantly started removing and privating all of my videos. For me, it was like, that’s it. This can’t happen anymore before anything gets worse.”
Would it have been harder to make that decision if things were really taking off? “Yeah, for sure,” she says. Even with the slight success and minor brand deals she had, it was still hard. “I got a lot of stuff the boys wanted. That’s how I almost excused it in a way.”
Now, Jillian has given up on her dreams of social media fame. She says the path she chose may not be right for every family. “Who am I to say what’s right and what’s wrong?” she wonders. “It’s still a gray area.”
This conversation about this gray area works best with a nuanced approach, rather than through a set of binary choices (i.e., either you post your kids online and you’re a monster bent on exploitation, or you don’t and you’re a saint forgoing social media fame for the greater good of your child.) We live in a strange, complicated world, and I don’t know what the right choice is for parents.
It’s something I’m struggling with myself as the mother of a young child. I haven’t posted her name or face online and only share photos that feature her tiny, dimpled hands or the back of her round head. I’ve talked about this with my husband a lot and even now, I can’t really explain why I don’t want her to be online. It was just an instinct that arose when I was pregnant—this instinct to keep her to myself and to our families. She’s just so precious to me, and there’s something that feels almost like an act of dilution in the act of sharing her with the greater world.
My husband gets this, kind of. He goes along with my boundaries even though, if he were solely in charge, things would be more lax. And I feel bad—I understand him wanting to post photos of her to share with his broader circle of friends and family, but something in me just balks at the idea. Am I being too strident? Probably. How does it affect my infant to have photos of her face online when she’s still growing into her features? What exactly do I think I’m protecting her from? Or is it not about her at all; did this decision arise not out of a protective instinct but an anxious one?
More and more parents are choosing to share photos of their children only on their Close Friends settings or with emojis pasted over their faces. The parents I spoke with who engaged in this practice told me they were worried about online footprints and how quickly artificial intelligence was advancing. They fretted about how photos of their children could be used or misused and wondered about whether or not their children could actively consent to being shared online.
There was also, they told me, an underlying sense of unease. It felt dangerous in some way, to share their kids online. They couldn’t say exactly why.
Perhaps there’s a level of paranoia in this decision that is difficult to face, but I also think it’s the normal pendulum swing of a culture that went from oversharing everything that happened to us to wanting to keep our most precious things private. Just a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable for an influencer or even a regular parent to post their kids only from the back or with emojis over their faces. Now, it’s just another choice for parents to make.
Excerpted from LIKE, FOLLOW, SUBSCRIBE: Influencer Kids and the Cost of Childhood Online by Fortesa Latifi. Copyright © 2026 by Fortesa Latifi. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
