For some families hustling in the influencer industry, content creation has offered a viable financial path, but also a warped reality. Influencer kids grow up on the internet, their childhoods on display to audiences of millions, while they help churn out content on their parents’ profitable blogs and social accounts. And in many of these cases, these children don’t see a dime. In this story, which is part of Cosmo‘s Sharenting Reckoning series, Fortesa Latifi talks to parents (and a few young adults/ex-influencer kids) to understand how the money flows, and also what these children have lost in the spotlight. At the moment, Illinois is the only state in the US where child influencers are legally entitled to a percentage of the money they help earn, but as Latifi reports, other states may soon follow suit.
When she made a TikTok comparing two of her daughters, the younger felt embarrassed because Merritt called her the “weird kid at school” in contrast to her older sister, who was labeled “popular” and “bubbly.” But Merritt says they decided not to take the video down because it was doing well and making money through TikTok’s monetization program, which pays creators for qualified views. The video is now pinned to the top of her page, with 2.3 million views and counting, netting $1,100 as of late February. As a form of reparation, she decided to split the profit from the video between her two daughters, with the stipulation that they use the money for the bedroom makeovers they’ve been wanting.
Khanbalinov has had zero new offers since he took his kids offline. “When we were showing our kids, brands were rolling in left and right—clothing companies, apps, paper towel companies, food brands. They all wanted us to work with them,” he says. “Once we stopped, we reached out to the brands we had lined up and 99 percent of them dropped out because they wanted kids to showcase their products. And I fought back, like, you guys are a paper towel company—why do you need a kid selling your stuff?”
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