This POV of an adult ‘family vlogger child’ on TikTok is a must-watch
Add this to the category of things our parents didn’t have to worry about, but we do. Many of us remember a time before there was the internet…much less worrying about videos being posted online about us for everyone to see. My friends and I always joke, thank god Facebook wasn’t a thing in high school. Can you imagine the photos of us doing stupid teenager stuff that would be on the internet forever if we were children of family vloggers? The Myspace photos and haircuts are enough damage.
But now it’s like our entire lives are online for the entire world to see—especially if you’re a mom blogger/vlogger/influencer. That’s their “brand” and their “content”—their lives and the lives of their family. It’s how they make money. Some families make a very (VERY) good living off of content creation using their families.
While it can sort of be looked at like a blessing for moms to be able to stay at home and also work and make a very good income, what is the true cost of this lifestyle?
While we aren’t sure of the end result of this phenomenon for kids yet (though we do have some information coming out about the impact), Courtney Lange, a mom on TikTok, did a pretend POV of a “family vlogger child” and it’s definitely worth the watch, even if it makes you feel depressed.
The video starts with the child of a family vlogger now grown up answering the phone when her mother calls with, “What do you want?”
She’s clearly angry with her mother and has a lot of unresolved trauma, but the mother doesn’t seem to understand why. She tells her daughter that she learned she was angry for being a part of the family vlog for all those years, but doesn’t get it.
“We bought you nice things, we took you on vacations, we have a nice house, we gave you a beautiful life, what more could you want?” Mom demands. Her “daughter” replied she didn’t want any of that, and what she did want more than anything was a present mother. “You only paid attention to us when you were recording,” the daughter says. “And then you’d put your phone down and walk away, and it was like we never existed.”
The mom gets defensive and says that isn’t true, and not even close to true. “How can you even say that?” she asks. “You always wanted to be in the videos,” she says. “We always did those videos together as a family, that’s just what we did. You asked to be in them.”
Apparently, the daughter only wanted to be in those videos because it was the only time mom paid attention to the kids, and she told her mom so.
And the kicker of the video that gives all the red flags, is when the daughter says she felt exploited her entire childhood. “Every time I cried, every time I got hurt, any time something good happened to me … any time something bad happened to me…” she says.
“You read my f— diary on live as a series over the years. How could you do that and expect me to have a relationship with you,” she asks.
She concludes that her mother never saw her as a daughter, but as dollar signs, content, a paycheck. And she then blocks her mother’s number and the video ends.
“I can’t wait for the tea these kids spill in the future,” one viewer commented. Many others mentioned all the families they follow on TikTok and how they bet one of those kids will be having a conversation like this one day. “Labrants, jessfam, Dougherty Dozen, Ok Baby, Avery Woods, etc., every single one of them,” someone said.
Will the kids end up being vloggers or YouTubers themselves? Will they end up like this hypothetical daughter and her mom? Only time will tell how the lives of the children on these TikTok channels and blogs/vlogs turn out to be—but until then, I guess they’ll keep on making content.
