Introduction to 2K Special Issue on “Child Influencers in the Asia Pacific Region”

Abstract

In this introduction to the Social Media + Society 2K Special Issue on “Child Influencers in the Asia Pacific Region,” we review some of the scholarship on various iterations of child Influencers across creator types, genres, and platforms, and survey some of the key issues raised in the scholarship. The Special Issue offers 11 articles that consider how child Influencers are connected to discourses around hegemony, are involved in social-cultural movements and projects, and are protected (or not) by regulation. With perspectives primarily from media studies and methods including ethnography, interviews, document surveys, and content analyses, each paper offers a specific demographic focus and raises issues specific to a country’s socio-political and socio-cultural context.

Introduction

One of the earliest mentions of how children emerged in the Influencer industry in the Asia Pacific region identified mummy and parenting bloggers who initially featured their children in online diaries, then progressed as/to advice columnists providing paid reviews (Abidin, 2011). The body of work on mummy and parenting bloggers is rich, with scholars having studied their emergence as a “radical act” of self-disclosure (Friedman & Calixte, 2009), as “redefining motherhood” (Lopez, 2009), as a “neoliberal crisis of the home” (Anderson et al., 2014), and even the inadvertent pressures of “combative mothering” (Abetz & Moore, 2018) and accusations of being “bad” mothers (Orton-Johnson, 2017). The field has also interrogated the growing monetization of mummy blogs (Hunter, 2016). As such forms of “sharenting” continue to evolve (Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2017), children are becoming more prominent in the contents that were once upon a time focused on the discourse of parenting.

As Influencers from lifestyle genres aged, many pivoted to the parenting genre where their children anchored sponsored contents, beginning as early as sonograms (Abidin, 2015). Some children become overnight celebrities through viral memes (Abidin, 2022) or viral videos posted by their parents (Leaver & Abidin, 2018), and parlay their fame into Influencer careers (Abidin, 2018). Other children are encouraged by peer practice and platform design to pursue microcelebrity aspirations (Şimşek et al., 2018) or become accidental microcelebrities overnight (Brown & Phifer, 2018).

Of the iterations of internet-famous children across platforms, the scholarship on YouTube has been prominent (e.g., Lange, 2014). Research has investigated a plethora of subcultures, including child unboxing videos (Craig & Cunningham, 2017; Marsh, 2016; Nicoll & Nansen, 2018), online games and gameplay streams (Dezuanni, 2020; Postigo, 2021), sensory content (Nansen & Balanzategui, 2022), and “disturbing” contents targeted toward children (Balanzategui, 2021). As such platforms splinter to launch child-friendly versions, scholars are also looking into the economy of how the likes of YouTube Kids constitute “mobile parenting” (Burroughs, 2017).

The recent proliferation of youth-targeted visual platforms like TikTok has led scholars to study the continued harmful consequences surrounding child Influencers, such as exposure to “online incivility” through humor (Cabbuag & Abidin, 2024). But nuanced research has also shed light on the agency of these young children and the internet-famous among them, through their creative negotiations of “restrictive parental mediation” (Sarwatay et al., 2023), and the formations of community and support clustered around age groups (Taylor & Abidin, 2024).

In the progression of child Influencers as they proliferate across creator, genre, and content formats, family Influencers have been studied for how they incorporate children and their routines in monetized contents (Abidin, 2017), and the strategic uses of authenticity and privacy that frame children as relational to audiences (Kennedy, 2024). Children are emerging as content creators who provide reading recommendations (Dezuanni et al., 2022), and as aspiring idol artists who strategically leverage their social media presence to foray into the mainstream entertainment industry (Lee & Abidin, 2023; Lee et al., 2024). Gen Zs who use social media for activism have emerged as new social justice Influencers, like Greta Thunberg (Abidin et al., 2020). However, it has also been noted that child Influencers have been positioned to market harmful products like fast food (Leaver et al., 2020) and junk food (Meyerding & Marpert, 2023).

In this vein, research has long identified the limitations of existing child protection regulations like the Coogan Law in safeguarding the wellbeing of child Influencers (Abidin, 2015), although recent scholarship has argued for “expansions” of the protections (Joss, 2024; Mol & Goanta, 2023). On the likes of YouTube (Feller & Burroughs, 2021) and TikTok (Divon et al., 2025), scholars are reviewing the remit of various online protections as they define and frame the parameters of child labor, and what activities fall under regulation by existing laws (e.g., Verdoodt et al., 2020). For example, looking specifically at TikTok, these recent efforts have offered a discourse analysis of how children can be protected (Ingber & Su, 2025) and how online communities step up to contribute to a “patchwork governance” to fill the gaps left by legal and industry governance (Turvy & Abidin, 2025).

Evidently, in the various iterations of child Influencers, children are inextricably entangled with social media commerce (Abidin, 2023). In conjunction with the forthcoming Child Influencers: How Children Become Entangled with Social Media Fame (Abidin, 2025) that provides an overview of the various origin stories, genres, and varieties of fame for child Influencers, this Special Issue of Social Media + Society 2K turns to the Asia Pacific region for localized case studies on the evolving phenomenon and burgeoning market of child Influencers.

This special issue

The collection of papers offer various takes on the phenomenon of child Influencers in the Asia Pacific region, each offering a different demographic focus and raising issues specific to a country’s socio-political and socio-cultural contexts.

Child Influencers and hegemony

The first group of papers interrogates child Influencers and matters of hegemony. In the Philippines, Samuel I. Cabbaug’s “‘When I grow up, I want to be a vlogger’: Child influencers in the Philippines” focuses on discourse and Child Influencer accounts on Facebook. He provides a brief history of how child Influencers have historical lineage to actors in the larger entertainment industry of cinema and television, and are contemporarily popular as members of family Influencer units. In assessing how tradition is sustained across the entertainment and social media industries, the paper demonstrates how the persona of child Influencers is often used to establish and promote typical Philippine family values. In Thailand, Vimviriya Limkangvanmongkol’s “Family, Parenting and Kid Influencers in Thailand: Balance Among Family Values, Cultures, and Child Development” turns to focus on an established Thai genre broadly known in the industry as “Family, Parenting and Kid Influencers.” She surveys the top Influencers who are widely recognized by industry awards, and the cultural values and pride they appear to espouse. In her study of these Influencer units, who are popular mostly on Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, she evidences how the running themes throughout their contents tended to focus on “representing close-knit family relationships,” “reinforcing Thai cultural competence,” and “recognizing kids’ development and talents.” Inadvertently, children in these Influencer units become agents of cultivating and promoting social values throughout society.

Hanwool Choe focuses on child Influencers on YouTube in Korea, in her piece “Korean Toddlers at Play or at Work?: Commodifiable Authenticity of Sponsored Child-Rearing Vlogs.” Through case studies focused on commodification and demography, she details how child Influencers use “pretend play” to embed product demonstrations as sponsored content, and how adult actors leverage on interactions with toddlers to construct “image-making” for brands. As a result, a prevalent discourse on Korean digital media frames the “child-as-commodity,” where content about marriage and family life is (re)packaged as entertainment media in a country with the “lowest fertility rate in the world.” Devina Sarwatay focuses on kidfluencers on Instagram in India, in her piece “Kidfluencers in India: Commodification, consumption, and perpetuation of dominant culture.” Through case studies focused on religiosity & social values, she found that kidfluencers who are managed by their parents often become vehicles for performing and reinforcing “dominant culture,” reflecting hegemonic practices or values related to the religious identities and family values already perpetuated by the incumbent government and mainstream society. The paper argues that when children are deployed to reinforce “cultural stereotypes,” it exposes them to online risks, which are not yet sufficiently mitigated or addressed by current regulation efforts.

Turning to Vietnam, Nguyen Do Doan Hanh studies prominent child Influencers on Facebook and YouTube, where issues of filial piety and age seem to dominate perceptions, stereotypes, and societal expectations. In her piece “Young People on Social Media: The Implications of Child Influencers in Vietnam,” Nguyen offers that young Vietnamese child Influencers often become to embody cultural norms, such as embracing “academic diligence” as an important expression of filial piety, or adhering to expectations of “cute” performances to solicit care and interest from audiences. This even applies long after a child has progressed into early adulthood, or when the “child Influencer” in question is in reality an adult who nevertheless appears infantile and childlike. In assessing the financial responsibilities and expectations bestowed upon these child Influencers, by their dependents and by audiences, the piece reflects on the burden of continuing to abide by stereotypes to retain viewer interest and monetization potential.

Child Influencers and socio-cultural movements

The second group of papers reflects on child Influencers and their involvement in socio-cultural movements, whether unwittingly, involuntarily, or agentically. “Performing girlhood and sisterhood in China: Chinese international student influencers’ everyday self-presentation on RedNote” by Wenxiang Zeng looks at international student Influencers on RedNote who are popular in China. She traces the conspicuous class and taste practices of Chinese international student Influencers in high school, and offers two strategies. First, the child Influencers enact “desirable girlhood” to emphasize the importance of family love and care while they are away from home, and to establish “youth autonomy and competence” that blends their markers of Chineseness and cosmopolitanism. Second, the child Influencers perform “authentic sisterhood” to appear authentic and to maintain reciprocal intimacies with audiences, which is ultimately intended to create potential opportunities for brand collaboration. “Negotiating gender, race, and nationhood in parenting on Douyin: White mummy bloggers in Chinese-foreign marriages in China” by Xinxin Jiang looks at White mummy bloggers on Douyin whose contents focus on the discourse of nationhood. Her study found that White mummy bloggers in Chinese-foreign marriages tended to present the child Influencers as discourses that bolstered the positive perception of such mixed cultural units. In negotiating “gender, race, and nationhood” through their sharenting practices, these White mummy bloggers labor to “blend their children’s mixed heritage with Chinese cultural symbols,” paving the way for the child Influencers identities to be “ready” to channel socio-political agendas.

Emma Baulch and Benjamin YH Loh focus on Muslim children on TikTok in Malaysia, and how they engage with religiosity. In “Tahfiz-Tok: Malaysian Muslim religious schools’ platform vernaculars,” they contextualize how Tahfiz or Muslim religious schools in Malaysia tend to attach roles and meanings to the child students who feature in their promotional TikTok videos. In these campaigns, the schools appear to leverage on TikTok-famous children as “moral projects,” advocating for the “strict adherence to Islamic codes and practices” known as the hijrah movement. By reviewing examples of child and family Influencers in the Tahfiz-Tok genre, and hijrah Influencers, the authors demonstrate how such accounts deploy “anchor” and “filler” content (see Abidin, 2017) to use children to appeal to prospective audiences and customers. Ariane Utomo focuses on child Influencers embroiled in celebrity divorces in Indonesia, especially as their biographies are captured on Instagram. Focusing on demography as a conceptual lens, “Growing up online through divorce: Child influencers and family change in Indonesia” queries what happens to child Influencers when their prolific family units break down in public, and the types of visibility and discourse that surround childhood in the midst of parental separation. The study finds that children are deployed to portray “diverse family structures” on social media, thus productively challenging “hegemonic portrayals of the ideal nuclear family,” which is important for shaping “public attitudes” and fostering acceptance of “family diversity.” However, in the public disentanglement of child Influencer’s management, such as the changing guardianship as indicated in child Influencer’s Instagram biography, the stigma surrounding divorce may be inadvertently reinforced.

Child Influencers and regulation

The final group of papers turns to child Influencers and the status quo of regulation. In “The Price of Virality and the Imperative for (Self) Regulation of Child Social Media Influencers in Taiwan,” Yavor A. Kostadinov studies the discourse and debate about the regulation of child Influencers in Taiwan. The piece outlines the prevalence of child social media Influencers in the market, and the resulting critical concerns regarding their wellbeing. A survey of the landscape reveals that there are insufficient legal provisions for child Influencers in the Taiwanese context, despite some promising legislative interest and some budding media discourse. It outlines also some of the recent contemporary and televised debates about the online rights of the child and the remit of parental control, and ongoing negotiations about placement of responsibility on the child themselves, the parents as guardians, and regulators. Finally, in “The regulation of child influencers in Australia and the Asia Pacific region,” Crystal Abidin reviews the regulations available for application on child Influencers in Australia and the Asia Pacific region at large. She offers the tripartite of “law, community governance, and industry leadership” as a framework for the collaborative regulation of child Influencers. The paper focuses on select findings from a recently published report benchmarking Influencer regulations across 18 countries in the Asia Pacific region (Abidin & Hong-Phuc, 2023). By taking a thorough look at the various definitions of “child labour,” the primary focus of “online protection” of children, and the regulations that are specific to child Influencers across the region, the paper offers scaffolded categories including “hard” and “soft governance,” and “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” regulations.

We hope you enjoy this collection of articles.