Abstract
This article critically investigates the institutional dynamics that shape influencer sharenting, employing a constructivist framework and the concept of institutional work. Based on in-depth interviews with key industry stakeholders, the study demonstrates how children’s visibility within influencer marketing is strategically cultivated through the interdependent operation of economic, professional, and normative structures. The article introduces the concept of institutionalized sharenting to describe the processes through which sharenting becomes routinized and legitimized, enabling industry actors to capitalize on children’s presence while displacing full responsibility onto parents. This deflection is enacted through a variety of practices, such as the inclusion of children via strategic collaborations with their parents, and is framed through discourses of authenticity, intensive parenting, and personal choice. Ultimately, the paper argues that the marginalization of children, despite their centrality to the industry’s profitability, is sustained by adultist and neoliberal logics that frame children’s labour as play and familial monetization as empowerment.
Introduction
Over the past two decades, society has undergone a profound transformation marked by the platformization of everyday life, wherein digital infrastructures have become integral to the lives and experiences of both children and parents (Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2024). As the boundaries between online and offline life continue to blur and as digital platforms are increasingly shaped by economic logics, many families now turn to content creation both as a form of self-expression and as a means of commodifying their everyday lives. This turn is often motivated by the perception that influencer careers, though precarious for many, offer a flexible way to pursue professional aspirations while managing caregiving and domestic responsibilities, which have historically been devalued, rendered invisible, and excluded from formal economies (Mäkinen, 2021). This perceived flexibility is particularly appealing in an era marked by the intensification of both work and family life (Beuckels & De Wolf, 2025).
Within this content of family-, parent- and child influencer profiles, children are often foregrounded as central figures within a global, multibillion-dollar industry. This practice where children’s intimate information and images are shared with a large digital audience for monetization practices, is referred to as influencer sharenting (Walrave et al., 2025). It has received growing public and academic attention in recent years due to its potential harms to the rights of influencer children, including their rights to consent, privacy, and protection from harm, as outlined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child (Clark & Jno-Charles, 2025; Hudders & Beuckels, 2024). While current interventions focus on educating parents on (influencer) sharenting risks and privacy management Beuckels (2025), this parent-centric framing risks reinforcing intensive parenting norms and obscures the broader institutional dynamics that shape children’s digital visibility. Besides, this approach diverts attention from the broader social and power dynamics at play, as well as from the structural and institutional responsibilities of platforms and the influencer industry in shaping and safeguarding children’s digital lives (Van Dijck et al., 2019).
Hence, building on the work of Annabell et al. (2025), this study contends that, while influencer parents indeed share lived experiences with a strong focus on care work in a very public fashion, they also operate as economic agents engaged in professionalized, commercial activities. This dual positioning of parents of child influencers complicates the assumption that they alone are responsible for safeguarding their children’s digital wellbeing. While they are indeed caregiving individuals who engage in intimate self-expression through content creation, they are also workers embedded in a platform economy that profits from both their labour and that of their children. Although platforms’ responsibilities with regard to child influencers have recently gained scholarly and regulatory attention (Divon et al., 2025), other commercial stakeholders within the broader influencer ecosystem, including talent agencies, marketers, and brands, currently remain highly underexamined thus far. Nevertheless, studies drawing on parent influencers’ reports have highlighted the significant time demands that influencer sharenting places on children, often enacted without their consent, leading to increased pressure on parents and conflict within the parent–child relationship (e.g., Van den Abeele, Vanwesenbeeck, & Hudders, 2024). These tensions are further intensified by the commercial pressures and contractual obligations, characteristic of platform capitalism (Beuckels et al., 2024; Van den Abeele, Vanwesenbeeck, & Hudders, 2024). These findings underscore the need to critically examine the role of commercial stakeholders in shaping the conditions under which influencer sharenting occurs.
Summarized, the current study aims to move beyond individualized, parent-focused accounts of influencer sharenting by adopting a relational lens. Rather than viewing sharenting solely as a matter of parental choice or responsibility, this approach conceptualizes it as a practice embedded within a broader institutional ecology, shaped by the interrelations between families, platforms, commercial actors, and regulatory frameworks. To complement previous insights and approaches, this study specifically investigates how industry stakeholders, such as brands and influencer agencies, contribute to the normalization and incentivization of children’s participation in influencer content. Through in-depth interviews with industry professionals, it seeks to uncover how responsibility for children’s rights is distributed, negotiated, and potentially displaced across the various actors ultimately driving influencer sharenting. In doing so, it contributes to a more systemic understanding of influencer sharenting as a socio-technical and economic phenomenon and calls for a rethinking of accountability beyond the family unit.
Literature Review
To understand how the industry’s involvement shapes influencer sharenting practices, it is essential to first examine the broader context in which it operates. The increasing professionalization of the influencer economy has transformed what may appear as personal or domestic content into a structured form of digital labour, embedded in commercial and institutional logics (Guld, 2023). This literature review first outlines familial influencing as an institutionalized industry, setting the stage for a critical examination of how children have become part of this system. Second, it discusses familial influencing as a form of institutional labour through a relational lens, highlighting the interdependent roles of parents, children, and industry actors.
The Emergence of a Family-Oriented Influencer Industry
The success of the familial influencer industry emerges at the intersection of contemporary parenting discourses, neoliberal ideologies, and the interactive, market-oriented dynamics of Web 2 (Ahmed & Rathore, 2024; Beuckels & De Wolf, 2025). As Hays (1996) articulated in her concept of intensive mothering, parenting in Western societies is increasingly understood as a privatized, child-centred practice that demands substantial emotional, physical, and financial investment from caregivers. In the context of contemporary platform society, these expectations incentivize parents, and particularly mothers, to perform their role of the ‘expert’ caregiver publicly (Jorge et al., 2022). These platforms’ affordances stimulate the continuous production and sharing of intensified, dramatized, and hyper-personal content, through which some individuals have cultivated distinct digital personas, earning them the status of influencers (Kozinets et al., 2023). This increasing market-orientation of human life, in which social relations and our everyday behaviour are being transformed into commodities that can be bought and sold, has permeated the most intimate spheres, including family lives. Hence, in today’s era that is simultaneously characterized by economic and care crises (Fraser, 2017), some families have leveraged influencer practices as a strategy to navigate intensive parenthood, enabling them both to dedicate time to family life and to generate income and social recognition, thereby converting previously undervalued and uncompensated care into forms of economic and symbolic capital (Mäkinen, 2021). Altogether, this provided a perfect breeding ground for the popularity of familial influencers – a term I use to refer collectively to parent, child, and family influencer profiles.
Within this context, sharenting has emerged as a central strategy, particularly among familial influencers, who mobilize intimate portrayals of children to cultivate authenticity and meet industry expectations (Walrave et al., 2025). The work of Blum-Ross and Livingstone (2017) show that, while parents often engage in sharenting for individual motivations such as self-expression, community building, or economic obligations, they face significant tensions between their personal and relational identities in making decisions about sharenting. These overlapping demands – arising from their multiple roles and desires as individuals, caregivers, and economic actors – frequently complicate their ability to navigate platforms effectively and equitably. In recent work on influencer sharenting, Abidin (2023, 2025) observes that public, academic, and political debates around the phenomenon are evolving and argues for a form of patchwork governance, in which various stakeholders address the gaps left by others’ inaction to protect minors from potential harms. The current study is situated within the European context, where the Digital Services Act (Article 28; European Parliament, Council of the European Union, 2022) cross-nationally emphasizes platform accountability for safeguarding the physical and mental well-being of minors. Building on these developments, this study contends that advancing toward shared accountability and patchwork governance requires a reorientation of the analytical focus in sharenting research – from the individual to the collective – situating it within its broader socio-institutional dynamics. Accordingly, the following sections outline the profits, risks, and institutional context of sharenting before proceeding to the empirical analysis.
Children at the Centre of Familial Influencing
As widely acknowledged by both scholars and influencers themselves, the perceived authenticity of influencer content remains a central currency of influence; valued, traded and strategically managed for commercial success within platforms, as it is highly desired by consumers (Van den Abeele, Hudders, & Vanwesenbeeck, 2024). In the context of familial influencers, influencer sharenting operates as a strategic mechanism for cultivating authenticity (Vanwesenbeeck et al., 2025), capitalizing on the expectation that influencers disclose intimate aspects of their everyday lives (Mäkinen, 2021). Within this expectation and shaped by the family-oriented nature of these profiles, children occupy a central and affectively charged role. As also highlighted in the work of Abidin (2017), sharenting is frequently employed as part of a persistent self-branding strategy within influencer marketing, wherein influencers put tremendous effort into staging seemingly raw, unfiltered, and spontaneous moments of family life. This blending of the staged and the authentic is encapsulated in what she coined as ‘calibrated amateurism’. Influencer sharenting is thus deeply embedded in the labour dynamics of familial influencer culture, where the authenticity of both parents and children is not merely a personal trait but a form of affective and relational labour, often enacted through practices of sharenting (Baxter & Czarnecka, 2025; Beuckels et al., 2024). Familial influencers thus engage in ongoing self-disclosure and emotional performance, often mobilizing their children as part of their self-brand; a strategy they report using to meet follower-, brand- and industry expectations (Beuckels et al., 2024; Van den Abeele, Hudders, & Vanwesenbeeck, 2024; Van den Abeele, Vanwesenbeeck, & Hudders, 2024).
However, the assumption that influencer sharenting is essential to enlarge the marketization potential of a parent influencers’ content has been challenged by recent research. An experimental study found that while influencer sharenting can enhance advertorial value by increasing perceived cuteness, this effect is simultaneously neutralized as consumers simultaneously experience heightened privacy concerns for the portrayed child and disapprove of the persuasive tactic embedded in such content (Van den Abeele, Beuckels, et al., 2025). Besides, a content analysis of familial influencer profiles showed a negative correlation between influencer sharenting and engagement with social media posts (Baxter & Czarnecka, 2025). Despite this, many familial influencers continue to believe that featuring children is essential for entrepreneurial pursuits (Van den Abeele, Hudders, & Vanwesenbeeck, 2024). However, in-depth insights into how industry actors conceptualize and reinforce this belief remain largely absent from current research.
Influencer Sharenting Perils
Given the prevalence and normalisation of sharenting in general and for economic purposes, a growing body of research has examined its associated risks. General sharenting has been linked to a variety of harms, including antagonistic online behaviours, paedophilic misuse, and identity theft, among others (Ranzini et al., 2020). Influencer sharenting, however, introduces additional vulnerabilities tied to economic exploitation, the commercial construction of children’s online identities, and celebrity bashing targeted at children (Hudders, 2025). These risks not only deepen general concerns about sharenting but also pose distinct threats to children’s rights as outlined by various scholars in the field (Clark & Jno-Charles, 2025).
Whereas proposed solutions to ‘sharenting risks’ often focus on anonymization techniques or parental consent (Walrave et al., 2023), identified risks in the literature extend far beyond data protection and privacy. Several studies have scrutinized the potential harms of influencer sharenting from different angles, yet their concerns converge. For instance, Rees (2025), departing from the principle of the child’s best interests as upheld in Article 3 of the United Nations General Assembly (1989), argues that influencer sharenting risks encompass not only data protection and financial security but also affect children’s identity, dignity, and psychological development. Similarly, Clark and Jno-Charles (2025), through a comparative case analysis of four prominent kidfluencers, identify five fundamental threats to the rights and freedoms of children involved in influencer sharenting: their rights to consent, privacy, freedom from economic exploitation, freedom from harm, and freedom of expression.
Drawing on Third and colleague’s (2025) work, and the General Comment No. 25 (2021) by which the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is applied to the digital environment, it becomes clear that safeguarding children’s rights in the digital environment requires a far broader, systemic approach. Their general comment specifically emphasizes that children are active rights-holders, entitled to participation, privacy, protection, and provision across all digital contexts. Their perspective underscores the importance of recognizing the infrastructures underpinning today’s digital environments and the fact that these are in most cases proprietary and commercially driven. Hence, as they argue, fulfilling the duty of care to children in this environment demands that states, corporations, and civil society share accountability for designing, regulating, and maintaining digital systems that respect and advance children’s rights.
Notwithstanding, although academic and public attention for influencer sharenting has grown significantly in recent years (Hudders et al., 2025), relatively little attention has been devoted to exploring strategies for preventing the potential harms associated with it (Beuckels, 2025). One study, for instance, developed a targeted intervention using expert input and intervention mapping, recommending tactics such as anonymizing children, seeking consent, and discussing potential harms (Hudders et al., 2025). Yet, both this intervention and most current research remain heavily parent-centric, reflecting dominant parenting ideologies and influencer culture while overlooking the commercial and structural dynamics of digital platforms, as described by Third et al. (2025). Similarly, Ugwudike et al. (2024), drawing on moral panic theory, argue that solely blaming parents who engage in sharenting for criminogenic outcomes is reductionist and often amplified by media narratives. This framing of sharenting risks, attributing them primarily to situational factors and parental agency, is deeply rooted in contemporary risk-averse and individualistic parenting ideologies, in which parents, and particularly mothers, are positioned as the primary managers of children’s (online) risks (Beuckels, 2025; Lee et al., 2024). The current study argues, however, that such a perspective obscures broader structural issues. It moves forward by investigating influencer sharenting through a more holistic lens, acknowledging the commercial and structural dynamics shaping children’s visibility, and aiming to move beyond parental determinism (Furedi, 2008), the notion that children’s outcomes are primarily determined by parental actions.
Rethinking Familial Influencing as Institutional Labour
Although the familial influencer industry is currently booming, it remains a relatively young and evolving field. Nevertheless, its foundations are deeply rooted in more established communication industries, with lineages traceable to women’s magazines (Abidin & Ots, 2016), celebrity culture (Abidin, 2015), journalism, PR, and advertising (Borchers & Enke, 2022). These predecessors not only shape the aesthetics and discursive strategies of familial influencer practices but also embed them within broader institutional logics of media production, gendered labour, and consumer culture.
While it is important to acknowledge that parents exercise agency in navigating their dual roles as caregivers and content creators, the currently dominant individualistic and parent-centric approach to safeguarding children’s rights risks obscuring the broader socio-technical and commercial infrastructures that shape influencer sharenting.
As Annabell et al. (2025) demonstrate in their case study on discrimination among influencers, the protections currently afforded to influencers are often inadequate in safeguarding them against the interests of the companies they work with. This raises important questions about how children’s roles and rights are negotiated within these same commercial contexts, especially given that children are frequently framed as passive subjects in discussions of their online privacy (Srivastava et al., 2023). The dominance of industry-driven frameworks that prioritize branding, monetization, and platform growth only heightens these concerns. To address these complexities, this study foregrounds both the professionalization and institutionalization of the influencer industry as key analytical lenses. While these concepts are closely intertwined, they refer to distinct but complementary processes that together shape the conditions under which influencer sharenting takes place.
The Professionalization of the Familial Influencer Industry
Professionalization refers to the evolution of influencer labour from informal activities into a recognized and monetized profession. In this study, I adopt a dual perspective on professionalization: at the individual level, it captures how influencers acquire skills, adopt entrepreneurial identities, and learn to navigate platform and market logics (Van Driel & Dumitrica, 2021); beyond the individual, it encompasses the emergence of industry-wide standards, the rise of specialized intermediaries, and the development of infrastructures that support and regulate influencer work (Stoldt et al., 2019). Over the past decades, tensions between the informal, amateur origins of content creators and the more rigid, historically institutionalized practices of collaborating organizations have driven the professionalization of the influencer industry. This evolution has led to the emergence of intermediary actors such as talent agencies, PR firms, and influencer marketing platforms, that specialize in managing the increasingly complex relationships between influencers and brands.
These third parties offer what Stoldt et al. (2019) term ‘structured flexibility’, aligning the creative autonomy of influencers with the strategic imperatives of corporate partners through practices like vetting, contract drafting, campaign monitoring, and payment administration. In negotiating tensions around authenticity, control, and commercial performance, these actors often reproduce what Wolf and Archer (2018) describe as advertising-led models, in which PR professionals rely heavily on the long-established norms and communication practices of their own industry. As a result, they risk overlooking the distinctive dynamics and creative potential of influencer culture, thereby failing to fully capitalize on the unique affordances of influencer marketing. Borchers and Enke (2021) similarly argue that both brands and third-party intermediaries exert significant influence over the planning, organization, and regulation of influencer content through routinized management practices. I posit that this dual lens of professionalization in the context of influencer sharenting will allow me to better understand the drivers of influencer sharenting beyond personal motivations, by situating familial content creation within broader professional expectations and commercial incentives that shape how and why children are made visible online.
Familial Influencing as Relational Institutional Work
Institutionalization, by contrast, refers to the embedding of influencer culture within broader, historically established systems of media production, marketing, and governance. It involves the stabilization of norms, values, and practices across organizational contexts, and the alignment of influencer marketing with legacy industries such as advertising, PR, and journalism (Guld, 2023). Institutionalization is not only about formalizing influencer work; it is about how influencer culture becomes part of the institutional fabric of media and commerce, shaped by the logics of corporate actors, regulatory bodies, and platform governance. Yet, institutionalization is not a static process. It is enacted and sustained through the everyday practices and interactions of diverse actors. Drawing on the work of Zilber (2013) and Topal (2015), this study conceptualizes influencer marketing as a form of relational institutional work, emphasizing the dynamic, situated processes through which institutions are created, maintained, and sometimes contested. In this view, brands, marketeers, influencers, and children are not just participants but institutional actors whose power positions and meaning frameworks shape the evolving norms and expectations of influencer labour, including sharenting (Topal, 2015). While institutionalization captures the broader structural embedding of influencer culture, relational institutional work highlights how these structures are enacted in practice; how influencer culture is lived, negotiated, and reproduced through relationships. Despite the centrality of children in these institutionalized contexts, influencer sharenting is still largely treated as a private or domestic matter within academic and public discourse, framed through parental choice rather than institutional dynamics. Adopting a lens of relational institutional work allows us to move beyond individualized, parent-focused accounts of sharenting and instead analyse how various influencer industry actors’ power positions and meaning frameworks contribute to the normalization and routinization of children’s visibility online.
Methodology
Given the exploratory nature of this study, a qualitative research design was adopted to enable a holistic understanding of the evolving influencer industry and its embedded practices. Qualitative methods are particularly well-suited to capturing the ‘thick descriptions’ (Alvesson, 2023) necessary to explore the layered experiences, meanings, and institutional contexts that shape influencer sharenting. Hence, this study builds on prior research that has primarily focused on parent influencers or followers (e.g., Van den Abeele, Hudders, & Vanwesenbeeck, 2025), and shifts the analytical lens toward the broader ecosystem of industry stakeholders. It investigates how commercial actors (such as brands, PR firms, and influencer agencies) shape, structure, and leverage sharenting practices within the familial influencer industry. This shift is crucial for understanding how familial influencer labour and influencer sharenting is not only professionalized at the individual level but also institutionalized through industry norms, infrastructures, power relations and daily practices. This study adopts a constructivist epistemology and a relational ontology, assuming that knowledge is co-constructed and that individuals are shaped by the relationships and institutional contexts they inhabit. This perspective does not negate individual agency but emphasizes that the relationship between actors (and their position and meaning frameworks) are more important than the actors themselves (Wildman, 2010).
Participants and Recruitment
The empirical basis of this study consists of in-depth interviews with fifteen professionals active within the influencer marketing ecosystem (cf. see Table 1). Participants occupy distinct roles across the ecosystem, including corporate professionals (e.g., brand managers, marketing directors), intermediaries (e.g., PR specialists, influencer marketing consultants), and parent influencers. This categorical diversity across the influencer ecosystem was central to the sampling strategy, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of how influencer sharenting is shaped across different positions of power and expertise. While most participants were based in Belgium, the sample also included a small number of international interviewees. The sampling strategy was grounded in the country in which this research was conducted, focusing on brands, marketers, and other professionals active within the Belgian influencer marketing ecosystem. The inclusion of two international interviewees from the United Kingdom and the United States reflects the global and networked nature of this market. These participants were selected because of their professional engagement with the Belgian market, such as managing campaigns for brands operating in Belgium, and not for the purpose of cross-cultural comparison. Accordingly, the analytical focus remains situated within the Belgian context, while acknowledging the transnational interconnections that shape influencer marketing practices more broadly.
Participants.
The informants for this study were selected through a combination of targeted sampling and snowball sampling. Initially, potential organizations and individuals were identified via online searches, focusing on those involved in influencer campaigns featuring children. Professionals in relevant roles were contacted via email. After each interview, participants were invited to suggest additional contacts within their networks, who were subsequently approached when deemed relevant. This iterative approach yielded a diverse set of perspectives and contributed to theoretical saturation, meaning that data collection continued until no new themes, concepts, or insights emerged, and the theoretical claims were sufficiently developed and well-grounded.
Interview Procedure and Ethical Considerations
To ensure a comprehensive exploration of the topic, semi-structured interviews were conducted. This format allowed for flexibility while maintaining thematic consistency across interviews. The interviewer employed dialogic techniques, including mirroring, probing, and prompting self-reflexivity, to elicit rich, situated accounts. The interview guide included introductory questions (e.g., about the participant’s professional role), transition questions (e.g., about their experience with influencer marketing), and central questions (e.g., about their views on and involvement in influencer sharenting). Questions were adapted to suit the participant’s role within the influencer ecosystem. Participants could choose whether interviews were conducted via video call (Teams or Google Meet), phone, or in person. All opted for remote, synchronous formats. Interviews were conducted in December 2024, lasted between 45 and 70 min, and were recorded with informed consent.
Prior to each interview, participants were informed about the study’s aims, their right to withdraw at any time, and the voluntary nature of their participation. Consent was obtained for audio recording and for the use of anonymized data in academic publications. All interviews were transcribed and pseudonymized immediately after recording. To protect confidentiality, participants are referred to by pseudonyms and categorized by their role in the influencer industry (cf. Table 1).
Data Analysis
For data analysis, an iterative phronetic approach was employed, as conceptualized by Tracy (2024). A phronetic approach emphasizes understanding practices in context, accounting for situated meanings, and making sense of social phenomena as they unfold in real-world settings. This approach involves a cyclical process of inductive and deductive reasoning, moving iteratively between existing theory, research questions, and emergent empirical insights. The iterative dimension allowed the analysis to be continually refined in response to new data and insights. In addition, the analysis was guided by principles of reflexive thematic analysis, attending to both semantic (explicit) and latent (implicit) dimensions of meaning within the data.
The immersion phase involved repeated listening to audio recordings, close reading of transcripts, and memo writing to capture early impressions and analytical leads. These memos were used for interpretive reflection and discussed with colleagues to refine emerging ideas. Several coding cycles were conducted using MAXQDA software, following a hybrid approach that combined data-driven and theory-informed codes.
The initial coding phase was descriptive, focusing on mapping out who was involved, what was happening, and in what contexts. In a second phase, codes were grouped according to the stages of influencer campaigns (e.g., briefing, content creation, evaluation), which revealed patterns in how sharenting practices were embedded in campaign workflows. As analysis progressed, it became increasingly clear that three overarching structures – economic, professional, and normative – were shaping influencer sharenting across actor categories. This insight led to a final round of recoding, in which all data were reanalysed through these three structural lenses. The resulting framework captures how sharenting is institutionalized through intersecting logics of monetization, professionalization, and normalization within the influencer marketing ecosystem.
Findings
Analyses reveal how influencer sharenting is not merely the outcome of individual parental choices but is actively shaped and sustained by intersecting institutional forces. Specifically, three mutually reinforcing structures – economic, professional, and normative – emerge as central to the normalization and legitimization of children’s visibility in influencer marketing (cf. Figure 1). These structures not only facilitate sharenting as a commercial practice but also enable a systematic deflection of responsibility: while industry actors benefit from the visibility of children, accountability is largely privatized and displaced onto parents under the guise of personal choice and creative freedom. To capture this dynamic, this paper introduces the concept of institutionalized sharenting: the normalization and routinization of children’s presence in influencer content through the interdependent operation of economic, professional, and normative structures. Each of these structures are illustrated in Figure 1 and will be discussed in separate sections below. Nevertheless, they are often highly interconnected and mutually reinforcing, shaping one another in practice. Within each structure, specific ‘logics’, which I understand as recurring ways of reasoning and acting, guide how children are included, how parents are positioned, and how organizations navigate ethical and commercial considerations. Together, these structures and logics create a system in which sharenting is both normalized and strategically organized across multiple layers of the influencer economy.
Institutionalized Sharenting.
Economic Structures: The Commodification of Childhood Visibility
Sharenting within influencer marketing is deeply entangled with economic structures that commodify familial intimacy and children’s visibility. Remarkably, all industry actors interviewed explicitly acknowledge the great marketization potential of children’s visibility:
Despite this recognition of its economic value, influencer sharenting is repeatedly depoliticized, meaning that structural, ethical, and political questions surrounding children’s digital visibility are downplayed or reframed as individual, private, or purely economic matters. Here, depoliticization refers to a shift in how power operates, as decisions about children’s participation are presented as personal or commercial choices rather than as matters of public concern and political accountability. The following sections identify three dominant logics through which industry actors enact this depoliticization – obscuring the labour involved in content creation while promoting and normalizing children’s participation in influencer culture.
The Market Fit
Children’s presence in influencer content is rarely questioned, in part because industry actors perceive them as naturally suited to the demands of the market. This natural ‘market fit’ refers to the taken-for-granted belief that children inherently embody the qualities that drive engagement (e.g. being cute and authentic), making them valuable assets within influencer marketing. Hence, children’s inclusion in influencer content is rarely driven by their own agency, but by their relatability to (their parents’) audiences, their role as consumers of specific products, and their capacity to enhance authenticity. This is illustrated by the following interview excerpts from Billie and Marie, who describe how children’s presence generates reach and engagement:
As multiple participants echoed, children’s perceived authenticity and ‘cuteness’ were cited as reasons why their presence leads to ‘good content’ or higher engagement, reinforcing the idea that they ‘fit’ within the influencer economy not because of who they are, but because of what they do for the system. Their very being – their cuteness, spontaneity, and perceived authenticity – functions as affective capital within a platform economy that is accepted by all its adult players. Hence, children’s presence is often seamlessly folded into commercial logics that often operate independently of their consent or awareness. This reflects the dominance of institutional logics (Friedland, 2012), where commercial rationalities shape not only content production but also the roles individuals are assigned within it.
Playbour
This sidelining of children also manifests in how their labour is rendered invisible, often framed through a neoliberal logic that equates children’s participation in content creation with play, spontaneity, and fun, despite its clear economic value. This framing aligns with earlier conceptualizations of playbour, a hybrid of play and labour, where digital activities are simultaneously enjoyable and productive (Rotimi et al., 2024). Across interviews, however, the emphasis was placed consistently on the ‘play’, and never on the ‘labour’. Hence, while the value of children’s presence was often acknowledged in economic terms, such as boosting engagement or making content more commercially successful, the activities that led to this success were never referred to as labour. Their involvement was portrayed as incidental, natural, and harmless; an extension of domestic life rather than a form of economic contribution. This disconnect allows industry actors to benefit from children’s visibility while denying the structured, performative, and monetized nature of their participation:
Strikingly, an ‘adult gaze’ from all industry actors, including mothers, becomes apparent when assessing children’s involvement in content creation. This exemplifies a form of adultism – a structural power imbalance in which adults assume authority over children’s experiences, choices, and representations (LeFrançois, 2014), as our data show industry actors continuously legitimizing children’s participation while obscuring their labour, agency, and consent. Although a lack of awareness and consent could often be interpreted as signs of exploitation, in the context of our study, these aspects are instead celebrated as evidence of a successful operation, since children are not perceived as being ‘bothered.’ This framing legitimizes children’s involvement in commercial content while masking the asymmetrical power relations and economic interests that underpin it:
Familial Profit
A third logic that legitimizes influencer sharenting is rooted in hegemonic neoliberal ideals of intensive motherhood, which constructs good motherhood based on total devotion to ones child, in terms of time, emotional and financial investment of resources (Hays, 1996). Interviewees framed influencer sharenting as a way for mothers to embody this ideal, portraying it as a practice that allows women to stay at home, spend time with their children, and simultaneously generate income and material benefits such as toys, clothing, and sponsored products. From this perspective, influencer sharenting is not only a form of care but also a productive, entrepreneurial act – one that aligns maternal labour with market value:
While the industry clearly profits from shifting full sharenting responsibility to parents (cf. findings below), influencer-mothers embrace this privatized responsibility as a performance of good parenthood. They do so by emphasizing the child-centred, careful negotiation involved in how their children are represented online, considering product fit, authenticity for followers, and, more broadly, how their children are affected. Remarkably, they rarely criticize companies, embracing the entrepreneurial neoliberal logic of the industry and taking full responsibility themselves, often even emphasizing that they would not participate if they lacked this freedom. Mothers thus appear to enact influencer activities as a performance of intensive motherhood, highlighting the gifts they can provide their children (financial devotion), the effort invested in calibrating their online presence (time and energy devotion), and the use of peers and other parents as benchmarks to assess their own performance (continuous self-improvement):
Despite the evident economic and symbolic capital generated by children’s presence in influencer content, their participation is rarely acknowledged as a form of labour, let alone compensated as such. Strikingly, while children are central to the production of value in these digital economies, they are seldom direct beneficiaries. Instead of receiving financial compensation, they are typically ‘rewarded’ through in-kind benefits such as toys or branded experiences – forms of compensation that reinforce consumerist logics rather than recognizing their labour. In the rare instances where monetary payment is arranged, it is consistently the parents who receive and control the earnings, further reinforcing adult authority over the commodification of children’s digital identities:
Overall, the three subtopics above reflect a broader adultist logic: adults profit from children’s labour while denying them agency, recognition, or compensation. This logic is enacted through industry practices that frame children’s participation as natural, playful, or beneficial, while obscuring the structural, ethical, and economic dimensions of their involvement. It is further justified by the prevailing assumption that companies and intermediaries are working with parents rather than children, thereby legitimizing adult authority over the commodification of children’s digital identities, while ignoring their agency – a point that will be elaborated in the following sections.
Professional Structures: The Professionalization and Precarity of Familial influencers
Beyond economic dynamics, influencer sharenting is also shaped by professional structures; the organizational systems, managerial practices, and industry norms through which content creation becomes formalized and institutionalized. Within this layer, two interrelated topics emerge as central drivers of influencer sharenting: first, the ongoing professionalization of the influencer industry, marking its evolution from informal domestic activity into a structured commercial field; and second, the practice of faux flexibility, through which organizations maintain control over – and moral distance from – children’s visibility within influencer content.
Professionalization
Professionalization captures the ongoing transformation of influencer culture into a structured, institutionalized field (Stoldt et al., 2019). It unfolds at two levels: individual professionalization, referring to the increasing formalization of influencer labour; and industry professionalization, denoting the rise of intermediaries and management systems that regulate and standardize these practices. Whereas the concept of playbour, discussed as part of the industry’s economic structures, concerns the discursive framing that renders children’s participation as ‘play’ rather than labour, professionalization highlights how this invisibility is structurally reproduced through the organization and management of influencer work.
At the individual level, professionalization often entails a paradoxical dynamic. As influencers gain visibility and attract higher-tier collaborations, they are more likely to receive financial compensation. Yet this professionalization frequently operates as a trade-off: while it brings increased legitimacy and economic opportunity, it also introduces more rigid structures of oversight and control imposed by organizational actors. As Michelle and Charlotte’s comments below illustrate, collaborations with established or regularly contracted influencers tend to involve detailed briefings and explicit creative guidelines – contrasting sharply with the more informal and loosely defined deals typical for one-off or unpaid collaborations:
Remarkably, the benefits of this trade-off are mostly in favour of adults, whereas the downsides such as increased performance standards and time investment often burden the minors. In many cases, children receive neither the economic capital nor the recognition or social capital that their visibility generates. Hence, individual professionalization tends to exacerbate rather than resolve the tensions surrounding influencer sharenting.
At the industry level, professionalization marks the transformation of influencer culture from informal content creation into a structured, institutionalized field (Stoldt et al., 2019). This shift is marked by the rise of intermediary actors such as talent agencies, influencer platforms, and marketing consultants, who increasingly mediate brand-creator relationships and shape the norms, expectations, and ethical boundaries of sharenting. In-house marketers describe this shift as a move away from informal, personal relationships toward standardized, management-driven interactions:
This shift is not only operational but also discursive. Intermediaries consistently refer to brands as ‘clients’, a term never used for influencers, whose interests they are also meant to represent. This asymmetry reflects a deeper structural hierarchy: brands are positioned as primary stakeholders, while family influencers are treated as flexible labourers. Their domestic lives are selectively leveraged and managed by an expanding network of actors, yet their creative agency remains contingent on brand-controlled elements such as detailed briefings, legal disclaimers, and scripted messaging. Notably, some intermediaries specialize in child-focused content or employ dedicated staff for campaigns involving children. In doing so, intermediaries serve a dual function: managing brand-creator relations, while acting as conduits through which brands deflect ethical responsibility:
Hence, whereas the professionalization of familial influencing might intuitively suggest better protection for children’s rights, in practice it primarily benefits adults, increasing economic opportunities for parents and granting organizations greater control, as well as opportunities to deflect responsibilities. Whereas this redistribution of responsibilities is directed at other professional organizations, the next section, under the label of faux flexibility, explains how everyday professional practices rooted in neoliberal parenting ideologies are also used by professionals to redistribute responsibility toward parents.
Faux Flexibility
Within the increasingly professionalized system as described above, organizations deploy a strategic logic I term faux flexibility. This refers to a rhetorical and operational manoeuvre through which organizations appear to grant influencers freedom and flexibility in sharenting decisions, while in practice strongly relying on children’s visibility for commercial gain and shifting responsibility entirely onto parents. This ‘pretended’ flexibility enables moral distancing: organizations reconcile ethical concerns with economic dependence by framing sharenting as a matter of parental autonomy rather than institutional design. This practice unfolds through various interrelated strategies. The first, strategic influencer sampling, involves selecting parent influencers who regularly feature their children, even without formal agreements or explicit sharenting requests. This balancing act – wanting children to appear while avoiding overt association with child influencer marketing – leads to a preference for collaborations with parent influencers, preserving the illusion of adult-only partnerships while still leveraging the affective and commercial power of the child:
Strikingly, at the discursive level, nearly all interviewees – except one based in the United States – initially expressed aversion to working with child influencers, citing internal or legal guidelines. Yet this disavowal is contradicted by operational practices, in which children are routinely considered in influencer selection. The following quotes from Anaïs illustrate how children are explicitly considered in influencer selection, despite her earlier formal denial of collaboration with children. Moreover, while some influencers report that brands avoid explicitly requesting the inclusion of children, others indicate that such requests are in fact common practice:
A second, interrelated strategy for maintaining faux flexibility is affective activation – the design of family-oriented experiences for influencers that implicitly require child participation. Examples include workshops to craft teddy bear necklaces for a pajamas brand, gardening kits for parents and children linked to another brand’s snack products, or family adventure park tickets bundled with promotional materials. These activations prompt parent–child engagement and result in a high volume of emotionally resonant content:
As argued in the first section of the findings, various economic structures reveal that children are not merely portrayed in campaigns but are strategically adopted as persuasive instruments by the industry, mobilized to generate emotional engagement, social visibility, and ultimately, consumer action. Building on this, this section additionally argued that professional structures within the industry facilitate the deflection of responsibility for children by redistributing it either to intermediaries or to parents through a variety of practices. The next section will examine how normative structures function as a final mechanism in institutionalizing influencer sharenting, shaping what is considered acceptable or expected behavior in the industry.
Normative Structures: Deflecting Responsibilities in a Regulatory Void
Everyday sharenting is widely normalized on social media, often framed as harmless documentation or community-building. Building on this cultural acceptance, the influencer industry operates within additional normative structures closely tied to its professional and economic organization. While interviewees express a general awareness of the risks associated with child influencers, this awareness is vague and primarily focused on potential reputational damage to brands. As a result, children are rarely acknowledged as active agents or rights-holders within the industry.
Privatized Responsibilities
Across interviews, a recurring pattern emerges: parents are positioned as the sole legitimate decision-makers in influencer sharenting. The practice is often framed as a matter of individual parental choice, rather than part of a broader system of collective or institutional responsibility for children’s digital well-being.
Industry norms legitimize sharenting by framing parents – especially mothers – as both autonomous content producers and sole guardians of their children’s digital well-being. While the industry has become increasingly professionalized, collaborations with familial influencers are often marked by minimal compensation and a reliance on their aspirational labour. Strikingly, the responsibility for understanding and complying with legislation, privacy norms, and platform governance is placed entirely on the parents. Industry actors frequently adopt a tone of culpabilisation, suggesting that parents ‘should know better’, ‘must take responsibility’, because they ‘are accountable for mistakes’. This double bind positions parents as professional traders when it comes to legal and ethical obligations, yet as informal, passion-driven individuals when it comes to remuneration and recognition. As Marie, a campaign manager, illustrates, the industry distances itself from accountability while benefiting from children’s visibility:
[. . .]
While many parents have internalized this privatized responsibility, they also describe how the hustle culture of content creation – juggled alongside full-time caregiving and, often, additional employment – places significant strain on family life. These narratives reveal how normative structures foster the expectation that families, particularly mothers and children, will absorb the pressures of content production into already overburdened domestic routines. It is not the industry that adapts to the realities of family life, but families who are expected to remain flexible and align their everyday rhythms with the demands of platform culture. As Jeanne explains:
Ultimately, strongly intertwined with the industry’s organizational structures, normative structures allow brands and intermediaries to obscure their own agency and shift the responsibility for sharenting fully onto parents – reinforcing a system in which the management of finances, care, risk, and accountability are privatized and profit remains centralized.
Compliance-as-Ethics Logic
When industry stakeholders do reflect on ethical responsibilities from within the industry, this is largely reduced to legal compliance. This reductionist framing is particularly convenient in light of the legal grey zones surrounding child influencing in all of the countries of interviewees. Hence, as long as campaigns adhere to existing advertising regulations such as disclosure requirements or restrictions on promoting unhealthy foods or alcoholic beverages to minors, brands and intermediaries consider their ethical obligations fulfilled. This compliance-as-ethics logic treats the law as a ceiling rather than a floor, leaving little room for proactive engagement with the broader implications of involving children in commercial content. As Borchers and Enke (2022) notes, many influencer professionals equate ethical behaviour with simply ‘not breaking the rules’, even when those rules are minimal, outdated, or inconsistently enforced. This pattern is consistently reported by brands, intermediaries, and parents – particularly in relation to the marketing of unhealthy products – and reflects how compliance with existing legislation has become a deeply embedded, normative expectation. Although often driven by brand reputation worries, many actors take great care to ensure that children are not depicted in these restricted contexts, often implementing strict internal guidelines and briefings to avoid any potential violations:
So there were very strict briefings: that’s not allowed, they can’t appear on screen. You could talk about having children, but they weren’t supposed to be shown in the content. Also, for a campaign with [Brand B], I think it was allowed to be about a party or a family moment, but the children couldn’t be explicitly shown.”
Hence, while most actors strictly adhere to existing regulations, this compliance often reflects a strategic alignment with institutional norms – many of which originate in offline contexts, such as food marketing and alcohol advertising laws – rather than a substantive ethical commitment to the children portrayed or targeted in influencer campaigns. Influencers themselves report that the only briefings they ever received prohibiting sharenting indeed concerned these specific regulatory boundaries related to unhealthy foods or alcoholic beverages, highlighting the narrow scope of ethical concern. At the same time, other interviewees openly describe how, within the digital context, they exploit strategic sampling or take advantage of the lack of strict monitoring as loopholes within the platform ecosystem:
Nevertheless, in the absence of clear legal guidelines on child influencing, sharenting is rarely considered unethical unless it becomes visibly exploitative from the parents’ side. This reflects a narrow, risk-oriented, and parent-centred set of ethical norms that marginalize the child’s perspective and reinforce a system in which responsibility is individualized and reactive, rather than collective and preventive. This becomes particularly evident when comparing these norms to those governing the child modeling industry, which operates within a child labour framework that imposes clear legal responsibilities such as obtaining parental consent, limiting working hours, and safeguarding school and leisure time. While these obligations are formally placed on parents, modeling agencies often assume a guiding role, translating legal requirements into everyday practice and ensuring compliance through internal protocols. As revealed in an interview with the CEO of a Belgian child modeling agency, this responsibility is not externally mandated but normatively internalized as part of professional conduct:
In stark contrast, brands and intermediaries in the child influencing sector appear to primarily serve commercial interests, functioning as brokers for corporate campaigns while rarely advocating for the rights or well-being of the child or the parent-influencer. As a result, the normative infrastructure of the industry remains shallow and brand-centric, lacking both robust regulation and widespread critical awareness. In this regulatory and ethical vacuum, sharenting continues to be legitimized through a convergence of economic incentives, professional routines, and normative structures that normalize children’s visibility in commercial content without critically interrogating its implications or the distribution of responsibility.
Conclusion
This study reveals that children’s visibility in influencer content is not incidental but strategically negotiated and deeply embedded in industry routines. Drawing on a constructivist framework and the concept of institutional work (Topal, 2015), I introduce the concept of institutionalized sharenting to describe how children’s presence online emerges from the alignment of economic, professional, and normative structures – challenging prior research that emphasizes individual parental agency.
While earlier studies have focused on parental responsibility and the risks of sharenting, this research uncovers a broader institutional ecology in which sharenting is actively promoted. Responsibility within this ecosystem is misaligned with profit flows: only a few influencers gain substantial financial rewards (Duffy, 2016), while industry actors consistently benefit from the unpaid labour of smaller creators and their children. Despite this, corporate actors frame parents as the sole moral and legal guardians, deflecting accountability and reinforcing neoliberal discourses that privatize care and moral responsibility (Lee et al., 2024). Although the sample was primarily situated within the Belgian market, some participants, particularly the US-based professional, expressed a stronger alignment with neoliberal ideals of self-entrepreneurship and the individual empowerment of women, often prioritizing these over privacy concerns. While this may reflect broader cultural narratives surrounding the moral value of market participation and entrepreneurial agency, examining such potential cultural variations was beyond the scope of this study. Future research should therefore investigate whether such cultural differences indeed exist and, if so, how they may influence or trickle down into the practices and values of the global influencer industry. Further, based on our analysis, it becomes clear that the industry discourse fails to recognize the dual role of influencers – as both individuals and commercial actors (Annabell et al., 2025). Familial influencers are primarily framed as caregivers, while their children are treated as passive brand extensions. This adultist and neoliberal framing positions children as highly visible to the audience, yet institutionally invisible; central to content production though structurally excluded from recognition, protection, and participation within the influencer economy.
To capture the complexity of the industry and its relational dynamics, I propose the concept of institutionalized sharenting. Rather than a series of isolated decisions, sharenting becomes a structured practice embedded in the routines and norms of the industry. This institutionalization is sustained by professional practices that normalize and conceal the precarity of children’s roles under dominant narratives of fun, authenticity, brand devotion, and profitability.
Legal frameworks are beginning to emerge, such as in France and Illinois, but remain scarce and largely focused on parental responsibility (République Française, 2020; Illinois General Assembly, 2023). While laws like France’s Loi n° 2020-1266 technically allow for brands to be considered employers, findings of this study show that commercial relationships with children are rarely formalized in contracts. Other national initiatives are also rapidly emerging, including general social media bans for minors that are being implemented or debated in several countries and, more specifically with regard to influencers, proposals such as those in Italy and Belgium for stricter regulations on child content creators (Belgian Chamber of Representatives, 2022; Camera dei Deputati, 2024). Although those signal growing political awareness, they remain fragmented and continue to delegate the primary responsibility to parents rather than platforms or brands. This legal grey zone enables corporate actors to adopt a compliance-as-ethics approach, treating minimal legal adherence as sufficient ethical conduct. This is not only a consequence of regulatory ambiguity but also reflects the industry’s reliance on its amateur origins to justify a lack of formal accountability. In contrast, the child modelling industry – firmly rooted in the traditional entertainment sector – demonstrates how institutional actors can internalize legal responsibilities grounded in child labour law, a framework largely ignored in the digital influencer space. Notably, the industry demonstrates far greater compliance in other domains, such as food marketing to children, suggesting that stricter legal guidelines to promote industry and platform accountability, are not only feasible but urgently needed to recalibrate the normative and structural conditions under which children are made visible online.
Most strikingly, children remain marginalized in both industry practices and regulation. Despite being central to influencer content, their voices and consent are rarely considered by industry professionals. This reflects a persistent adultist logic that positions children as passive subjects rather than agentic participants in the digital economies they help sustain. Thus far, both policymakers and industry actors have regarded the protection of children’s rights in the digital environment as too difficult and/or too costly, often adhering to what Livingstone et al. (2024) describe as a false binary between the roles of parents and policymakers. Our findings align with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment No. 25 (2021), in the sense that it emphasizes fulfilling children’s rights in the digital environment requires shared accountability among states, corporations, and civil society. It stresses that children should not be treated as passive users, but as active rights-holders, whose best interests must be a primary consideration. Yet, as our findings demonstrate, children’s best interests are often interpreted through neoliberal values – such as the gifts and opportunities they receive, rather than actively consulted. Both parents and industry actors appear to define what constitutes a child’s best interest, while children’s own perspectives are rarely consulted, as also observed in previous studies (Beuckels et al., 2024). As mechanisms that meaningfully engage children in decisions about their participation remain largely absent in the industry, a more systematic assessment of children’s voices is imperative to advance our understanding of what their best interests actually entail within the context of familial influencing. Ultimately, our data shows that consent processes, contracts, and briefings are typically designed for and negotiated by adults, with little to no adaptation to children’s developmental needs or communicative capacities. Based on these findings, several concrete governance strategies emerge.
First, governance must extend beyond parental regulation. As the industry becomes more professionalized, agencies and brands should be required to formally acknowledge and contractually define children’s participation, ensuring it is not obscured by tactics like strategic sampling or responsibility deflection. Decision-making about children’s visibility should no longer reside solely within the private sphere of the family but be supported by intermediaries who prioritize children’s rights. Second, current laws focus almost exclusively on sponsored content, leaving the vast amount of editorial or filler content – often the most time-consuming and impactful – entirely unregulated. This content plays a crucial role in building influencer personas and marketability, and children’s presence within it should be subject to ethical scrutiny. Finally, a shift toward child-centred, collaborative governance is imperative. Given the institutionalized nature of influencer sharenting, children must be recognized not merely as subjects of protection but as stakeholders whose perspectives matter (Third et al., 2025). Governance frameworks should embed co-creation, participatory consent, and iterative consultation with children into both formal regulation and everyday industry practice. As Livingstone and Haddon (2012) argue, children are capable of building digital literacy and mitigating risks when empowered. The influencer economy must therefore evolve toward a model of collective responsibility – one that shares accountability across all actors and actively centres children in the governance of systems that profit from their presence.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Julie Eeckhout for her valuable assistance in data collection.
Ethical Approval
This study received ethical approval from the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at Ghent University (approval number EC 2022-6).
Consent to Participate
All participants provided informed consent prior to participation.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Special Research Fund (BOF) at Ghent University under grant number BOF.PDO.2024.0023.01.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study consist of pseudonymized interview transcripts. Due to the sensitive nature of the material and to protect participant confidentiality, the data are not publicly available.