seriously like to normal ppl it wouldn’t be a problem at all, you wouldn’t even notice it, especially if you’re actually trying to become a parent to the child you’re adopting
Thailand is a hotspot for child trafficking and has famously been a place where foreign p*edophiles go to buy time with children. Children get sold by their poor parents sometimes for meagre money the foreigners offer. Children without parents need strong protections.
The kid defending Her younger sister saying “she can’t wake herself up, I wake her up” broke my fucking heart. There was a lot of things my parents didn’t teach me that my older sister did so that I wouldn’t fail in ways that she did, later my parents took the credit for me not making mistakes the same way my sister did “see your little sister did it just fine, why couldn’t you be like her?” Because she made sure I didn’t grow up like her!!! She made sure I was ok and loved and always had someone safe and it rips me apart every day that I’m 6 years younger than her and was too little to watch out for her in the same way
As an older sister the fact that you are that aware of her affect on your life I'm sure is really appreciated by her. You sound like the kind of younger sibling to be proud of. Glad y'all have each other despite the other circumstances.
Not to backseat drive a morally bankrupt family vlogging channel but couldn't Cool Mom have simply built anticipation and then done a big montage video at the 1 year mark where she dropped all the "secret" footage of the baby from a whole year, edited in a highly romanticized way, like set to an inspirational christian pop song. They're not even smart enough to be evil right
literally sighed with relief that they didn't adopt the next child either. I can't even imagine not being able to post about something for a year being a deal breaker for having someone join my family.
the lollypop incident is so concerning to me not because it was being recorded but because i would nor for the life of me allow a little girl to be around a man who tells her sexual jokes and then proceeds to ask her not to tell, to"keep their little secret". Those actions, to me, are concerning in spite of the camara.
Seriously, the whole thing feels predatory. How was this allowed? Why were they in an adult store in the first place? Do her parents know? I hate to say it, but between this and the weird sexualising jokes toward his infant daughter, I would not be surprised if this guy got caught on some serious shit later. Wish something could be done to investigate this.
“Secret”-especially paired with something s*x adjacent-is a huge red flag. One therapist did a video on creating a safe environment around the concept of secrets. They recommended using the term “surprise” for things like gifts and parties. A “surprise” is something you don’t tell for right now. You will tell later, and it’s for good things, like a present you’re giving someone. But kids shouldn’t keep “secrets” from their parents or caregivers.
@@ScrawnyTreeDemonAs a daughter of a asshole potential pedophile there's something more sinister going on with that father. The CPS should check his history
@@emmadenton1826me too I was fully convinced that’s what they were going to get i hope this sets a precedent for future cases and let’s people be more wary of all family bloggers
Filming your kid potty training isn't for family. There's a very specific subset of a family channel's audience being entertained by that, and it's NOT the kind of audience any parent should be pandering to.
Yeah definitely most of the content screams icky fetish type content that bring in people that are not good people at all. The gross comments and stalking is terrifyingly enough, also I wouldn't blame a child in these setting even dying from suicide because of their parents. Pedophiles love these channels alot
THIS this is a big age gap between my sisters and I so I’m a great aunt in my 30s. Do I hope that my great nephews potty training is going well? Yes. Will I give him positive reinforcement via praise, treats and helping him find a toilet if he needs one? Yes. Do I want photos or videos of him pants down on a toilet? Absolutely not. More importantly would my niece ever send me photos or videos like that? Absolutely not.
I never understood some parent's obsession with documenting potty training. Simply asking for advice, but not sharing pictures of your child trying to use a toilet? Fine. Everyone needs advice since potty training can be extremely difficult. But showing the whole world your child trying to go? Ridiculous and disgusting. No one wants to see that, and you should be shamed by everyone (including your child) for sharing that.
There was one family tiktoker who filmed herself teaching her kid about private parts, while showing her kid lying on her back, and while off screen, it was implied the kid's legs were open. Before it got taken down, that tiktok video had 40K SAVES. It made me absolutely sick and I had no idea how this parent can justify why it was saved so many times without knowing a huge chunk of those saves are likely from predators.
@@KindaEruditewhat…why would anyone post that 😭😭 they know who’s watching, they know who’s behind the screen. i will never understand these type of monster parents
I was a teen mom and it horrified me just how many young girls are groomed by grown men who lust after them with zero protection from their parents. My child’s father was the same age as me but definitely thought he would be able to control me via our child and when he didn’t get his way, he had another girl pregnant before our child was 6 months old. My relatives were also able to coerce me into keeping the baby with gentle lies but the second they also didn’t get their way, they would threaten to rescind their support. Now I’m thankfully an adult who was able to work through that trauma and recognize just how evil some people are when it comes to kids and who is or isn’t seen as a child. ESPECIALLY IN THE CHURCH…
That's horrific. I'm so sorry you've had to go through that. The way our culture exploits children, both then-teens like yourself and little babies, is blood-boiling. I hope you and your child are doing better now.
@@ScrawnyTreeDemon I appreciate your kind words, thank you💖 I'm happy to say my children and I have the relationship that I wanted with my parents. It's not perfect but I'm happy my kids at least want to come talk to me and hang out with me. Plus I'm independent of my family; I don't have to deal with them at all and still get to talk to my niece and nephews.
@@ZeroN1neZeroMy mom had me at probably around the same age you had your first. I know people judged my mom and gave her shit about it when I was a kid, apparently a nurse even told her to her face in the delivery room that she should adopt me out, etc but she loved me and my sister and she did her best and both of us are doing fine these days. Like, I definitely learned from how hard things were for her as a young mother, but if you're trying your best to give your kids a good life while giving yourself permission to take care of yourself then I have faith your kids will be ok
Girl, you were a teen mom. That tells us ALL we need to know about you. You didn't even have the basic self preservation skills to secure and protect YOUR OWN future, yet you're complaining about other people's behavior? 😂
@@TomikaKelly oh, baby doll, I can’t even take you seriously😂😂😂 you clearly are here with some strange rage bait fixation and I’m not here to feed wild dogs. I know who I am; do you?
Being autistic myself, that story about the parents rehousing their autistic adopted child once the child became "violent around their family" set off at least 5 different alarm bells in my mind even before you were finished explaining the whole story. It almost makes me wonder if the reason they wanted to adopt a special needs child in the first place was just because they wanted an easy excuse that *some* people won't question if they -inevitably- returned them.
they abuse a neurodivergent kid and victim blame for reacting negatively then 'rehouse them' so as to 'erase' them--THAT IS NOT OKAY AND IS SO ABLEIST WHAT THE SHIIIIUUIUT im autistic as well, and have unfortunately dealt with similar abusive shit from caregivers and the trauma is wild and still hurts
it was definitely an excuse (based on ableist rhetoric/stereotypes to villify the neirodivergent)...they just wanted to uphold that 'normal perfect nuclear family' shit and it is soooooo enraging
It's actually worse than that (allegedly.) See, "Minnie" let it slip in an interview that the child was originally misdiagnosed with having an incurable brain tumor and was unlikely to live past childhood only to find out that wasn't the case after she had adopted him. In said interview she displays some noticeable discomfort over the idea that this child would be living with them for the rest of his life so it appears that she was under the impression that the child would only be around for a few months or years before kicking the bucket and wasn't actually prepared to take care of him his whole life. She only wanted to adopt a special needs child when she thought the setup would be temporary and bailed when she realized that wouldn't be the case (allegedly.)
@@jinglesmcgee8377 holy shit. Like foster an old dog like a normal person. What kind of monster do you have to be to pick a child based on hoping you won't have a lifetime commitment?!
Also it's wild that they can film adopted and foster kids in the first place. Like in my country, digital security of adoptive and foster families is taken EXTREMELY seriously, because the inherent danger of taking care of kids from dangerous backgrounds. Like not only are the biological parents themselves often a danger to the kids, imagine what happens when a kids biological parents get into debt with wrong kinds of people, and those people figure out where the kids are living through RUclips or Facebook or whatever. Not only is it dangerous to that specific kid, but also EVERY kid around them, and the foster parents themselves. Like my foster family doesn't even have their phone numbers or address online, let alone pictures and info on their kids. Those kids don't live with their biological parents for a reason. Advertising around that you're an adoptive or foster family comes with EXTREME risks.
Videoing your child’s bathroom time is deviant behavior, posting it for the world to see ought to be illegal. People who want to watch a random kid on the internet during bathroom time are weird and dangerous. I don’t take anything back, so don’t @ me.
I agree. If a parent hits a child, you’ll see people come out of the woodwork to defend their right to discipline their child with “tough love”. Now if a pet owner were to hit their dog? All hell would break loose and there would be no question about it being unfair or abusive.
The acceptance of hitting children is so fucking crazy. Hitting other adult members of your family is seen as bad, but hitting your small child and even other's people children is ok and even encouraged. So gross!
Agreed, it's like a child's human rights completely depend on whether their parents want to uphold them. Children are a marginalised group and it's terrifying
youre so right they are!!! people love to denounce animal abuse constantly, my own abusive family considered themselves amazing animal owners, and yet they treated me worse than their dogs (who werent treated well at all either)
Shanspeare: "The Truman Show, do you remember that?" Me: "Yeah, really good movie." Shanspeare: "1998" Me: "That long ago? Really?" Shanspeare: "I wasn't even born yet." I feel like I just got roasted so hard that my soul is drifting away from the ashes that were once my body. 💀
I was SAVED by being born when I was because if my mom was just a little bit younger and been born in a more tech generation she would have 10000% been a mommy blogger. I remember how much she used to divulge my life to friends, family, coworkers, anyone- that I would refer to her talking to people as "broadcasting". My hobbies, my fears, my joys, my shameful moments, my health, my grades, everyone we knew was told everything about me all the time. It was so dehumanizing. For years I had nightmares about being powerless, immobile, unable to yell/be heard, etc. Needless to say we don't speak anymore and have no relationship and it all started with exactly that- sharenting
Everyone is talking about the “we don’t want to violate anyone’s privacy other than our own kids’” part but not the “we would have to take care of and have some kid in our house for a year and they wouldn’t even be our kid” part. They could not be more blatant and forthright about the fact that they don’t want to take care of a child, they do not think a child deserves care, and they do not want to adopt a child in order to give a child care. They just wanted to buy a child to make content with it. Can you imagine how the child would be treated in their home, when they already admit before they even get one that they don’t want to have to take care of it??
@@alejandroreyes8878 TW: Chile abuse and neglect they were a family channel who had six children. the mother and father had gone viral twice for abuse. The first time was when the mother refused to bring her daughter lunch and told the teachers not to give her anything because she should’ve packed her lunch the night before and didn’t lie to her mother about it. The child was 6. Then, one of their other children had played a prank on the other (classic sibling stuff) and he got his BEDROOM taken away slept on beanbag for months after already having gone to a teen-help camp and those are almost always abusive. So then the channel disbans and the mother starts to become more open about her politics (super right wing LGBTQ+ hater all that) and she started getting involved with a marriage counselor (who fucking sucks). The mother and father break up and at this point they still have two young children in the house. The marriage counselor and her began to make videos together actively advising parents abuse their children. She and the marriage counselor move into together and it all culminated into the two young children escaping the home looking like they were starved, not showering regularly, and all around neglected.
@@alejandroreyes8878 That's the name of the family channel with the parents who made the kid sleep on a beanbag for 7 months; the mom just got sentenced to prison time for child abuse.
It is so comical to me hearing about these "parents" talking about adopting kids, which almost sounds like hiring a new, underpaid employee, on the same day that Bridgit Mendler posted and was like oh by the way I am a mum and have been for years after I fostered and adopted this boy- didn't post his name or face or anything. The contrast is so ridiculously stark between people who just genuinely want a child and to help that child flourish vs those who want to exploit it.
It feels so bizarre to imagine people using adopted and foster kids on family channels, because I grew up in a foster family, and as far as I was aware, in my country, foster families were instructed not to even MENTION their foster kids on social media or that they were a foster family, or post their locations, let alone post pictures. My foster family didn't even have a social media, and you couldn't even find their phone number online. It might seem like a lot, but it's actually really important when fostering kids, because the inherent danger associated with taking care of kids from dangerous backgrounds. Like imagine a kid from a drug and crime affiliated family. Not only are their own parents a danger to them, imagine what happens if the parents take loans from wrong kinds of people, or don't pay a dealer, and that dealer or a loan shark figures out the foster family their kids live at. Not only is it a danger to that specific kid, it's dangerous for EVERY kid in that foster family, and the foster parents. I'm not entirely sure about adoption cases, but I would imagine similar rules follow adopted kids. It cannot be overestimated just how important information security is when taking care of kids from high risk families. Like the last I heard of my brother's biological father was that he was in prison, probably doing 10 years to life. I couldn't even IMAGINE what could happen if that dude got freed and happened to find out where his kid was at. Also our bio mom was def in the habit of sleeping around with wrong kinds or crowd and got into debts she couldn't pay with wrong kinds of people.
I'm glad that after this horrifying reality check, you mentioned Janette Macurdy's book and tied this vlog children to the horrors inflicted upon child actors. A vicious cycle
When you said “children are considered second class citizens”, that really struck me. I remember being told as a kid that I have less rights than pets in many regards, and that I should stick up for myself because of that.
literally! predators get half as far as they do because they seem to take children seriously, unlike the institutions that are supposed to protect them. Of course a kid will follow whoever seems to actually see them as a person whether its real or not.
"it's almost like parents are pimping out their children" reminds me of a comment I saw the other day. Family Channels get pregnant for views. From what I understand most of these channels have multiple children after they become famous and there's a pretty big uptick in both views and content to be made around every pregnancy. Announcing it, the ultrasound, the morning sickness, their diets, building the baby room, going into labour, etc. etc. Adding these two concepts together (the pimping and the purposeful breeding) there's almost a level of human trafficing to it? But instead of having to steal their victims, they create them. It just adds another layer of ick for me.
Building your own victims has always been the way to go, since children are seem as the property of their parents. Shit, have an unregistered home birth, and no one even knows that kid exists.
This is actually part of how agrarian/pastoral societies became hierarchal and patriarchal. You simply needed full time, near life long breeders for it to work. Long version: Unlike 100% hunter gatherers, who are notoriously egalitarian including women (and often even children!) who need kid to be able to walk 20 miles a day before they have another one (by definition no kept animals to ride of pull non-walkers) and use family planning so their average is a birth every 4-5 yrs per woman (mostly via nursing which if done in a certain way works as good as the Pill, but also herbal family planning). But non industrial agriculture requires alot of workers and also fighters to guard land because you "own" land you put work into (this goes into why property gives rise to hierarchy gives rise to inheritance gives rise to control of womens sexuality ie in an egalitarian society paternity is irrelevent and many hunter gatherers had very odd ideas about paternity like every man a wiman sleeps with is part father of her kids...as every respurce is shared and everyone looks after kids ot hardly mattered. Pre industrial agriculture women average a baby every 12-18 mos. This made most women virtually breeding slaves for abouttwelve thousand years, until early modern era. And they died regularly in childbirth but it was "worth it" (to the society) because you cpuld remarry and needed to keep breeding that many workers for subsistence farming to work. This began to shift again several hundred yrs ago as other forms of industry arose, divorcing labor from farmland and making too many children a luxury again in most of the world. Even when we had child labor, the technology quickly outpaces what you can have a workforce of small kids do. Technology makes biology largely irrelevent, though stuff like religion slowed the transition down. In some ways social democracy like the Sweden model is a return to our natural pre-domezticated ways of living in a group where ppl have free expression but are required to share what they hunt amd forage and have elder councils or a "chief" with no power, just whatever living person has good leadership ability and wisdom. It's just scaled up to the scale of our current societies. It's how we naturally lived. Retrogressive types will and are trying to use the same arguments now re global capitalism no longer growing- well duh it was never sustainable to assume every generation would be bigger especially as industry shrinks the need for many kids and technology makes gender role enforcement uneccessary. Thats always been the endgame paradox of capitalism. Theyll use it as an excuse to suppress abortion, birth control, LGBT ppl and (mark my words!) eventually to revoke suffrage. Instead of just readjusting the way we do industry and economy. The essential power set up of societies was very much tied to their form of food acquisition. Even taking agrarian vs pastoral (herding) societies they do patriarchy using different typified methods that fall along that faultline for example. Source: look at any anthropology database of societies and their food acquisition will align with the form general power shape they take, regardless of what continent or even what century. (Honors thesis in anthropology at Ivy. ) This isn't news, anthropologists have known since the 50s. It's just we project our recent past onto the far past and assume otherwise, and its generally in the interests of the rulers to encourage such a belief. Even within patriarchy we do this ie what we think as traditional ie childhood and nuclear family, were inventions of middke-upper class Victorians.
There's a woman I knew who was a big advocate for children's liberation, and, as youth liberation advocates often are, was frequently accused of only believing in it as a way to predate on kids. Her response was always, "if I wanted to predate on kids, I'd just become a mom." And even though I haven't seen her in years I still think of that a lot
The second class citizen thing hits really close. One time, I'm talking to my little brother who is 13. But at the time, he was about... I'm gonna say 9? 10? It's been a while. We're at Walmart and at the kids section. He saw the Ryan's World merch and he grew jealous and asked me "why is he famous! Why can't that be me?" And I said bluntly. "You really don't... You don't want to be famous. Think about it this way, bud. You like playing Minecraft. You like playing with Legos and your mice (that's what he calls his marbles), right?" "Yeah." "Now imagine that all you want to do is play Minecraft or with your mice, but our parents tell us everyday that you have to be on camera. You can't say no because it's your parents. There's no "I don't want to" in Ryan's life. And it's not even for a few minutes a day, it's hours. It's a job. It's not his choice. And you can't choose what to do on that video, it's always the parent's choices on what to do." My brother then just kinda felt bad. I did too afterwards because I often think about that talk. Kids rarely can say no to their peers, kids can't vote, kids can't defend themselves a lot, heck kids rarely have consent when they don't want hugs and kisses from other family members. Often times, people treat animals or something like a fancy car better than kids!!
@@melonowl333 of course. I grew up on the child stars. I grew up on the Olsen Twins, Macaulay Culkin, and recently I heard about what happened to Bobby Driscoll after Peter Pan because of the Chip n' Dale movie controversy.
My mom when i was a teen wanted to exploit the fact i had cancer as a kid and write a book and start a blog. I had to cry and beg her not to because those pictures and moments she'd being up are extremely personal and i wasn't ready and still not ready for strangers to know my worse moments. I was a dying, it still is a huge source of trama. Before you asked no she wasn't doing it because she wanted to feel better shes very blunt and honestly with me. And said because parents with cancer are usually alone she could take advantage of that by making them feel less alone. By selling them a book. So there were alot of reasons im objectived to this.
I can somewhat relate to your experience. I was born with scoliosis and my family did fundraisers for the hospital I went to because my parents felt they had to give back to them because we didn’t have to pay for treatment. I hated doing those fundraisers every year, it was nothing more than a pity party to show how “brave” I was or how “special” I was There’s a weird trend with parents and sensationalizing their child’s disability / illness, or just putting it on a pedestal. I hope you’re doing better now, and I wish you the best.
I could somehow see myself be okay with being exploited if it helped my parents pay for medical bills or to grant me financial security but that's my POV now a decade into adulthood. As a child or teenager my parents didn't do a great job at respecting my privacy and even having like 30 people know stuff about me that they shouldn't have known was horrifying enough. A book or blog with acutal PICTURES is waaay too much.
@@WahooYahoo I hope your doing better too. Yeah I hated the pity party thing. They wanted me to be in a commercial for the hospital I was being treated at as a kid. But I just had a full on mental breakdown and my mom was pissed I refused to do the commercial. Honestly if I didn't have cancer at the time she would have probably have had my dad beat my ass. I just hated the idea of me dying being broadcast. I knew I was dying and while I didn't understand fully what that meant I didn't want to be paraded around. I just wanted to go home and be with my family away from it all.
As an Early Childhood Educator, I’m actually in love with the way you used the term “image of the child” as it is so important to societal views on children, yet I rarely actually here it out of my field
Me to the doc, barely 10 seconds after birth: Oh, so this is, like... The doc: Yeah it's life. Sorry. Me: I mean... It could be worse ! It could be worse. It's also probably going to be worse too.
I knew this wasn't great as soon as I came out of the womb. My entire family is quite cynical or as I like to call it just fucking realistic so of course I also became that way.
I hate how those families see disabled children as some kind of quirky RUclips challenge and a cute accessory to other children. Or at worst they despise them for not being as monetisable. They want the praise of "being a hero" and genuinely believe that disabled people should pray to them for being a (at best) mid parents.
The part about a family "re-homing" (you mean.... like you would a turtle?) that poor boy and just quietly dropping him from their lives.... Only I've had actually pets for less than two years who had a bigger impact on my family. It's heartbreaking that so many countries have to have so many laws that make it near impossible for babies in need to get adopted BECAUSE people like this. God, I hope that kid is okay. I understand why all the names are changed, and honestly I wouldn't give these people my views regardless, but I almost wish we could just know that boy was living a Good life. I guess it's impossible to know that, but I sure hope.
these parents really don't think about how invasive and embarrassing this is for kids. imagine you start middle school and your classmates have seen you like a TV character for years, from getting potty trained to having your first period...
I was told by a therapist I should try journaling to help with OCD symptoms or in general and I still can’t bring myself to do it because I had zero privacy growing up and was unsafe if I expressed myself at all. I’m around supportive folks now but I would be horrified if I died or went out of town or anyone for any reason read my private stuff, even if it says more about them I’m so worried about it. Parents really have no idea the impact.
You're the first creator I've seen to give the tumblr girl a fake name. I really respect the effort to give her a little privacy with her content from childhood. Yeah just wanted to say that. Word to you ✨️
I’m not gonna lie, I have zero desire to give my child a digital footprint. If a moment is so important that I want people to see it, I’ll just text it to them, and if I don’t have their number then they’re probably not close enough to know what my child is up to. It’s scary to me how people just post their kid’s schools or their neighborhood they live in because if someone wants to kidnap or keep tabs on your child, now they now all of that information. Edit: I will add that if they choose to have social media someday when they are older, I’ll support it. I’m just gonna make sure we have the proper talks about safety and all that beforehand.
Also private accounts are a thing!!! Having a profile with just close friends/family members!!! Idk why people prioritize strangers likes and attention over their children!!!!!!
@@zesty6781 I'll never understand when people act like they need to post on social media to share about their family to other family members. Just make a big WhatsApp group with all people you personally (!) know who care about the lives of your kids and upload it there. Because there is no way of comparison and no liking/sharing that will give you the endorphine rush that is so dangerous on social media, you'll likely keep being very rational about what you post. That way you're much less likely to share sth you'll regret.
I didn't even know anything about the channels until I heard that they had millions of subscribers. And somebody was getting their kids taken away for alleged abuse allegations! Just wild!
Their videos are horrifying. It’s honestly pretty disgusting that millions of people watched them and didn’t think ‘I should report this’ but three guesses who was angriest that DOF got shut down. Yup, the ‘freezepeach’ people. 🤢
@@gateauxq4604most of the people that watch family channels are little kids. i don’t think they have the capacity to recognise that they’re fucked up. it’s a fact that has a lot of unfortunate implications but that’s the world we live in
This is wild to me because the "drop and give me 10" as in 10 pushups was an extremely common punishment my dad gave specifically me and my younger sister that did sports. His argument was it made us stronger, my trauma and embarrassment and humiliation and subsequent mistrust of my dad says otherwise. It was just kind of shocking to see someone look at that type of punishment and say that it's not okay. It's really nice to know that sensible people find this form of punishment strange and weird.
I used to have to do a couple hundred pushups almost everyday and wall sits with books on my arms as punishment. I’ve never met anyone else who had to do the same 🥲
Militaristic families like this always give me the creeps. When I'd be at my friend's house as a kid and we both did something "bad", her father would punish her by forcing her to do push-ups and wall-sits, same with her younger brother. I guess he was a military guy but like.... It's different with small children who aren't even legally able to enlist in the military/experience bootcamp like consenting adults are.... right? I mean even my sister-in-law does this to my nephew and niece because her husband (NOT their biological dad) is a military guy...? It's so unsettling to me.
@@littlerelief No one should live in a boot camp full stop. People are thinking beings with feelings worthy of and with a need for respect and love, not disposable ammunition a moralized violence monopoly has a moral right to throw at whatever it doesn't like.
As a mother, this is all unconscionable and horrifying. As a legal and mental health professional, I’ve unfortunately seen all this and worse first hand.
as an adoptee i feel compelled to point out that part of the thing that enables and encourages these vile people (and others as well) to do this is our cultural narrative surrounding adoption; the general public tends to think of it as "saving a child" usually from abuse or orphanhood or from an uncaring parent; people find this "hero narrative" to be very fulfilling and aspirational, but it belies the realities of of adoption-- a multibillion dollar per year industry (primarily run by religious institutions that use that money to fund anti-abortion campaigns) that relies on the exploitation of first families (have you ever heard of a rich family giving up their child for adoption? no! of course not!) who are likely to be impoverished (statistically speaking, poc and the disabled). there's this unspoken assumption that anyone would be grateful to be removed from poverty at the expense of ever knowing their origins for someone else's profit, and those who drive the market for children tend to be seen as saviours and even pioneers for human rights in some cases (participating in capitalism = human rights, according to liberal understanding, i suppose), and things get VERY vicious VERY quickly towards people who challenge this narrative. people LOVE the feel good idea of a blank slate being pulled up from poverty/abuse/abandonment and given to a well off saviour (especially if said saviour has suffered, like from infertility, that adds a tearjerking "making something beautiful out of a mistake" element, though no one ever asks the adoptee how it feels to be legally and culturally branded a mistake in the narrative of someone else's life), it's a feel good story to everyone on the outside and the emotional investment in this narrative is HEAVY because of both religious implications, financial implications, cultural expectations surrounding the nuclear family, narratives of gratefulness and deserving, the idea that if an adoptee is less than placating towards their families emotional wants surrounding them they are "ungrateful" and "a ticking time bomb" waiting to ruin either their family of origin or their adoptive family's lives... the rabbithole on this goes so, so deep, but most people only have this surface understanding of what they see in movies and have spoonfed to them by people who are not adopted and by adoptees who either are in denial, haven't thought about or don't know about these things, or feel comfortable speaking over adoptees who do. everybody is quick to praise adoptive parents, but no one is quick to ask "why don't adoptees have legal access to their medical records especially when disabled people are more likely to have their children removed ~for some reason~", "why are original birth certificates sealed and completely inaccessible to the person they are about in some states", "why do some international adoptees not get US citizenship and what happens to the ones that have been deported to countries that no longer claim them", "why do black children cost less than white children", "why are you not legally entitled to the information that you are adopted", "why is marriage between a child who was adopted out and their immediate birth family legal", "why is it that if a child is adopted out under the agreement that the adoption will be open that the adopting family can renege on this agreement at their discretion", "why are original families not given the financial support to keep their children when poverty is statistically THE !NUMBER ONE! deciding factor in giving up a child for adoption, but adoptive families are given all sorts of tax incentives and can even crowdfund without anyone batting an eye and everyone will complain on their behalf that LITERAL LIVING HUMAN BEINGS are 'too expensive'". and that's just dipping a toe into the legal aspects of this nightmare, not even going in on the emotional results-- why are adoptees suicide rates so high? why is "he's adopted" a funny joke to so many people? what are the effects of growing up with no genetic mirroring? i could go on but. people only understand adoption as a "wholesome" method of family building-- it does not even occur to them that it is a life-changing legal procedure that the person it affects most cannot consent to. anyway loved the video as always, sorry for rambling in the comments. ✌
Idk if you are too but I’m a foreign adoptee and the rescue baby narrative goes double for us. When you’re from a country dubbed inferior by America/the west, people really get it into their minds that you’re a little rescue child saved from a life of communism/poverty/slavery/etc. Luckily my family has never held it over my head but others have, especially when I’m critical of my current country because would I really rather be _THERE?_ For context, my adoptive family is also white and I’m not so there’s an unintentional (for them) white savior narrative associated with my citizenship/upbringing.
@@shouldbewritig i am a domestic (and white) adoptee but i do run in adoption abolition circles so i'm familiar with the topic, it's definitely enforced even worse for adoptees from "inferior" countries. that type of rhetoric leads to such cases as the US marine who kidnapped that afghan girl (i believe litigation is still ongoing for this case) and the african woman (i don't recall which country atm) who was tricked into thinking her child was being send to the US for schooling, among others. totally exploitative and maddening and heartbreaking to see people celebrating, i'm so sorry that you have that additional layer to deal with, sending you lots of love
Another Hollywood child comparable to situations like these is Brooke Shields. Watching her documentary and seeing how her mother exploited her and ESPECIALLY how grown adults were commenting on her body and "promiscuity" reminds me a lot the kind of people who are making these videos as well as their audiences.
Not to mention her appearance in Blue Lagoon. She was 14 during filming and for her topless scenes she had her hair glued to her breasts. Her character also has nude scenes, and while those at least were performed by a double, most people aren't going to automatically think that while watching the movie.
Something worth mentioning, Alyson Stoner ("the kid from the Missy Elliot video") has a series on their channel about child stardom and is working with legislation to pass protective laws for influencers! Thank you for bringing attention to this
god i used to watch “carrie”‘s mom vlogs all the time and didn’t know she became a mom at such a young age. i just turned 18 and can’t imagine such a shift in my life like that. it’s sad seeing no one protected her.
also i honestly believe she needs help even now. she was pushed into motherhood when she was still a kid and never experienced childhood. i wish her kids had adequate care cus obv their dad is terrible too.
Genuine question but I was just asking my partner this - why were you following them? I don't personally understand the appeal the these sort of channels, maybe because I have kids, but I am really confused why out of all the things to watch online you'd want to watch other people just...doing family stuff? Sorry, I'm sure this comes across as mean but I am genuinely curious.
@@iamjustkiwi i was pretty young like about 11 when she had her first baby and i thought her life seemed perfect. as the years went by and the allegations of her neglecting her second child arose i started to watch her less. i think i enjoyed her content mostly cus i was young and liked seeing her little family so put together. i also think most of her audience knew of her online presence before she became a mom and only watched for her instead of the kids.
@@kaheivi I actually really appreciate you sharing that, it confirms a lot of what I have kind of suspected and honestly it makes it all a bit more scary, where people growing up now are getting fed these completely fabricated illusions of a healthy life.
that part of her story makes me really sad :( the part where shanspeare said she was seen playing her nintendo switch instead of watching her kids was clear evidence to me that she wasnt given time to actually become an adult before having her kids. i hope her and her kids are doing better.
It's varied by country, by state, and then the classification of the child. What I mean by that last point is the distinction between child actors and children of content creators. There are certain protections for child actors that have agencies, are part of unions, etc, that DON'T extend to children of content creators. There has to be a major movement for the recognition of the rights and safety of children online.
The USA hasn't even ratified the UNs Convention on the Rights of the Child, do you really expect them to care about parents exploiting their kids and taking all their money, leaving them to grow up abused, traumatised and with no funds to break free? So long as there's a profit to be made, your politicians, your companies and your lobbyists won't care about kids.
@@phelanii4444 Luckily the children won't have to worry about getting food or water while not having funds as those are human rights which were agreed to... Nope, just messing with everyone. The US hasn't agreed to those either.
@56:54 "Housed with them" instead of "living with them". Love your word choice! Are these exploited kids "living"? Maybe not living life to the fullest if they are used as the family's cash cow...
im 23 now, but i was abused all throughout my childhood. the only ways i ever learned that my abuse wasnt normal was through friends saying so or by seeing their families interact. once i knew it was bad, every day was torturous because i knew i had to be with them for 18 years. being put in foster care wasnt an option for me, because it was even scarier than staying with my family and knowing what abuse id deal with. i also only had a few memories of good, gentle, caring interactions with adults, so abuse was all i knew. i cant imagine dealing with all of this and having it filmed, ready to be viewed whenever. i couldnt imagine logging in to youtube to watch some video and getting reccomended a video of a deeply traumatic moment. i hope these kids get the support, legal or otherwise, they need sooner than later. i wish we could take every abusive parent and make them relive their childrens memories through their kids eyes, make them feel how helpless their kids felt, make them see how scary they were to their kids.
We really need coogan laws for monetized social media. If a channel regularly features children (like 30% of the video length or more) then any monetization should be split so at least 50% of the monetization is deposited directly into a trust for that child. We need to make it annoying and hard to monetize the presence of children.
UPDATE: This was powerful. Truly powerful. You have done a service by researching, analyzing, scripting, & documenting this disturbing trend. I'm grateful you made it, and also grateful that you were thoughtful enough to include a CW so people like me could wait until they were ready to watch. ORIGINAL: Hahaha nope. Not ready for this topic right now. This is going into "Watch Later" for a better mental health day. Truly, genuinely, *thank you* for your content warning. I have an anxiety disorder, so CWs genuinely help me avoid panic attacks.
I want to let y’all know the content was in fact pretty explicit and terrifying. Please take care of yourself and know what you can handle or skip to the safe landing
@@TofuDinoNugsThe particularly bad stuff featured time stamps and a warning before it started, so if you can handle moderately scary stuff you can at least easily skip the "actual legal battles are now going down due to the magnitude of this abuse" sections.
take your time, completely get it jsjsjssjhs, i usually watch triggering videos in parts so i have time to decompress; but if you ever feel like its too much thats okay--we dont need more hurted
This is another one of those essays where I wanna give the creator a purple heart because I can barely take a couple seconds of some of the family channels (esp the trench ones.) Like the part about a baby being promiscuous?? My body physically crumpled, I'm going to pass away post haste
The quote from "Pippy" about feeling like she was in a "snow globe" her whole life is funny to me because I'm literally reading a book about a post-apocalyptic world where there's exactly one haven on earth. It's named Snowglobe, and the catch to living there is that you become an "actor" in a tv show that's broadcasted out to the rest of the world (or just to Korea; this is a book in translation; it's titled Snowglobe by Soyoung Park, translated by Joungmin Lee Comfort). It's very much a YA dystopia book, but I think Pippy's quote speaks to a universality of how non-prison panopticonic life is perceived by those in it.
These poor babies. Neglectful parents are the most selfish vile people in the world. Bringing a life into this world for your own desires and profit should result in the highest level of shaming and criticism. We need legislation against family vlogging as well as laws against AI without consent.
Totally agree but recently I've been wondering if there's actually any non-selfish reasons for bringing a child into this world. I just can't seem to think of any
@@AIgeneratedHuman there are none. The child had no say in being brought into this harsh world and parents will still look them in the face and tell them to be grateful they were born so they can pay bills and struggle and deal with identity and all this bullshit. Children owe their parents nothing and parents owe their children everything, but they love to pretend they’re Gods who made the benevolent choice to bring life into the world so they don’t have to be held accountable for their actions towards their children. Children are the most unprotected group of people in the world. They’re not seen a real humans until they’re 18 and them they’re told to stfu and move on from the awful things their parents did as if they wouldn’t have been happy to not exist.
Thank you for putting a trigger on the final section. I am starting to realise I likely suffer some trauma from childhood and whenever that "daddy" of 5 person comes on. It scares me
the way you talked about the "spade" family channel starting out as a normal couple vlog and then encroaching more and more on the kid's life brings to mind another truman show comparison, although this one is a deep cut: in supplemental material for the movie (i thiiiiink the behind the scenes book that included the screenplay?), the creative team stated that the in-universe truman show was originally just a yule-log style video of baby Truman in his crib, occasionally accompanied by his mother playing with baby or his father coming home from work and bemoaning to the wife that his employer might be downsizing the company. None of the rest of Seahaven existed yet. It was only after the show became a massive hit that they were able to build an entire fake town to film Truman's every move. I know this is technically happening in the opposite direction (the world expanding around Truman vs the camera tightening in on Spade Baby) but it has similar Vibes of something that started tame-ish, found success, and then wildly spiraled out of control. (Sorry for the infodump this movie is a special interest of mine)
I'm old (63), and I started using the Internet in 1998. I spent most of my online time then in chat rooms, especially on Yahoo. I remember when the chat rooms were shut down because parents, law enforcement, school officials, etc. were concerned over children coming across predators online. Nowadays family vloggers let everyone and anyone into their minor children's lives. I've seen demographic info on some of these channels, where the vast majority of the subscribers are grown men.
I remember being pregnant with my oldest when Philip Defranco broke the story about DOF and I absolutely lost my mind. It made me so sad. I remember holding my belly and crying because I couldn’t imagine being that cruel to a child that I am supposed to love and protect.
My mom was like Sapphire in a few ways. I can't speak on the personal mental circus act that is Sapphire's reasoning for her actions, but in my mom's case, she loved the attention of being a “good, attentive, no-nonsense" mother that she portrayed provided her. Little did anyone else know, it was an act. And when I say act, I mean she would encourage me to swear, get into fights both in and out of school, lie, steal, the whole grocery list of bad behaviors for angsty troubled kids. She'd tell me that all of that was ok, even reinforce most of it by showing me how it's done.... Then she'd punish me for doing any of it the instant she had an audience to impress with her supposed parenting skills. She set me up as her prop, just so people would look at her as a shining example of what a “good" parent looks like. It wasn't recorded with a camera or anything like that in my situation, but my life, for at least 13 years, was largely scripted to write me as a problem child and paint my mom as some brave, strong single mother doing what it takes to rein me in. She's in prison for capitol murder now (completely unrelated, and yet.... Not unexpected, considering that most of her existence has been about manipulation and control, and she lost control of several key people in her life, chief among them, me). Anyways, all this to say, if even a part of Sapphire's motivation was supposed to be praise on how “amazing" she is as a parent, I can definitely relate with her kids.
My mom wasn’t QUITE that brand of narcissist but she had BPD and was no walk in the park and many behaviors have some overlap. Appearances were v important and exploiting me and airing anything I found my private life was a big part of that. I’d never considered before today how thankful I am I grew up long before RUclips and before the internet was a thing for the masses. Had my mother known she could exploit me to total strangers for her own adulation as a mother AND made money off it? I’d have been effed. Absolutely effed. If I thought she gave me psychological trauma already, imagine what she could have done w a platform! 😢 If no one is going to make this stuff illegal any time soon, I’m glad the mood has shifted and no one is watching the way they used to at least. Bc it’s just wrong to exploit kids in any and every way a public platform provides. Consent is impossible as Shanspeare points out - and I don’t believe it’s ok unless they can understand and consent to the full depth and breadth of the consequences of such personal moments being posted and being impossible to fully retract EVER. They’ll be 65 at a job interview and someone will be able to pull this stuff up. Not ok for a parent to do this. Bad judgement. Bad parenting. Innocent children pay, as always.
PS my heart goes out to you for all you’ve gone through and still do. You deserved better and I hope you’ve been able to afford and seek out therapy at some point (expensive, I know) to help a little. Group therapy is at least less $$. And still effective and worthwhile. I wish you the best. You are not your trauma or what she did to you. You are awesome and a survivor. And it’s ok to get angry and to feel every emotion about it - grief, sadness etc. She’s the bad person. You are not. You are amazing and you made it through so much. Be proud of you. 👏 I am! Mothers like that are…. A lot. And barely mothers. I went no contact with mine a decade ago and only refer to her by first name bc I am now a mom and realized how much I disliked the word “mom” bc of all stirred in me bc of her. I didn’t want her ruining my relationship w my ability to mom and be a mom and be happy to hear my kiddo say “mom” and “mama” at me. I wouldn’t let her take that from me, too. So I took that title from her instead. 😁
I did not expect that second to last sentence, holy shit. What a specific, cruel form of abuse. I can't imagine what that'd do to a child's image of self or the world, or how to repair that. I hope you're doing okay.
@@kkilljoy3588 your words mean more to me than I really know how to articulate. Thank you so much 😊.. I've been in and out of therapy since I was about 16. I'm 31 now. It really has been helpful being able to talk to someone because for years, I did keep it to myself, especially during highschool. She's doing 57 years for capital murder, and it's only been 3 years since she got locked up. Fun fact: she killed someone literally the day before my 27th birthday, gets arrested ON my birthday. My aunt calls me up to tell me happy birthday, literally blurts out “your mom killed my best friend "... My aunt is a dog-lover, so immediately, my mind goes “oh mom must've accidentally ran over my aunt's dog".. Found out a couple minutes later that she had literally beat and torchurd a woman to de3th who was my aunt's best friend from since they were little. So, you know, on top of everything prior to that specific moment, that just made therapy kind of a necessity, in order to stay sane.
If you want to hear the whole story, Cruel World Happy Mind did a two part deep dive on her. Idk if Shanspeare doesn’t want people to comment her actual name, so I won’t put her real name here, but you should be able to tell which of CWHM’s videos are about her. It’s definitely a fucked up story.
yeah is specifically stuck out to me when shanspeare clarified that she wasn't bringing the father's behavior up to reflect badly on her because it's so insane to me that that even has to be clarified. And to be clear, I'm not blaming Shanspeare for this because I know that some people really do think like this and the clarification was necessary. For some people, when they hear about someone's parent being a predator, their first thought it that it negatively reflects on that person, which is just... bleak. Like think about it for just a second. Their PARENT, the person who they are the most vulnerable to, who they have no choice but to rely on as a child, the person who has had the most access to them throughout their entire childhood is a predator. Anyone who doesn't have rocks in their head should know that the child is not a fucking accomplice, but the most likely out of anyone to have been victimized.
She'd probably cry the same way if her car was stolen tbh. Or her Xbox. Or any other """""possession""""" that no one else should be able to """"""own"""""""".
my jaw is already on the floor from the intro.. gonna spend the next two hours picking it up over and over again as I marvel at your talent and ingenuity
They're brilliant, but man…this one is a TOUGH watch. Cases of child abuse and neglect are HARD to stomach. I’m an hour and a half in and I need to take a break. It’s an amazing video and Shanspeare’s done an amazing job. It’s just the reality of the subject matter that’s hard to sit with. I’m glad they're talking about it, though.
the segment about Digital Kidnapping sent shivers down my spine. it reminded me of an incident when i was in junior year tw for pedophilia i was checking the tumblr app between classes. someone i was following rbed a photo post, commenting that the orignal poster was a pedophile and asking us to help them mass report and flag the blog said photo was a picture of a baby girl that the baby was between 10 months to a year old, she was standing in a yard wearing bermuda shorts and a blouse. the photo was clearly taken from her parents facebook. but the man who posted it on tumblr wrote *paragraphs* about what he wanted to do to this baby. and the thoughts not only occured to him, but were so strong in his mind that he wrote fucking prose about it and posted it all online to be frank, even though i absorbed this whole incident in maybe 30 seconds in 2017, i think about it all the fucking time. the dim memory of that baby's face flashes in my mind whenever my niece's and baby cousins pop up on facebook. even though im a long way from having kids myself, it's made me seriously reconsider ever posting photos of my kids online, even to share with family. so the very notion that parents like that gymnastics family intentionally expose their kids to those kinds of sick bastards just for some extra cash just...i cannot fathom it. i don't care how hurting for cash someone might be, i don't care "well it's not like they're being touched" or whatever justification there is, i cannot fathom it
also i know, ultimately, there's no method of dressing that can protect from sexual assault or abuse. (and ofc even if there was, it still wouldn't be anyone but the rapist's fault that they raped someone). "it doesn't matter if you're wearing a burqa or a bikini, sexual assault isn't about sex its about power", as that saying goes. but it *really* fucking sucks that even the tamest, most innocent thing, like an infant standing in the grass, can be twisted like that. like not even babies are safe!! its just so tiring. again i can't understand how some parents would do that on purpose but, all this unpleasantness aside, this was a fantastic and well made video (as always!) shan ♡ keep on keeping on 💕✨️
This is absolutely disgusting, holy shit. But your comment about never forgetting. Woof, that hit hard for me. A few months ago I watched a documentary about someone who "catfished" pedos online by posing as a little girl to expose them. And one story was about a father what happened to his daughter and even months later I still can't get the sheer atrocity out of my head. The grandma or something had been home alone with the baby girl and had let this neighbour in the house. This neighbour then raped the baby and filmed it to post online. I was so fucking enraged I had to literally calm myself down with breathing exercises. I just wanted to strangle that monster. And I've been living in paranoia since. I don't have children yet but even the idea of leaving my child with anyone but myself scares the shit out of me. I will never post any picture of my kids online, they will have no internet presence as kids, I swear to God. Sorry for this rant, but I think about this almost every time I see a child. Just this terror. Of knowing there are people like that out there.
I saw someone make this comparison once: say there was a park in your town and a known pedophile hung out there and sat on a bench every day, just watching. Even if you kept your child in your sight 100% of the time…would you still take them there? The internet is that park and we know for a fact that unfortunately, there are thousands and thousands of creeps and weirdos like the guy you mentioned on tumblr, just waiting to leer at somebody’s kid. I don’t have children yet but just the idea of it turns my stomach.
I genuinely feel like that the step-mom's crying around 1:32 isn't so much from regret over not showing love to the kids who got saved from this situation, or due to the shock of losing the custody, but moreso the shock of losing control over what she thought to be their belongings. Might be the truth, might not, of course, but it is difficult to imagine the tears to be anything less than selfish or them just feeling bad for themselves. Cruel parents will never not boggle my mind. Also, a great video as a whole! Really respect the way you presented everything and always kept the children's experience/pov in mind.
Yes, definitely agree. Normally I'm quite forgiving and try to be kind but at that point when I saw the crying I could only think "Cry more, I hope you suffer". The sad thing is that almost nothing will ever hurt her as much as she and her partner hurt their own children.
why do parents turn off the comments and think the issue is solved? The creeps that comment are the bold ones, the ones that aren't commenting or CANT comment are just as sick and dangerous.
This is the most current societally acceptable version of child labor. As someone who was forced to work for my family starting at age 9, I can almost tell you exactly what these kids are going through. The parents are just stupid enough to post it. I experienced more isolation during my forced labor, but I'm still scared of cameras as my parents would record moments in which I was happy and then show me it to mock me. The shame it inspires in just being yourself... Its paralyzing....
This really does make me so grateful that my parents did not have access to the technology to do this to me and my siblings. That intersection of surveillance and abuse that you mention is just so godawful. It was bad enough to have photos of embarrassing experiences taken and shared when they were physical objects without the internet.
Same here! My mom shares everything on facebook. I dont have kids yet but I already started having privacy conversations with her. She just calls me silly and says I am panicking for nothing
I never thought about the Truman Show that way! I was born in around when it came out, and by the time I saw it in my early teens, it never ever crossed my mind that it was something inconceivable!!
I left TikTok a while ago but something that did start to bother me was how many parents would upload mountains of content of their children under the guise of educating others on how to use the gentle parenting style. They would constantly record their children throughout the day in order to find opportunities to show their parenting skills and how they deal with common childish things like kids spilling things, breaking stuff, having tantrums, fights with siblings, etc. and the comments would praise on their way of handling the situation but after some thought, you realize it's either one of two things, or both: either their kids are under almost 24/7 surveillance (with the phone on plain view, meaning they are aware of the constant recording) in order to find these types of moments, or all of them are orchestrated with the excuse of it being "for educational purposes for other parents". Some of them would even create merch about their children under a specific gimmick (there was one particularly awful example of a baby whose house and clothes were gothic). It's super exploitative, but doesn't appear to be as exploittive as other examples because the parents are teaching others, so it's alright even if their children aren't old enough to consent.
I just KNEW rock bottom was gonna be DOF. I remember watching the exposure and coverage by Philip DeFranco at the time. Phil is so passionate about child abuse cases after his experiences growing up, and the emotion he had while covering this has stuck with me all these years
@@kyoyameganebereznoff The video did show the clip in question, not sure if its still up as i dont really watch that channel as much anymore. Hopefully them kids can at least get SOME peace from the hell they're going/been through.
I remember seeing the clip of Thing 2 that you couldn't find. It was via some "youtube drama" channel explaining what happened right after the Do5 channel was taken down. He called it an "accident" like he didn't just shove a child hard enough to fly through the entire room. Awful, awful person.
Big ups for relying on the stock footage instead of digging up things best left unseen and/or as forgotten as possible. And to you and the other channels that, if they do show the footage, make sure to blur out or put a black bar over the children.
Seeing the older daughter in that spade family clip immediately start acting again after Austin yelled at his wife was jarring. I wonder if these kids have a hard time figuring out what is real and what isn't. I know I would and as someone with depersonalization disorder that would make my mental state worse.
I'm upset at how many of these channels I could recognize through context clues, though I am not a consumer of Family Vlog content. These kids will never escape their stories
this was such a good video as always and so depressing at the same time. people should take youth liberation a lot more seriously, because the fact that most americans would tacitly agree that children “aren’t full human beings” or are the “rightful property” of their parents, and shouldn’t be given the autonomy or rights afforded generally to adults, is profoundly fucked up
1:22:04 - You hit the nail right on the head. I work as a technician that fixes electronics like ipads and stuff. When you disable an ipad, the only way to restore it is to erase it completely. If I had a dollar for every time a parent told me, "he's a kid, he doesn't need that info" or "what privacy, I'm their parent" when I ask if they have a backup, I would never need to work again.
"they place their emotional stability on children; they use their children as a litmus test for their own power" - this whole section tbh, thank you... now I FINALLY have words to describe what my father did to me throughout my childhood. this was sooooo hard to watch, and I had to take breaks. what i can say, on the other hand, is that i'm very grateful to have stumbled upon your channel! how i haven't come across you before i have no idea. you're easily the most well-spoken, knowledgable and unique creator I've listened to especially regarding these difficult topics. and, as an adult survivor, only very recently escaping the grips of abuse that has gone on this long (literally the first memory of my life unfortunately)... listening to you, and hearing you open up about your abuse, actually made me feel like there's some hope. you're inspiring to me! well done.
I was a big fan of “Carrie” when I was in middle school/early high school! I so vividly remember all of that happening, and it’s definitely interesting to think of how that relates to her current online presence. I look forward to watching the rest of the video!
The lead up reminded me so much of what happened to Damien Leonhardt (who at the time still went by Jessi Slaughter). I remember the videos, the cruel jokes so vividly back in 2009. No one even stopped to think about the fact that they were victimised when they were only 10 or 11 at the time by BOTD singer Dhavi Vanity.
This never sat right with me. It's like people viewed them as a "crazy" adult woman rather than a literal child with child-like emotions. They just made fun of them.
Wait is that the girl (Jessi Slaughter as I recognize the name I think. I assume they are trans now) whose dad was in the background yelling about calling the Internet police and started the You Done Goofed meme. That was when I started getting into Internet culture and stopped scluding myself to Neopets. They, Boxy , and a couple other girls the early Internet went after is why I kept the fact I was a girl ambiguous for years. I hope they are doing well now. I heard their dad is a real piece of work.
@@Nickelbag610 You remember correctly. Damien (11 at the time) made a video about shooting people who were mean to them online (the words were brain slushy) which catapulted them to internet fame. The online bullying however obviously didn’t stop, people took the way they acted and treated them like an adult. After that the infamous video that you referenced appeared of a crying Damian with their father in the background screaming about how he was going to call the “the internet police”, that “consequences will never be the same” and “you done goofed” which only exhausterbated the situation when places like the something awful forums and 4chan saw those. Their father died of a heart attack a decade or so ago. At the time and still I think, people treated it like what happened online was a failure of parenting and not a concerted effort to bully a child. I don’t think Damien is much online anymore but I hope they’re in a better place.
The thing about not bringing your 5 years old's lunch to school is absolutely insane to me as my mom was still preparing my lunch for me until high school ToT
Shan, i am 35 got one kid and was raised in pretty broke environments i saw a lot as a child myself. This stuff is absolutely heart wrenching and needs to be understood by more parents and caring people. Thank you
Thank you for talking about this. I have been against family vlogging that discloses the children's faces and names for a long, long time for these exact reasons. I remember a couple of years ago telling my friend (who had recently become a mother) how I did not like these channels and she looked at me like I had just slapped her baby. I can understand that for her, as a new mom, these videos were helpful and relatable. But there is a way to show what it is like to be a parent on youtube without exploiting your children. The PARENTS should be the content, not their children. I really hope that the downfall of family vlogging channels is here.
I'm glad you went more in-depth about the objectification of children. That's exactly how I felt growing up and haven't heard anyone really put it into words before. I had some circumstances that didn't apply but otherwise it's so nice to hear someone shed light on it. Also I hope Sapphire gets 60 years
Omg I've been going down RUclips shorts rabbit hole and came across a family vlogger mom making content solely based on her autistic son ... It gave me bad vibes and you just confirmed it
There is a huge influx of parents who video their autistic kids meltdown and most volatile moments. Taking advantage of their disability and often painting themselves as victims of the children they exploit. It’s ableism at its worst.
The way ‘dad spade’ makes suggestive jokes about his daughter and to her face, I can say from firsthand experience that even if kids don’t understand what these jokes mean, they can understand by the way adults treat it that it’s inappropriate and it does make them self conscious. My former step dad used to joke about how “he’ll have to start beating boys off with a bat to keep them away from me” (among other suggestive remarks). It doesn’t matter if I understood the concept of sexual attraction, I could tell he was implying something inappropriate and it always upset me. When you tell your daughter “Why are you dressed like that?” Even if you think they wouldn’t understand, it DOES make them conscious of their body. Also, you’re sexualizing your daughters simply because they’re assigned female. That’s not appropriate no matter what their age is.
I'm so glad you touched on this topic. Even the most well-meaning parents can fail to realize the irreversible harm that happens to children EVERY DAY by thoughtlessly posting them online amongst whom they have curated an online presence with and don't believe would be harmful. Then, there are those who intentionally cause harm for their own gain. It's a very sad reality, and this video touches on plenty, but still only some, of the ways children are harmed. I desperately want more legislation passed to protect children and people of non-consenting parties. Technology moves so rapidly, and politics move at a snail's pace 😢
Thing 1 and Thing 2 are horrifying, disgusting monsters. Those kids deserve better. The similarity to your own family makes me feel you and your siblings deserved better too.
I’m adopted. My adopted was messed up and I didn’t know that or how until i was an adult. Hearing the adoption stories you told here sucked and shows just how often people think of children as accessories.
work protections in the US are being loosened and many are again working in factories and being maimed or killed they are also working longer not allow proper time for school
I’m glad you brought up the point about loneliness towards the end. I watched some family vloggers in the early 2010s from about ages 11 to 13, in large part because my family moved to a new city, our new neighborhood didn’t have many other kids, and I struggled a lot to make friends at my new school. I don’t remember caring all that much about the individual kids in a fan way (and I do remember finding the parents annoying), rather I was living vicariously through these kids who had a lot of other kids around to hang out with. Looking back, it was all different vlog families collabing for content, but as a kid, I just saw lots of kids on big play dates having fun. The thing that eventually put me off the concept was that a lot of the big vlog families were very religious, and I ended up experiencing a lot of religious abuse at my new school. It was wild getting certain phrases shouted at me until I cried, then going onto the computer at the end of the day and hearing those same phrases spoken with that overacted jokey tone and royalty free ukulele in the background. I can so easily see an alternate scenario where instead of bailing to find a new coping mechanism, I internalized those harmful ideas because the people who made me feel happy on the computer said they were cool. So yeah in addition to the kids actually in the videos, I think there’s potential harm being done to the kids watching. (Edit: spelling.)
Thank you for making this video. This explains my odd feeling with even the good family channels. My daughter loves watching "kids play channels" now and then and I dislike those for the most part as well, because I can't shake the feeling, that they don't really play but retake the play footage over and over again while their parents build brands with their childrens faces. Making children work in the film industry is already questionable, but family vlogging and youtube channels with the children as stars takes away even more of their privacy and childhood, since the camera becomes an everlooming thing in their lives they cannot escape from.
Thanks Bright Cellars for sponsoring this video and for the limited-time offer! Take the quiz bit.ly/BrightCellarsShanFeb and comment your matches!!
Hello everyone, good viewing🐼
Sellout! 🤬🤬🤬🤬
Cellout! 🤬🤬🤬🤬
@@kindauncool are you joking lol
Get a better mic with that money 🙏🏾🙏🏾
"we dont want to violate anybodys privacy that isnt our kid" IS INSANE
“that sounds weird but” NO IT SOUNDS INSANE
they were so close yet still couldn't grasp it
Obviously it isn't a violation when your own kid is involved, they love it, obviously...
casually freudian slipping their way through the convo
Frt, they're not even concerned about exploiting their own child!? That's having to go through a lot of adjustments.
the filming rule for Thailand adoption feels a little out of place until you hear the type of people who complain about it. absolutely disgusting.
right I hope everywhere adopts this practice
Honestly. It's a brilliant way to weed out weirdos eager to stick a camera in their face. Sad times we live in.
seriously like to normal ppl it wouldn’t be a problem at all, you wouldn’t even notice it, especially if you’re actually trying to become a parent to the child you’re adopting
Thailand is a hotspot for child trafficking and has famously been a place where foreign p*edophiles go to buy time with children. Children get sold by their poor parents sometimes for meagre money the foreigners offer. Children without parents need strong protections.
I wonder how many Thai children have dodged the bullet of being adopted by family vloggers
The kid defending Her younger sister saying “she can’t wake herself up, I wake her up” broke my fucking heart. There was a lot of things my parents didn’t teach me that my older sister did so that I wouldn’t fail in ways that she did, later my parents took the credit for me not making mistakes the same way my sister did “see your little sister did it just fine, why couldn’t you be like her?” Because she made sure I didn’t grow up like her!!! She made sure I was ok and loved and always had someone safe and it rips me apart every day that I’m 6 years younger than her and was too little to watch out for her in the same way
This dynamic is poisonous. I feel for you.
So sad when children need to parent themselves/their younger siblings when their own parents are not able to parent...
Your sister sounds swell. I hope you can let her know at least now that she's loved and appreciated
This is such a sweet sentiment. Tell your sis you appreciate her and the love she gave you
As an older sister the fact that you are that aware of her affect on your life I'm sure is really appreciated by her. You sound like the kind of younger sibling to be proud of. Glad y'all have each other despite the other circumstances.
Not to backseat drive a morally bankrupt family vlogging channel but couldn't Cool Mom have simply built anticipation and then done a big montage video at the 1 year mark where she dropped all the "secret" footage of the baby from a whole year, edited in a highly romanticized way, like set to an inspirational christian pop song. They're not even smart enough to be evil right
They could've run ads on it and everything.
Unrelated, but I love your videos, Jenny! ❤
literally sighed with relief that they didn't adopt the next child either. I can't even imagine not being able to post about something for a year being a deal breaker for having someone join my family.
They could have filmed waist up and had the kid make the whomp whomp noises like the adults in Charlie Brown
Jenny! Missed you girl!
the lollypop incident is so concerning to me not because it was being recorded but because i would nor for the life of me allow a little girl to be around a man who tells her sexual jokes and then proceeds to ask her not to tell, to"keep their little secret". Those actions, to me, are concerning in spite of the camara.
Seriously, the whole thing feels predatory. How was this allowed? Why were they in an adult store in the first place? Do her parents know? I hate to say it, but between this and the weird sexualising jokes toward his infant daughter, I would not be surprised if this guy got caught on some serious shit later. Wish something could be done to investigate this.
It felt like a pedophile grooming someone.
literally it was so fucking sinister it gave me goosebumps.
“Secret”-especially paired with something s*x adjacent-is a huge red flag.
One therapist did a video on creating a safe environment around the concept of secrets. They recommended using the term “surprise” for things like gifts and parties.
A “surprise” is something you don’t tell for right now. You will tell later, and it’s for good things, like a present you’re giving someone.
But kids shouldn’t keep “secrets” from their parents or caregivers.
@@ScrawnyTreeDemonAs a daughter of a asshole potential pedophile there's something more sinister going on with that father. The CPS should check his history
They’re not sad that the children are gone. They’re sad that their punching bags are gone.
No, they’re sad that their meal tickets are gone.
@@gateauxq4604 americans get money/benefits if they have children? I didn’t know that
@@sojabursche I think they mean the money they were making off the channel
@@johnmarkther2218 oh, ok yeah that makes sense too
@@sojaburscheYes, the government is more likely to give you foodstamp, government assistance, and insurance if you have a child. For obvious reasons.
Did you know you dropped this on the same day that 8 Passengers got maximum prison sentences? 👏🏻👏🏻
Wait, they did ?!?!
Yeah 1-15 years for her and her "therapist"@@marloeslovestea
I'll grab the champagne 🍾 I was terrified they would get a rich white people sentence (probation only)
OH MY GOD??
@@emmadenton1826me too I was fully convinced that’s what they were going to get i hope this sets a precedent for future cases and let’s people be more wary of all family bloggers
Filming your kid potty training isn't for family. There's a very specific subset of a family channel's audience being entertained by that, and it's NOT the kind of audience any parent should be pandering to.
Yeah definitely most of the content screams icky fetish type content that bring in people that are not good people at all. The gross comments and stalking is terrifyingly enough, also I wouldn't blame a child in these setting even dying from suicide because of their parents. Pedophiles love these channels alot
THIS this is a big age gap between my sisters and I so I’m a great aunt in my 30s. Do I hope that my great nephews potty training is going well? Yes. Will I give him positive reinforcement via praise, treats and helping him find a toilet if he needs one? Yes. Do I want photos or videos of him pants down on a toilet? Absolutely not. More importantly would my niece ever send me photos or videos like that? Absolutely not.
I never understood some parent's obsession with documenting potty training. Simply asking for advice, but not sharing pictures of your child trying to use a toilet? Fine. Everyone needs advice since potty training can be extremely difficult. But showing the whole world your child trying to go? Ridiculous and disgusting. No one wants to see that, and you should be shamed by everyone (including your child) for sharing that.
There was one family tiktoker who filmed herself teaching her kid about private parts, while showing her kid lying on her back, and while off screen, it was implied the kid's legs were open.
Before it got taken down, that tiktok video had 40K SAVES. It made me absolutely sick and I had no idea how this parent can justify why it was saved so many times without knowing a huge chunk of those saves are likely from predators.
@@KindaEruditewhat…why would anyone post that 😭😭 they know who’s watching, they know who’s behind the screen. i will never understand these type of monster parents
I was a teen mom and it horrified me just how many young girls are groomed by grown men who lust after them with zero protection from their parents. My child’s father was the same age as me but definitely thought he would be able to control me via our child and when he didn’t get his way, he had another girl pregnant before our child was 6 months old. My relatives were also able to coerce me into keeping the baby with gentle lies but the second they also didn’t get their way, they would threaten to rescind their support. Now I’m thankfully an adult who was able to work through that trauma and recognize just how evil some people are when it comes to kids and who is or isn’t seen as a child. ESPECIALLY IN THE CHURCH…
That's horrific. I'm so sorry you've had to go through that. The way our culture exploits children, both then-teens like yourself and little babies, is blood-boiling. I hope you and your child are doing better now.
@@ScrawnyTreeDemon I appreciate your kind words, thank you💖 I'm happy to say my children and I have the relationship that I wanted with my parents. It's not perfect but I'm happy my kids at least want to come talk to me and hang out with me. Plus I'm independent of my family; I don't have to deal with them at all and still get to talk to my niece and nephews.
@@ZeroN1neZeroMy mom had me at probably around the same age you had your first. I know people judged my mom and gave her shit about it when I was a kid, apparently a nurse even told her to her face in the delivery room that she should adopt me out, etc but she loved me and my sister and she did her best and both of us are doing fine these days. Like, I definitely learned from how hard things were for her as a young mother, but if you're trying your best to give your kids a good life while giving yourself permission to take care of yourself then I have faith your kids will be ok
Girl, you were a teen mom. That tells us ALL we need to know about you. You didn't even have the basic self preservation skills to secure and protect YOUR OWN future, yet you're complaining about other people's behavior? 😂
@@TomikaKelly oh, baby doll, I can’t even take you seriously😂😂😂 you clearly are here with some strange rage bait fixation and I’m not here to feed wild dogs. I know who I am; do you?
Being autistic myself, that story about the parents rehousing their autistic adopted child once the child became "violent around their family" set off at least 5 different alarm bells in my mind even before you were finished explaining the whole story. It almost makes me wonder if the reason they wanted to adopt a special needs child in the first place was just because they wanted an easy excuse that *some* people won't question if they -inevitably- returned them.
they abuse a neurodivergent kid and victim blame for reacting negatively then 'rehouse them' so as to 'erase' them--THAT IS NOT OKAY AND IS SO ABLEIST WHAT THE SHIIIIUUIUT
im autistic as well, and have unfortunately dealt with similar abusive shit from caregivers and the trauma is wild and still hurts
it was definitely an excuse (based on ableist rhetoric/stereotypes to villify the neirodivergent)...they just wanted to uphold that 'normal perfect nuclear family' shit and it is soooooo enraging
It's actually worse than that (allegedly.) See, "Minnie" let it slip in an interview that the child was originally misdiagnosed with having an incurable brain tumor and was unlikely to live past childhood only to find out that wasn't the case after she had adopted him. In said interview she displays some noticeable discomfort over the idea that this child would be living with them for the rest of his life so it appears that she was under the impression that the child would only be around for a few months or years before kicking the bucket and wasn't actually prepared to take care of him his whole life. She only wanted to adopt a special needs child when she thought the setup would be temporary and bailed when she realized that wouldn't be the case (allegedly.)
@@jinglesmcgee8377 holy shit. Like foster an old dog like a normal person. What kind of monster do you have to be to pick a child based on hoping you won't have a lifetime commitment?!
Also it's wild that they can film adopted and foster kids in the first place. Like in my country, digital security of adoptive and foster families is taken EXTREMELY seriously, because the inherent danger of taking care of kids from dangerous backgrounds. Like not only are the biological parents themselves often a danger to the kids, imagine what happens when a kids biological parents get into debt with wrong kinds of people, and those people figure out where the kids are living through RUclips or Facebook or whatever. Not only is it dangerous to that specific kid, but also EVERY kid around them, and the foster parents themselves. Like my foster family doesn't even have their phone numbers or address online, let alone pictures and info on their kids. Those kids don't live with their biological parents for a reason. Advertising around that you're an adoptive or foster family comes with EXTREME risks.
Videoing your child’s bathroom time is deviant behavior, posting it for the world to see ought to be illegal. People who want to watch a random kid on the internet during bathroom time are weird and dangerous. I don’t take anything back, so don’t @ me.
^
That feels like child endangerment to me
it is that’s why so many of these family bloggers end up in jail.
@kathykang1123 actually that's not true. That's why 8 passengers is so shocking because Generally nothing is ever done.
seriously!!! its so gross and such a massive violation of that childs privacy and safety
I feel like children are honestly below pets sometimes. People will be straight up nasty to kids for existing.
I agree. If a parent hits a child, you’ll see people come out of the woodwork to defend their right to discipline their child with “tough love”. Now if a pet owner were to hit their dog? All hell would break loose and there would be no question about it being unfair or abusive.
The acceptance of hitting children is so fucking crazy. Hitting other adult members of your family is seen as bad, but hitting your small child and even other's people children is ok and even encouraged. So gross!
I mean, in many locations, you can legally physically ab*se your kids more than your pets.
Agreed, it's like a child's human rights completely depend on whether their parents want to uphold them. Children are a marginalised group and it's terrifying
youre so right they are!!! people love to denounce animal abuse constantly, my own abusive family considered themselves amazing animal owners, and yet they treated me worse than their dogs (who werent treated well at all either)
Shanspeare: "The Truman Show, do you remember that?"
Me: "Yeah, really good movie."
Shanspeare: "1998"
Me: "That long ago? Really?"
Shanspeare: "I wasn't even born yet."
I feel like I just got roasted so hard that my soul is drifting away from the ashes that were once my body. 💀
Learning Shanspeare is a zoomer hit me hard 😭
Same. I was a year from graduating high school in '98.
As an 80 millennial with one Zoomer and two Gen Z siblings (one turning 20 this Saturday) the ashes have left the planet for me 🤣🤣🤣
I choked so hard when she said that.
Shanspeare is younger than me????
I was SAVED by being born when I was because if my mom was just a little bit younger and been born in a more tech generation she would have 10000% been a mommy blogger. I remember how much she used to divulge my life to friends, family, coworkers, anyone- that I would refer to her talking to people as "broadcasting". My hobbies, my fears, my joys, my shameful moments, my health, my grades, everyone we knew was told everything about me all the time. It was so dehumanizing. For years I had nightmares about being powerless, immobile, unable to yell/be heard, etc.
Needless to say we don't speak anymore and have no relationship and it all started with exactly that- sharenting
My mom was the same way. My family in general really which is why I don’t talk to any of them. My business should get to stay my business
Everyone is talking about the “we don’t want to violate anyone’s privacy other than our own kids’” part but not the “we would have to take care of and have some kid in our house for a year and they wouldn’t even be our kid” part.
They could not be more blatant and forthright about the fact that they don’t want to take care of a child, they do not think a child deserves care, and they do not want to adopt a child in order to give a child care. They just wanted to buy a child to make content with it.
Can you imagine how the child would be treated in their home, when they already admit before they even get one that they don’t want to have to take care of it??
the two women associated with "8-passengers" who were arrested last year were sentenced today, 4 years minimum-60 years max.
I'm afraid to ask, but, whats 8-Passengers?
@@alejandroreyes8878 TW: Chile abuse and neglect
they were a family channel who had six children. the mother and father had gone viral twice for abuse. The first time was when the mother refused to bring her daughter lunch and told the teachers not to give her anything because she should’ve packed her lunch the night before and didn’t lie to her mother about it. The child was 6. Then, one of their other children had played a prank on the other (classic sibling stuff) and he got his BEDROOM taken away slept on beanbag for months after already having gone to a teen-help camp and those are almost always abusive. So then the channel disbans and the mother starts to become more open about her politics (super right wing LGBTQ+ hater all that) and she started getting involved with a marriage counselor (who fucking sucks). The mother and father break up and at this point they still have two young children in the house. The marriage counselor and her began to make videos together actively advising parents abuse their children. She and the marriage counselor move into together and it all culminated into the two young children escaping the home looking like they were starved, not showering regularly, and all around neglected.
@@alejandroreyes8878 That's the name of the family channel with the parents who made the kid sleep on a beanbag for 7 months; the mom just got sentenced to prison time for child abuse.
upset that the terrible dad got off scott free :/
And it's max 30 years thanks to Utah law
It is so comical to me hearing about these "parents" talking about adopting kids, which almost sounds like hiring a new, underpaid employee, on the same day that Bridgit Mendler posted and was like oh by the way I am a mum and have been for years after I fostered and adopted this boy- didn't post his name or face or anything. The contrast is so ridiculously stark between people who just genuinely want a child and to help that child flourish vs those who want to exploit it.
wasn’t bridgit herself a child star? she probably understands the travails of child exploitation more than most.
@@ameliaj8791Unfortunately, as proven by "Carrie"'s story in this video. Sometimes exploited children become the exploiters
@@friendlyneigborhoodbean....point being this Bridgit lady is not one of those people
@@lizdexamphetamine of course not (also Bridgit Mendler is an absolute power house I highly recommend you looking into her)
It feels so bizarre to imagine people using adopted and foster kids on family channels, because I grew up in a foster family, and as far as I was aware, in my country, foster families were instructed not to even MENTION their foster kids on social media or that they were a foster family, or post their locations, let alone post pictures. My foster family didn't even have a social media, and you couldn't even find their phone number online. It might seem like a lot, but it's actually really important when fostering kids, because the inherent danger associated with taking care of kids from dangerous backgrounds. Like imagine a kid from a drug and crime affiliated family. Not only are their own parents a danger to them, imagine what happens if the parents take loans from wrong kinds of people, or don't pay a dealer, and that dealer or a loan shark figures out the foster family their kids live at. Not only is it a danger to that specific kid, it's dangerous for EVERY kid in that foster family, and the foster parents. I'm not entirely sure about adoption cases, but I would imagine similar rules follow adopted kids. It cannot be overestimated just how important information security is when taking care of kids from high risk families.
Like the last I heard of my brother's biological father was that he was in prison, probably doing 10 years to life. I couldn't even IMAGINE what could happen if that dude got freed and happened to find out where his kid was at. Also our bio mom was def in the habit of sleeping around with wrong kinds or crowd and got into debts she couldn't pay with wrong kinds of people.
I'm glad that after this horrifying reality check, you mentioned Janette Macurdy's book and tied this vlog children to the horrors inflicted upon child actors. A vicious cycle
Now they don’t need a shitty producer. They can sell out their children directly via RUclips!
When you said “children are considered second class citizens”, that really struck me. I remember being told as a kid that I have less rights than pets in many regards, and that I should stick up for myself because of that.
I also remember being told that I didn’t have many rights yet as a child. It was fucked up.
literally! predators get half as far as they do because they seem to take children seriously, unlike the institutions that are supposed to protect them. Of course a kid will follow whoever seems to actually see them as a person whether its real or not.
"it's almost like parents are pimping out their children" reminds me of a comment I saw the other day.
Family Channels get pregnant for views.
From what I understand most of these channels have multiple children after they become famous and there's a pretty big uptick in both views and content to be made around every pregnancy. Announcing it, the ultrasound, the morning sickness, their diets, building the baby room, going into labour, etc. etc.
Adding these two concepts together (the pimping and the purposeful breeding) there's almost a level of human trafficing to it? But instead of having to steal their victims, they create them. It just adds another layer of ick for me.
completely agree, the points and connections made make so much sense; its like human trafficking damn...thats so grossssssssssss
Building your own victims has always been the way to go, since children are seem as the property of their parents. Shit, have an unregistered home birth, and no one even knows that kid exists.
This is actually part of how agrarian/pastoral societies became hierarchal and patriarchal.
You simply needed full time, near life long breeders for it to work.
Long version:
Unlike 100% hunter gatherers, who are notoriously egalitarian including women (and often even children!) who need kid to be able to walk 20 miles a day before they have another one (by definition no kept animals to ride of pull non-walkers) and use family planning so their average is a birth every 4-5 yrs per woman (mostly via nursing which if done in a certain way works as good as the Pill, but also herbal family planning).
But non industrial agriculture requires alot of workers and also fighters to guard land because you "own" land you put work into (this goes into why property gives rise to hierarchy gives rise to inheritance gives rise to control of womens sexuality ie in an egalitarian society paternity is irrelevent and many hunter gatherers had very odd ideas about paternity like every man a wiman sleeps with is part father of her kids...as every respurce is shared and everyone looks after kids ot hardly mattered.
Pre industrial agriculture women average a baby every 12-18 mos. This made most women virtually breeding slaves for abouttwelve thousand years, until early modern era. And they died regularly in childbirth but it was "worth it" (to the society) because you cpuld remarry and needed to keep breeding that many workers for subsistence farming to work.
This began to shift again several hundred yrs ago as other forms of industry arose, divorcing labor from farmland and making too many children a luxury again in most of the world. Even when we had child labor, the technology quickly outpaces what you can have a workforce of small kids do. Technology makes biology largely irrelevent, though stuff like religion slowed the transition down.
In some ways social democracy like the Sweden model is a return to our natural pre-domezticated ways of living in a group where ppl have free expression but are required to share what they hunt amd forage and have elder councils or a "chief" with no power, just whatever living person has good leadership ability and wisdom. It's just scaled up to the scale of our current societies. It's how we naturally lived.
Retrogressive types will and are trying to use the same arguments now re global capitalism no longer growing- well duh it was never sustainable to assume every generation would be bigger especially as industry shrinks the need for many kids and technology makes gender role enforcement uneccessary. Thats always been the endgame paradox of capitalism. Theyll use it as an excuse to suppress abortion, birth control, LGBT ppl and (mark my words!) eventually to revoke suffrage. Instead of just readjusting the way we do industry and economy.
The essential power set up of societies was very much tied to their form of food acquisition. Even taking agrarian vs pastoral (herding) societies they do patriarchy using different typified methods that fall along that faultline for example.
Source: look at any anthropology database of societies and their food acquisition will align with the form general power shape they take, regardless of what continent or even what century.
(Honors thesis in anthropology at Ivy. )
This isn't news, anthropologists have known since the 50s. It's just we project our recent past onto the far past and assume otherwise, and its generally in the interests of the rulers to encourage such a belief. Even within patriarchy we do this ie what we think as traditional ie childhood and nuclear family, were inventions of middke-upper class Victorians.
There's a woman I knew who was a big advocate for children's liberation, and, as youth liberation advocates often are, was frequently accused of only believing in it as a way to predate on kids. Her response was always, "if I wanted to predate on kids, I'd just become a mom." And even though I haven't seen her in years I still think of that a lot
@rickwrites2612 Could you share any books or articles about this? I'd like to read up on this
The downfall of family vlogging channels- it’s about damn time.
Heteronormative family has always been a status, something to be envied, and family vlogging truly highlight this
and something that must be enforced to be maintained
@@socialist-strong hear hear
Not all family vlogs are heteronormative. There are also channels like Julie & Camilla
Love this take, never articulated it like this
Exactly this. Majority of the hetero families are way more abusive and toxic.
The second class citizen thing hits really close.
One time, I'm talking to my little brother who is 13. But at the time, he was about... I'm gonna say 9? 10? It's been a while.
We're at Walmart and at the kids section. He saw the Ryan's World merch and he grew jealous and asked me "why is he famous! Why can't that be me?"
And I said bluntly.
"You really don't... You don't want to be famous. Think about it this way, bud. You like playing Minecraft. You like playing with Legos and your mice (that's what he calls his marbles), right?"
"Yeah."
"Now imagine that all you want to do is play Minecraft or with your mice, but our parents tell us everyday that you have to be on camera. You can't say no because it's your parents. There's no "I don't want to" in Ryan's life. And it's not even for a few minutes a day, it's hours. It's a job. It's not his choice. And you can't choose what to do on that video, it's always the parent's choices on what to do."
My brother then just kinda felt bad. I did too afterwards because I often think about that talk. Kids rarely can say no to their peers, kids can't vote, kids can't defend themselves a lot, heck kids rarely have consent when they don't want hugs and kisses from other family members. Often times, people treat animals or something like a fancy car better than kids!!
Thanks for sharing this, and that's a good talk to have
@@melonowl333 of course. I grew up on the child stars. I grew up on the Olsen Twins, Macaulay Culkin, and recently I heard about what happened to Bobby Driscoll after Peter Pan because of the Chip n' Dale movie controversy.
My mom when i was a teen wanted to exploit the fact i had cancer as a kid and write a book and start a blog. I had to cry and beg her not to because those pictures and moments she'd being up are extremely personal and i wasn't ready and still not ready for strangers to know my worse moments. I was a dying, it still is a huge source of trama. Before you asked no she wasn't doing it because she wanted to feel better shes very blunt and honestly with me. And said because parents with cancer are usually alone she could take advantage of that by making them feel less alone. By selling them a book. So there were alot of reasons im objectived to this.
That's disgusting. I'm so sorry. Wish you all the best in healing.
that's really terrible, i hope you're doing better now
I can somewhat relate to your experience. I was born with scoliosis and my family did fundraisers for the hospital I went to because my parents felt they had to give back to them because we didn’t have to pay for treatment. I hated doing those fundraisers every year, it was nothing more than a pity party to show how “brave” I was or how “special” I was
There’s a weird trend with parents and sensationalizing their child’s disability / illness, or just putting it on a pedestal.
I hope you’re doing better now, and I wish you the best.
I could somehow see myself be okay with being exploited if it helped my parents pay for medical bills or to grant me financial security but that's my POV now a decade into adulthood. As a child or teenager my parents didn't do a great job at respecting my privacy and even having like 30 people know stuff about me that they shouldn't have known was horrifying enough. A book or blog with acutal PICTURES is waaay too much.
@@WahooYahoo I hope your doing better too. Yeah I hated the pity party thing. They wanted me to be in a commercial for the hospital I was being treated at as a kid. But I just had a full on mental breakdown and my mom was pissed I refused to do the commercial. Honestly if I didn't have cancer at the time she would have probably have had my dad beat my ass. I just hated the idea of me dying being broadcast. I knew I was dying and while I didn't understand fully what that meant I didn't want to be paraded around. I just wanted to go home and be with my family away from it all.
As an Early Childhood Educator, I’m actually in love with the way you used the term “image of the child” as it is so important to societal views on children, yet I rarely actually here it out of my field
"i was cynical as a baby" that line speaks to me
Omg same on an intense level
Me to the doc, barely 10 seconds after birth: Oh, so this is, like...
The doc: Yeah it's life. Sorry.
Me: I mean... It could be worse ! It could be worse. It's also probably going to be worse too.
Oh yeah well I was cynical as a zygote!
Seriously though who can blame y'all?
I knew this wasn't great as soon as I came out of the womb. My entire family is quite cynical or as I like to call it just fucking realistic so of course I also became that way.
ABSOLUTELY, I actually paused because same
I hate how those families see disabled children as some kind of quirky RUclips challenge and a cute accessory to other children. Or at worst they despise them for not being as monetisable. They want the praise of "being a hero" and genuinely believe that disabled people should pray to them for being a (at best) mid parents.
The part about a family "re-homing" (you mean.... like you would a turtle?) that poor boy and just quietly dropping him from their lives.... Only I've had actually pets for less than two years who had a bigger impact on my family.
It's heartbreaking that so many countries have to have so many laws that make it near impossible for babies in need to get adopted BECAUSE people like this. God, I hope that kid is okay. I understand why all the names are changed, and honestly I wouldn't give these people my views regardless, but I almost wish we could just know that boy was living a
Good life. I guess it's impossible to know that, but I sure hope.
And I bet that if one of their children were to become disabled or chronically ill, they’d refuse to treat it for the sake of the channel.
2 HOUR SHANSPEARE??? Today is truly blessed🙏🏼
I didn't even notice until I saw your comment...
Oh SHIT!! 😭🎉🙌🏻
So you just finished watching when saw your comment.
YAAAAAAAASSSSS!!!!!!! 🤘🏻👏🏻👏🏻 I'M SO HERE FOR THIS!!!
After two hours of watching about family channels - today is truly cursed
these parents really don't think about how invasive and embarrassing this is for kids. imagine you start middle school and your classmates have seen you like a TV character for years, from getting potty trained to having your first period...
Alot of people shouldn't reproduce
I was told by a therapist I should try journaling to help with OCD symptoms or in general and I still can’t bring myself to do it because I had zero privacy growing up and was unsafe if I expressed myself at all. I’m around supportive folks now but I would be horrified if I died or went out of town or anyone for any reason read my private stuff, even if it says more about them I’m so worried about it. Parents really have no idea the impact.
You're the first creator I've seen to give the tumblr girl a fake name. I really respect the effort to give her a little privacy with her content from childhood. Yeah just wanted to say that. Word to you ✨️
I’m not gonna lie, I have zero desire to give my child a digital footprint. If a moment is so important that I want people to see it, I’ll just text it to them, and if I don’t have their number then they’re probably not close enough to know what my child is up to. It’s scary to me how people just post their kid’s schools or their neighborhood they live in because if someone wants to kidnap or keep tabs on your child, now they now all of that information.
Edit: I will add that if they choose to have social media someday when they are older, I’ll support it. I’m just gonna make sure we have the proper talks about safety and all that beforehand.
Same.
Also private accounts are a thing!!! Having a profile with just close friends/family members!!! Idk why people prioritize strangers likes and attention over their children!!!!!!
@@zesty6781 I'll never understand when people act like they need to post on social media to share about their family to other family members.
Just make a big WhatsApp group with all people you personally (!) know who care about the lives of your kids and upload it there.
Because there is no way of comparison and no liking/sharing that will give you the endorphine rush that is so dangerous on social media, you'll likely keep being very rational about what you post.
That way you're much less likely to share sth you'll regret.
Well said! Family group chats, or even a shared drive for only family and some very well vetted close friends are another great option.
A LOT of information. Can easily be found on the internet. If theywant to kidnap your kid OR YOU, they can.
I didn't even know anything about the channels until I heard that they had millions of subscribers. And somebody was getting their kids taken away for alleged abuse allegations! Just wild!
Their videos are horrifying. It’s honestly pretty disgusting that millions of people watched them and didn’t think ‘I should report this’ but three guesses who was angriest that DOF got shut down. Yup, the ‘freezepeach’ people. 🤢
@@gateauxq4604most of the people that watch family channels are little kids. i don’t think they have the capacity to recognise that they’re fucked up. it’s a fact that has a lot of unfortunate implications but that’s the world we live in
Calling Nikki’s husband ‘random husband’ has me DEEEEAAAADDDD
This is wild to me because the "drop and give me 10" as in 10 pushups was an extremely common punishment my dad gave specifically me and my younger sister that did sports. His argument was it made us stronger, my trauma and embarrassment and humiliation and subsequent mistrust of my dad says otherwise. It was just kind of shocking to see someone look at that type of punishment and say that it's not okay. It's really nice to know that sensible people find this form of punishment strange and weird.
It's boot camp disciplinary behaviour. No one should live in a boot camp 24-7 from birth to late teens, it's cruel and unusual.
I used to have to do a couple hundred pushups almost everyday and wall sits with books on my arms as punishment. I’ve never met anyone else who had to do the same 🥲
Militaristic families like this always give me the creeps. When I'd be at my friend's house as a kid and we both did something "bad", her father would punish her by forcing her to do push-ups and wall-sits, same with her younger brother. I guess he was a military guy but like.... It's different with small children who aren't even legally able to enlist in the military/experience bootcamp like consenting adults are.... right? I mean even my sister-in-law does this to my nephew and niece because her husband (NOT their biological dad) is a military guy...? It's so unsettling to me.
@@littlerelief No one should live in a boot camp full stop. People are thinking beings with feelings worthy of and with a need for respect and love, not disposable ammunition a moralized violence monopoly has a moral right to throw at whatever it doesn't like.
As a mother, this is all unconscionable and horrifying. As a legal and mental health professional, I’ve unfortunately seen all this and worse first hand.
as an adoptee i feel compelled to point out that part of the thing that enables and encourages these vile people (and others as well) to do this is our cultural narrative surrounding adoption; the general public tends to think of it as "saving a child" usually from abuse or orphanhood or from an uncaring parent; people find this "hero narrative" to be very fulfilling and aspirational, but it belies the realities of of adoption-- a multibillion dollar per year industry (primarily run by religious institutions that use that money to fund anti-abortion campaigns) that relies on the exploitation of first families (have you ever heard of a rich family giving up their child for adoption? no! of course not!) who are likely to be impoverished (statistically speaking, poc and the disabled). there's this unspoken assumption that anyone would be grateful to be removed from poverty at the expense of ever knowing their origins for someone else's profit, and those who drive the market for children tend to be seen as saviours and even pioneers for human rights in some cases (participating in capitalism = human rights, according to liberal understanding, i suppose), and things get VERY vicious VERY quickly towards people who challenge this narrative. people LOVE the feel good idea of a blank slate being pulled up from poverty/abuse/abandonment and given to a well off saviour (especially if said saviour has suffered, like from infertility, that adds a tearjerking "making something beautiful out of a mistake" element, though no one ever asks the adoptee how it feels to be legally and culturally branded a mistake in the narrative of someone else's life), it's a feel good story to everyone on the outside and the emotional investment in this narrative is HEAVY because of both religious implications, financial implications, cultural expectations surrounding the nuclear family, narratives of gratefulness and deserving, the idea that if an adoptee is less than placating towards their families emotional wants surrounding them they are "ungrateful" and "a ticking time bomb" waiting to ruin either their family of origin or their adoptive family's lives... the rabbithole on this goes so, so deep, but most people only have this surface understanding of what they see in movies and have spoonfed to them by people who are not adopted and by adoptees who either are in denial, haven't thought about or don't know about these things, or feel comfortable speaking over adoptees who do. everybody is quick to praise adoptive parents, but no one is quick to ask "why don't adoptees have legal access to their medical records especially when disabled people are more likely to have their children removed ~for some reason~", "why are original birth certificates sealed and completely inaccessible to the person they are about in some states", "why do some international adoptees not get US citizenship and what happens to the ones that have been deported to countries that no longer claim them", "why do black children cost less than white children", "why are you not legally entitled to the information that you are adopted", "why is marriage between a child who was adopted out and their immediate birth family legal", "why is it that if a child is adopted out under the agreement that the adoption will be open that the adopting family can renege on this agreement at their discretion", "why are original families not given the financial support to keep their children when poverty is statistically THE !NUMBER ONE! deciding factor in giving up a child for adoption, but adoptive families are given all sorts of tax incentives and can even crowdfund without anyone batting an eye and everyone will complain on their behalf that LITERAL LIVING HUMAN BEINGS are 'too expensive'". and that's just dipping a toe into the legal aspects of this nightmare, not even going in on the emotional results-- why are adoptees suicide rates so high? why is "he's adopted" a funny joke to so many people? what are the effects of growing up with no genetic mirroring? i could go on but. people only understand adoption as a "wholesome" method of family building-- it does not even occur to them that it is a life-changing legal procedure that the person it affects most cannot consent to. anyway loved the video as always, sorry for rambling in the comments. ✌
Thank you for this perspective and taking time to post it!
Idk if you are too but I’m a foreign adoptee and the rescue baby narrative goes double for us. When you’re from a country dubbed inferior by America/the west, people really get it into their minds that you’re a little rescue child saved from a life of communism/poverty/slavery/etc. Luckily my family has never held it over my head but others have, especially when I’m critical of my current country because would I really rather be _THERE?_ For context, my adoptive family is also white and I’m not so there’s an unintentional (for them) white savior narrative associated with my citizenship/upbringing.
In addition, adoption is sometimes a tool of cultural genocide- for example, this can be seen with the Sixties Scoop
@@sharkofjoy thank you for taking the time to read it, i appreciate that!
@@shouldbewritig i am a domestic (and white) adoptee but i do run in adoption abolition circles so i'm familiar with the topic, it's definitely enforced even worse for adoptees from "inferior" countries. that type of rhetoric leads to such cases as the US marine who kidnapped that afghan girl (i believe litigation is still ongoing for this case) and the african woman (i don't recall which country atm) who was tricked into thinking her child was being send to the US for schooling, among others. totally exploitative and maddening and heartbreaking to see people celebrating, i'm so sorry that you have that additional layer to deal with, sending you lots of love
Another Hollywood child comparable to situations like these is Brooke Shields. Watching her documentary and seeing how her mother exploited her and ESPECIALLY how grown adults were commenting on her body and "promiscuity" reminds me a lot the kind of people who are making these videos as well as their audiences.
Not to mention her appearance in Blue Lagoon. She was 14 during filming and for her topless scenes she had her hair glued to her breasts. Her character also has nude scenes, and while those at least were performed by a double, most people aren't going to automatically think that while watching the movie.
@@vulcanhumorYou forgot her actually showing up nude in Pretty Baby at age 12. I still can’t believe that movie was made
That bath picture, ugh, her mom is disgusting for pushing her into all that
Something worth mentioning, Alyson Stoner ("the kid from the Missy Elliot video") has a series on their channel about child stardom and is working with legislation to pass protective laws for influencers! Thank you for bringing attention to this
The adamant "he wanted this" in reference to a CHILD is genuinely disgusting.
It's awful. No one would accept treatment of a nurotypical child like that. Awful
literally yesterday "Sapphire" was sentenced to up to 30 years for child abuse
god i used to watch “carrie”‘s mom vlogs all the time and didn’t know she became a mom at such a young age. i just turned 18 and can’t imagine such a shift in my life like that. it’s sad seeing no one protected her.
also i honestly believe she needs help even now. she was pushed into motherhood when she was still a kid and never experienced childhood. i wish her kids had adequate care cus obv their dad is terrible too.
Genuine question but I was just asking my partner this - why were you following them? I don't personally understand the appeal the these sort of channels, maybe because I have kids, but I am really confused why out of all the things to watch online you'd want to watch other people just...doing family stuff? Sorry, I'm sure this comes across as mean but I am genuinely curious.
@@iamjustkiwi i was pretty young like about 11 when she had her first baby and i thought her life seemed perfect. as the years went by and the allegations of her neglecting her second child arose i started to watch her less. i think i enjoyed her content mostly cus i was young and liked seeing her little family so put together. i also think most of her audience knew of her online presence before she became a mom and only watched for her instead of the kids.
@@kaheivi I actually really appreciate you sharing that, it confirms a lot of what I have kind of suspected and honestly it makes it all a bit more scary, where people growing up now are getting fed these completely fabricated illusions of a healthy life.
that part of her story makes me really sad :( the part where shanspeare said she was seen playing her nintendo switch instead of watching her kids was clear evidence to me that she wasnt given time to actually become an adult before having her kids. i hope her and her kids are doing better.
This is frightening. Why won't social media ban these accounts? Or do we need a federal law to protect kids?
It's varied by country, by state, and then the classification of the child. What I mean by that last point is the distinction between child actors and children of content creators. There are certain protections for child actors that have agencies, are part of unions, etc, that DON'T extend to children of content creators. There has to be a major movement for the recognition of the rights and safety of children online.
Because it doesn’t pay to get rid of these channels.
Social media only cares so much if there’s money involved.
Companies will almost never favor safety over profits. It would have to be put into law for this to stop.
The USA hasn't even ratified the UNs Convention on the Rights of the Child, do you really expect them to care about parents exploiting their kids and taking all their money, leaving them to grow up abused, traumatised and with no funds to break free? So long as there's a profit to be made, your politicians, your companies and your lobbyists won't care about kids.
@@phelanii4444 Luckily the children won't have to worry about getting food or water while not having funds as those are human rights which were agreed to...
Nope, just messing with everyone. The US hasn't agreed to those either.
@56:54 "Housed with them" instead of "living with them". Love your word choice! Are these exploited kids "living"? Maybe not living life to the fullest if they are used as the family's cash cow...
im 23 now, but i was abused all throughout my childhood. the only ways i ever learned that my abuse wasnt normal was through friends saying so or by seeing their families interact. once i knew it was bad, every day was torturous because i knew i had to be with them for 18 years. being put in foster care wasnt an option for me, because it was even scarier than staying with my family and knowing what abuse id deal with. i also only had a few memories of good, gentle, caring interactions with adults, so abuse was all i knew. i cant imagine dealing with all of this and having it filmed, ready to be viewed whenever. i couldnt imagine logging in to youtube to watch some video and getting reccomended a video of a deeply traumatic moment. i hope these kids get the support, legal or otherwise, they need sooner than later. i wish we could take every abusive parent and make them relive their childrens memories through their kids eyes, make them feel how helpless their kids felt, make them see how scary they were to their kids.
It’s like reading my own feelings. I am so sorry that was done to you🫂
We really need coogan laws for monetized social media. If a channel regularly features children (like 30% of the video length or more) then any monetization should be split so at least 50% of the monetization is deposited directly into a trust for that child. We need to make it annoying and hard to monetize the presence of children.
UPDATE: This was powerful. Truly powerful. You have done a service by researching, analyzing, scripting, & documenting this disturbing trend. I'm grateful you made it, and also grateful that you were thoughtful enough to include a CW so people like me could wait until they were ready to watch.
ORIGINAL: Hahaha nope. Not ready for this topic right now. This is going into "Watch Later" for a better mental health day.
Truly, genuinely, *thank you* for your content warning. I have an anxiety disorder, so CWs genuinely help me avoid panic attacks.
I want to let y’all know the content was in fact pretty explicit and terrifying. Please take care of yourself and know what you can handle or skip to the safe landing
Hope you’re having a good day ❤️
@@TofuDinoNugsThe particularly bad stuff featured time stamps and a warning before it started, so if you can handle moderately scary stuff you can at least easily skip the "actual legal battles are now going down due to the magnitude of this abuse" sections.
take your time, completely get it jsjsjssjhs, i usually watch triggering videos in parts so i have time to decompress; but if you ever feel like its too much thats okay--we dont need more hurted
1:38:24 "Hopefully nobody gives her food" imagine hoping your kid STARVES.
*Thank you for shedding some light on this disturbing genre, mother. I shall listen with great interest.*
This is another one of those essays where I wanna give the creator a purple heart because I can barely take a couple seconds of some of the family channels (esp the trench ones.) Like the part about a baby being promiscuous?? My body physically crumpled, I'm going to pass away post haste
The quote from "Pippy" about feeling like she was in a "snow globe" her whole life is funny to me because I'm literally reading a book about a post-apocalyptic world where there's exactly one haven on earth. It's named Snowglobe, and the catch to living there is that you become an "actor" in a tv show that's broadcasted out to the rest of the world (or just to Korea; this is a book in translation; it's titled Snowglobe by Soyoung Park, translated by Joungmin Lee Comfort).
It's very much a YA dystopia book, but I think Pippy's quote speaks to a universality of how non-prison panopticonic life is perceived by those in it.
These poor babies. Neglectful parents are the most selfish vile people in the world. Bringing a life into this world for your own desires and profit should result in the highest level of shaming and criticism. We need legislation against family vlogging as well as laws against AI without consent.
God this video just made me so angry, these kids deserve so much more than justice, it’s disgusting
@@vyk_15 I had to take at least 3 breaks watching it. Bad parents are my number one trigger bc the selfishness and narcissism involved is outrageous.
@@SimoneintheSkies I had to visually pre-occupy myself while paying attention to the overall message. I get so upset in a way that text doesn’t convey
Totally agree but recently I've been wondering if there's actually any non-selfish reasons for bringing a child into this world. I just can't seem to think of any
@@AIgeneratedHuman there are none. The child had no say in being brought into this harsh world and parents will still look them in the face and tell them to be grateful they were born so they can pay bills and struggle and deal with identity and all this bullshit. Children owe their parents nothing and parents owe their children everything, but they love to pretend they’re Gods who made the benevolent choice to bring life into the world so they don’t have to be held accountable for their actions towards their children. Children are the most unprotected group of people in the world. They’re not seen a real humans until they’re 18 and them they’re told to stfu and move on from the awful things their parents did as if they wouldn’t have been happy to not exist.
Family vlogging was the wild west of RUclips on a good day.
Truly different internets
Thank you for putting a trigger on the final section. I am starting to realise I likely suffer some trauma from childhood and whenever that "daddy" of 5 person comes on. It scares me
the way you talked about the "spade" family channel starting out as a normal couple vlog and then encroaching more and more on the kid's life brings to mind another truman show comparison, although this one is a deep cut: in supplemental material for the movie (i thiiiiink the behind the scenes book that included the screenplay?), the creative team stated that the in-universe truman show was originally just a yule-log style video of baby Truman in his crib, occasionally accompanied by his mother playing with baby or his father coming home from work and bemoaning to the wife that his employer might be downsizing the company. None of the rest of Seahaven existed yet. It was only after the show became a massive hit that they were able to build an entire fake town to film Truman's every move. I know this is technically happening in the opposite direction (the world expanding around Truman vs the camera tightening in on Spade Baby) but it has similar Vibes of something that started tame-ish, found success, and then wildly spiraled out of control. (Sorry for the infodump this movie is a special interest of mine)
I'm old (63), and I started using the Internet in 1998. I spent most of my online time then in chat rooms, especially on Yahoo. I remember when the chat rooms were shut down because parents, law enforcement, school officials, etc. were concerned over children coming across predators online. Nowadays family vloggers let everyone and anyone into their minor children's lives. I've seen demographic info on some of these channels, where the vast majority of the subscribers are grown men.
I remember being pregnant with my oldest when Philip Defranco broke the story about DOF and I absolutely lost my mind. It made me so sad. I remember holding my belly and crying because I couldn’t imagine being that cruel to a child that I am supposed to love and protect.
I'm sure you'll be a wonderful Mum who'll keep your young one safe ❤️
My mom was like Sapphire in a few ways. I can't speak on the personal mental circus act that is Sapphire's reasoning for her actions, but in my mom's case, she loved the attention of being a “good, attentive, no-nonsense" mother that she portrayed provided her. Little did anyone else know, it was an act. And when I say act, I mean she would encourage me to swear, get into fights both in and out of school, lie, steal, the whole grocery list of bad behaviors for angsty troubled kids. She'd tell me that all of that was ok, even reinforce most of it by showing me how it's done.... Then she'd punish me for doing any of it the instant she had an audience to impress with her supposed parenting skills. She set me up as her prop, just so people would look at her as a shining example of what a “good" parent looks like. It wasn't recorded with a camera or anything like that in my situation, but my life, for at least 13 years, was largely scripted to write me as a problem child and paint my mom as some brave, strong single mother doing what it takes to rein me in. She's in prison for capitol murder now (completely unrelated, and yet.... Not unexpected, considering that most of her existence has been about manipulation and control, and she lost control of several key people in her life, chief among them, me). Anyways, all this to say, if even a part of Sapphire's motivation was supposed to be praise on how “amazing" she is as a parent, I can definitely relate with her kids.
My mom wasn’t QUITE that brand of narcissist but she had BPD and was no walk in the park and many behaviors have some overlap. Appearances were v important and exploiting me and airing anything I found my private life was a big part of that.
I’d never considered before today how thankful I am I grew up long before RUclips and before the internet was a thing for the masses. Had my mother known she could exploit me to total strangers for her own adulation as a mother AND made money off it?
I’d have been effed. Absolutely effed.
If I thought she gave me psychological trauma already, imagine what she could have done w a platform! 😢
If no one is going to make this stuff illegal any time soon, I’m glad the mood has shifted and no one is watching the way they used to at least. Bc it’s just wrong to exploit kids in any and every way a public platform provides. Consent is impossible as Shanspeare points out - and I don’t believe it’s ok unless they can understand and consent to the full depth and breadth of the consequences of such personal moments being posted and being impossible to fully retract EVER.
They’ll be 65 at a job interview and someone will be able to pull this stuff up. Not ok for a parent to do this.
Bad judgement.
Bad parenting.
Innocent children pay, as always.
PS my heart goes out to you for all you’ve gone through and still do. You deserved better and I hope you’ve been able to afford and seek out therapy at some point (expensive, I know) to help a little.
Group therapy is at least less $$. And still effective and worthwhile.
I wish you the best. You are not your trauma or what she did to you.
You are awesome and a survivor.
And it’s ok to get angry and to feel every emotion about it - grief, sadness etc.
She’s the bad person. You are not. You are amazing and you made it through so much. Be proud of you. 👏 I am!
Mothers like that are…. A lot. And barely mothers. I went no contact with mine a decade ago and only refer to her by first name bc I am now a mom and realized how much I disliked the word “mom” bc of all stirred in me bc of her. I didn’t want her ruining my relationship w my ability to mom and be a mom and be happy to hear my kiddo say “mom” and “mama” at me.
I wouldn’t let her take that from me, too. So I took that title from her instead. 😁
I did not expect that second to last sentence, holy shit. What a specific, cruel form of abuse. I can't imagine what that'd do to a child's image of self or the world, or how to repair that. I hope you're doing okay.
@@kkilljoy3588 your words mean more to me than I really know how to articulate. Thank you so much 😊.. I've been in and out of therapy since I was about 16. I'm 31 now. It really has been helpful being able to talk to someone because for years, I did keep it to myself, especially during highschool. She's doing 57 years for capital murder, and it's only been 3 years since she got locked up. Fun fact: she killed someone literally the day before my 27th birthday, gets arrested ON my birthday. My aunt calls me up to tell me happy birthday, literally blurts out “your mom killed my best friend "... My aunt is a dog-lover, so immediately, my mind goes “oh mom must've accidentally ran over my aunt's dog".. Found out a couple minutes later that she had literally beat and torchurd a woman to de3th who was my aunt's best friend from since they were little. So, you know, on top of everything prior to that specific moment, that just made therapy kind of a necessity, in order to stay sane.
Excellent, as always! Thank you!
thst first girl's story is frightening as hell because if the allegations are true, he almost definitely was behaving like that in the house too
If you want to hear the whole story, Cruel World Happy Mind did a two part deep dive on her. Idk if Shanspeare doesn’t want people to comment her actual name, so I won’t put her real name here, but you should be able to tell which of CWHM’s videos are about her. It’s definitely a fucked up story.
@@Petitfleur_her real name is in the tags in the description box of the video
yeah is specifically stuck out to me when shanspeare clarified that she wasn't bringing the father's behavior up to reflect badly on her because it's so insane to me that that even has to be clarified. And to be clear, I'm not blaming Shanspeare for this because I know that some people really do think like this and the clarification was necessary. For some people, when they hear about someone's parent being a predator, their first thought it that it negatively reflects on that person, which is just... bleak. Like think about it for just a second. Their PARENT, the person who they are the most vulnerable to, who they have no choice but to rely on as a child, the person who has had the most access to them throughout their entire childhood is a predator. Anyone who doesn't have rocks in their head should know that the child is not a fucking accomplice, but the most likely out of anyone to have been victimized.
DOF’s mom crying in front of the laptop on her knees has got to be some kind of performance art, it’s so crazy
She'd probably cry the same way if her car was stolen tbh. Or her Xbox. Or any other """""possession""""" that no one else should be able to """"""own"""""""".
That made my blood boil. That and the dad pacing around like a goddamn toddler and gesticulating at the wall.
“Tulip” is so sweet I wish she would be with a family that cherishes her
my jaw is already on the floor from the intro.. gonna spend the next two hours picking it up over and over again as I marvel at your talent and ingenuity
They're brilliant, but man…this one is a TOUGH watch. Cases of child abuse and neglect are HARD to stomach. I’m an hour and a half in and I need to take a break.
It’s an amazing video and Shanspeare’s done an amazing job. It’s just the reality of the subject matter that’s hard to sit with. I’m glad they're talking about it, though.
@@vaporeonice3146 agreed! just a reminder Shaniya uses they/them pronouns :)
@@elleliteracy thank youuu! I don't think I ever checked; fixed :)
the segment about Digital Kidnapping sent shivers down my spine. it reminded me of an incident when i was in junior year
tw for pedophilia
i was checking the tumblr app between classes. someone i was following rbed a photo post, commenting that the orignal poster was a pedophile and asking us to help them mass report and flag the blog
said photo was a picture of a baby girl that the baby was between 10 months to a year old, she was standing in a yard wearing bermuda shorts and a blouse. the photo was clearly taken from her parents facebook. but the man who posted it on tumblr wrote *paragraphs* about what he wanted to do to this baby. and the thoughts not only occured to him, but were so strong in his mind that he wrote fucking prose about it and posted it all online
to be frank, even though i absorbed this whole incident in maybe 30 seconds in 2017, i think about it all the fucking time. the dim memory of that baby's face flashes in my mind whenever my niece's and baby cousins pop up on facebook. even though im a long way from having kids myself, it's made me seriously reconsider ever posting photos of my kids online, even to share with family.
so the very notion that parents like that gymnastics family intentionally expose their kids to those kinds of sick bastards just for some extra cash just...i cannot fathom it. i don't care how hurting for cash someone might be, i don't care "well it's not like they're being touched" or whatever justification there is, i cannot fathom it
also i know, ultimately, there's no method of dressing that can protect from sexual assault or abuse. (and ofc even if there was, it still wouldn't be anyone but the rapist's fault that they raped someone). "it doesn't matter if you're wearing a burqa or a bikini, sexual assault isn't about sex its about power", as that saying goes.
but it *really* fucking sucks that even the tamest, most innocent thing, like an infant standing in the grass, can be twisted like that. like not even babies are safe!! its just so tiring. again i can't understand how some parents would do that on purpose
but, all this unpleasantness aside, this was a fantastic and well made video (as always!) shan ♡ keep on keeping on 💕✨️
This is absolutely disgusting, holy shit. But your comment about never forgetting. Woof, that hit hard for me. A few months ago I watched a documentary about someone who "catfished" pedos online by posing as a little girl to expose them. And one story was about a father what happened to his daughter and even months later I still can't get the sheer atrocity out of my head. The grandma or something had been home alone with the baby girl and had let this neighbour in the house. This neighbour then raped the baby and filmed it to post online. I was so fucking enraged I had to literally calm myself down with breathing exercises. I just wanted to strangle that monster. And I've been living in paranoia since. I don't have children yet but even the idea of leaving my child with anyone but myself scares the shit out of me. I will never post any picture of my kids online, they will have no internet presence as kids, I swear to God. Sorry for this rant, but I think about this almost every time I see a child. Just this terror. Of knowing there are people like that out there.
I saw someone make this comparison once: say there was a park in your town and a known pedophile hung out there and sat on a bench every day, just watching. Even if you kept your child in your sight 100% of the time…would you still take them there? The internet is that park and we know for a fact that unfortunately, there are thousands and thousands of creeps and weirdos like the guy you mentioned on tumblr, just waiting to leer at somebody’s kid. I don’t have children yet but just the idea of it turns my stomach.
I genuinely feel like that the step-mom's crying around 1:32 isn't so much from regret over not showing love to the kids who got saved from this situation, or due to the shock of losing the custody, but moreso the shock of losing control over what she thought to be their belongings. Might be the truth, might not, of course, but it is difficult to imagine the tears to be anything less than selfish or them just feeling bad for themselves. Cruel parents will never not boggle my mind.
Also, a great video as a whole! Really respect the way you presented everything and always kept the children's experience/pov in mind.
Yes, definitely agree.
Normally I'm quite forgiving and try to be kind but at that point when I saw the crying I could only think "Cry more, I hope you suffer".
The sad thing is that almost nothing will ever hurt her as much as she and her partner hurt their own children.
why do parents turn off the comments and think the issue is solved? The creeps that comment are the bold ones, the ones that aren't commenting or CANT comment are just as sick and dangerous.
Yeah
This is the most current societally acceptable version of child labor. As someone who was forced to work for my family starting at age 9, I can almost tell you exactly what these kids are going through. The parents are just stupid enough to post it. I experienced more isolation during my forced labor, but I'm still scared of cameras as my parents would record moments in which I was happy and then show me it to mock me. The shame it inspires in just being yourself... Its paralyzing....
"I'm asking for the bare minimum" ain't that a mood
This really does make me so grateful that my parents did not have access to the technology to do this to me and my siblings. That intersection of surveillance and abuse that you mention is just so godawful. It was bad enough to have photos of embarrassing experiences taken and shared when they were physical objects without the internet.
Same here! My mom shares everything on facebook. I dont have kids yet but I already started having privacy conversations with her. She just calls me silly and says I am panicking for nothing
I never thought about the Truman Show that way! I was born in around when it came out, and by the time I saw it in my early teens, it never ever crossed my mind that it was something inconceivable!!
I left TikTok a while ago but something that did start to bother me was how many parents would upload mountains of content of their children under the guise of educating others on how to use the gentle parenting style. They would constantly record their children throughout the day in order to find opportunities to show their parenting skills and how they deal with common childish things like kids spilling things, breaking stuff, having tantrums, fights with siblings, etc. and the comments would praise on their way of handling the situation but after some thought, you realize it's either one of two things, or both: either their kids are under almost 24/7 surveillance (with the phone on plain view, meaning they are aware of the constant recording) in order to find these types of moments, or all of them are orchestrated with the excuse of it being "for educational purposes for other parents". Some of them would even create merch about their children under a specific gimmick (there was one particularly awful example of a baby whose house and clothes were gothic). It's super exploitative, but doesn't appear to be as exploittive as other examples because the parents are teaching others, so it's alright even if their children aren't old enough to consent.
Calling the early 2010's "a long time ago" makes me feel really old lol. As a 38-year-old it feels like literally yesterday to me
Nowadays, a year ago might as be 100 the way people act about it. It’s strange.
I just KNEW rock bottom was gonna be DOF. I remember watching the exposure and coverage by Philip DeFranco at the time. Phil is so passionate about child abuse cases after his experiences growing up, and the emotion he had while covering this has stuck with me all these years
If his videos from that reporting are still up, I believe he showed a clip of Billy being shoved into the bookcase. It definitely happened.
@@kyoyameganebereznoff The video did show the clip in question, not sure if its still up as i dont really watch that channel as much anymore. Hopefully them kids can at least get SOME peace from the hell they're going/been through.
I remember seeing the clip of Thing 2 that you couldn't find. It was via some "youtube drama" channel explaining what happened right after the Do5 channel was taken down. He called it an "accident" like he didn't just shove a child hard enough to fly through the entire room. Awful, awful person.
Big ups for relying on the stock footage instead of digging up things best left unseen and/or as forgotten as possible. And to you and the other channels that, if they do show the footage, make sure to blur out or put a black bar over the children.
Seeing the older daughter in that spade family clip immediately start acting again after Austin yelled at his wife was jarring. I wonder if these kids have a hard time figuring out what is real and what isn't. I know I would and as someone with depersonalization disorder that would make my mental state worse.
in my childhood, a trope stereotyping the "embarrassing parent" was the display of baby photos to guests. now people make careers out of doing so.
We appreciate how well you articulate your insights. Keep working hard.
I'm upset at how many of these channels I could recognize through context clues, though I am not a consumer of Family Vlog content. These kids will never escape their stories
this was such a good video as always and so depressing at the same time. people should take youth liberation a lot more seriously, because the fact that most americans would tacitly agree that children “aren’t full human beings” or are the “rightful property” of their parents, and shouldn’t be given the autonomy or rights afforded generally to adults, is profoundly fucked up
1:22:04 - You hit the nail right on the head. I work as a technician that fixes electronics like ipads and stuff. When you disable an ipad, the only way to restore it is to erase it completely. If I had a dollar for every time a parent told me, "he's a kid, he doesn't need that info" or "what privacy, I'm their parent" when I ask if they have a backup, I would never need to work again.
"they place their emotional stability on children; they use their children as a litmus test for their own power" - this whole section tbh, thank you... now I FINALLY have words to describe what my father did to me throughout my childhood. this was sooooo hard to watch, and I had to take breaks. what i can say, on the other hand, is that i'm very grateful to have stumbled upon your channel! how i haven't come across you before i have no idea. you're easily the most well-spoken, knowledgable and unique creator I've listened to especially regarding these difficult topics. and, as an adult survivor, only very recently escaping the grips of abuse that has gone on this long (literally the first memory of my life unfortunately)... listening to you, and hearing you open up about your abuse, actually made me feel like there's some hope. you're inspiring to me! well done.
I was a big fan of “Carrie” when I was in middle school/early high school! I so vividly remember all of that happening, and it’s definitely interesting to think of how that relates to her current online presence. I look forward to watching the rest of the video!
Same
Somebody please help me, I literally don't know who this is
@@ccdaly2561 Acacia Brinley
The lead up reminded me so much of what happened to Damien Leonhardt (who at the time still went by Jessi Slaughter). I remember the videos, the cruel jokes so vividly back in 2009. No one even stopped to think about the fact that they were victimised when they were only 10 or 11 at the time by BOTD singer Dhavi Vanity.
Dhavi vanity has so many accusations by the way. That was still in the times that Jeffree star still hung out with him as well.
This never sat right with me. It's like people viewed them as a "crazy" adult woman rather than a literal child with child-like emotions. They just made fun of them.
Wait is that the girl (Jessi Slaughter as I recognize the name I think. I assume they are trans now) whose dad was in the background yelling about calling the Internet police and started the You Done Goofed meme. That was when I started getting into Internet culture and stopped scluding myself to Neopets. They, Boxy , and a couple other girls the early Internet went after is why I kept the fact I was a girl ambiguous for years. I hope they are doing well now. I heard their dad is a real piece of work.
@@Nickelbag610 You remember correctly. Damien (11 at the time) made a video about shooting people who were mean to them online (the words were brain slushy) which catapulted them to internet fame. The online bullying however obviously didn’t stop, people took the way they acted and treated them like an adult. After that the infamous video that you referenced appeared of a crying Damian with their father in the background screaming about how he was going to call the “the internet police”, that “consequences will never be the same” and “you done goofed” which only exhausterbated the situation when places like the something awful forums and 4chan saw those. Their father died of a heart attack a decade or so ago. At the time and still I think, people treated it like what happened online was a failure of parenting and not a concerted effort to bully a child.
I don’t think Damien is much online anymore but I hope they’re in a better place.
The thing about not bringing your 5 years old's lunch to school is absolutely insane to me as my mom was still preparing my lunch for me until high school ToT
Shan, i am 35 got one kid and was raised in pretty broke environments i saw a lot as a child myself. This stuff is absolutely heart wrenching and needs to be understood by more parents and caring people. Thank you
Thank you for talking about this. I have been against family vlogging that discloses the children's faces and names for a long, long time for these exact reasons. I remember a couple of years ago telling my friend (who had recently become a mother) how I did not like these channels and she looked at me like I had just slapped her baby. I can understand that for her, as a new mom, these videos were helpful and relatable. But there is a way to show what it is like to be a parent on youtube without exploiting your children. The PARENTS should be the content, not their children.
I really hope that the downfall of family vlogging channels is here.
"for a low price, i will tell you her social security number too"
this channel has me fuking crying im really excited for this series
I'm glad you went more in-depth about the objectification of children. That's exactly how I felt growing up and haven't heard anyone really put it into words before. I had some circumstances that didn't apply but otherwise it's so nice to hear someone shed light on it.
Also I hope Sapphire gets 60 years
Omg I've been going down RUclips shorts rabbit hole and came across a family vlogger mom making content solely based on her autistic son ... It gave me bad vibes and you just confirmed it
Ick
There is a huge influx of parents who video their autistic kids meltdown and most volatile moments. Taking advantage of their disability and often painting themselves as victims of the children they exploit.
It’s ableism at its worst.
I remember the DOF stuff going down. I have SEEN the video of "Billy" being thrown into a bookcase. It isn't alleged, freaking monsters.
The way ‘dad spade’ makes suggestive jokes about his daughter and to her face, I can say from firsthand experience that even if kids don’t understand what these jokes mean, they can understand by the way adults treat it that it’s inappropriate and it does make them self conscious. My former step dad used to joke about how “he’ll have to start beating boys off with a bat to keep them away from me” (among other suggestive remarks). It doesn’t matter if I understood the concept of sexual attraction, I could tell he was implying something inappropriate and it always upset me.
When you tell your daughter “Why are you dressed like that?” Even if you think they wouldn’t understand, it DOES make them conscious of their body. Also, you’re sexualizing your daughters simply because they’re assigned female. That’s not appropriate no matter what their age is.
I'm so glad you touched on this topic. Even the most well-meaning parents can fail to realize the irreversible harm that happens to children EVERY DAY by thoughtlessly posting them online amongst whom they have curated an online presence with and don't believe would be harmful. Then, there are those who intentionally cause harm for their own gain. It's a very sad reality, and this video touches on plenty, but still only some, of the ways children are harmed. I desperately want more legislation passed to protect children and people of non-consenting parties. Technology moves so rapidly, and politics move at a snail's pace 😢
Carrie's story is so sickening and sad. Unfortunately what she's gone through isn't unique.
A really good "family vlogger" is mommacusses. It's more of a mom account than a family account but it's really sweet and makes me happy
I love her stuff a lot ❤
I love the chaos lunch series and how she respected her child's boundaries and stopped the series when her kid didn't feel like doing it anymore
The couple that didn’t adopt a child because they couldn’t make it into content has always stuck with me. Just horrifying, terrible humans
Thing 1 and Thing 2 are horrifying, disgusting monsters. Those kids deserve better. The similarity to your own family makes me feel you and your siblings deserved better too.
I’m adopted. My adopted was messed up and I didn’t know that or how until i was an adult. Hearing the adoption stories you told here sucked and shows just how often people think of children as accessories.
work protections in the US are being loosened and many are again working in factories and being maimed or killed they are also working longer not allow proper time for school
I’m glad you brought up the point about loneliness towards the end. I watched some family vloggers in the early 2010s from about ages 11 to 13, in large part because my family moved to a new city, our new neighborhood didn’t have many other kids, and I struggled a lot to make friends at my new school. I don’t remember caring all that much about the individual kids in a fan way (and I do remember finding the parents annoying), rather I was living vicariously through these kids who had a lot of other kids around to hang out with. Looking back, it was all different vlog families collabing for content, but as a kid, I just saw lots of kids on big play dates having fun. The thing that eventually put me off the concept was that a lot of the big vlog families were very religious, and I ended up experiencing a lot of religious abuse at my new school. It was wild getting certain phrases shouted at me until I cried, then going onto the computer at the end of the day and hearing those same phrases spoken with that overacted jokey tone and royalty free ukulele in the background. I can so easily see an alternate scenario where instead of bailing to find a new coping mechanism, I internalized those harmful ideas because the people who made me feel happy on the computer said they were cool. So yeah in addition to the kids actually in the videos, I think there’s potential harm being done to the kids watching. (Edit: spelling.)
Thank you for making this video. This explains my odd feeling with even the good family channels. My daughter loves watching "kids play channels" now and then and I dislike those for the most part as well, because I can't shake the feeling, that they don't really play but retake the play footage over and over again while their parents build brands with their childrens faces.
Making children work in the film industry is already questionable, but family vlogging and youtube channels with the children as stars takes away even more of their privacy and childhood, since the camera becomes an everlooming thing in their lives they cannot escape from.