As the internet worms its way into our lives, parents are working hard to shield their kids from the negative effects that social media can bring down on them.
They do this by limiting screen time and blocking sites that could expose their child to something harmful.
However, these same parents have no issue with posting photographs of their children on Facebook.
Many parents post their child as a way to update family members who may live out of the state or to work as a digital scrapbook to document childhood memories for their children to look back on.
Others don’t take such an innocent vantage point. Influencers see their children as a way to capitalize off parenthood, sometimes posting three or more videos with their child every day.
Although there is not yet evidence to prove it, having a camera shoved in their face at the ripe age of three cannot be beneficial to the psyche of a growing child.
Instead of protecting their kids from the outside world, these parents are exposing them to it at an ever more rapid pace.
Not only is this a problem because of the stalkers online but because it portrays a false idea of what their parenting is like.
The arrest of Ruby Franke, an influencer mother charged with six counts of child abuse, brought this problem into a new light.
As a mother of six, she rose to fame by giving parenting advice due to the size of her family.
Franke is now behind bars for abusing the very children she made money off of parenting.
Since the arrest, viewers have gone back and rewatched her videos under a harsher light. In some, she tells the audience that she has taken her child’s bed away and even denied them meals as a form of punishment.
Instead of this being used to prove her guiltiness, it was used as ammunition for equally abusive parents in her comments.
Social media gave her the platform to spread her parenting ideologies and to make money off the abuse of her children.
This serves as the most cautionary of tales. If children are allowed to be posted on social platforms, they will be taken advantage of and capitalized on. Regulations need to be put in place or similar situations will continue to happen.
