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Kidfluencers vs children’s well-being
Critics mainly suspect that kidfluencers are projections of their parent’s ambition, or worse, the cash cows of their respective families.
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After being introduced in 2015, child-friendly video sharing platform YouTube Kids is now accessible in Indonesia. (Shutterstock/File)
“Kidfluencers” is a specific term referring to children with a large social media following. It seems the term is only referring to a hobby that relates to the usage of certain kinds of platforms on the internet. Yet, since the activity of creating content for platforms these days can generate income, it may become a job for the people involved in it.
When children perform these kinds of activities, problems may arise, since their involvement may constitute a form of child labor, which in principle is illegal under Manpower Law No. 13/2003. There is an exception clause for children aged 13-15 years old albeit with strict requirements.
The main problem of kidfluencers is that children who create their own content or are part of their parents’ social media content might have to spend a lot of time in order to produce content that sells. The allocation of time can disturb the education, health and development of the children.
There are several rights that need to be balanced in order to let children manifest their creativity in social media without disturbing their education, health and development.
Article 32 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child concerns the protection of a child’s education, health and development. Because children have evolving capacities, they need to have adequate time to nurture their capacities.
Moreover, they need to be protected from harm that might come with work, which might hamper their development. In the case of kidfluencers, the primary right at risk of being harmed is the right to be protected from economic exploitation, as stipulated in the convention. The critics of the case of kidfluencers mainly suspect that kidfluencers are projections of their parent’s ambition, or worse, the cash cows of their respective families.
The activities of kidfluencers at first might seem harmless because they do what they like while being recorded and earning views on platforms such as YouTube. Yet, when the video gains popularity and more views, which converts to money, some parents then start to manage the “quality” of the contents of their children’s channel.
