My kid’s famous. Let’s ride this train.”

People of my age might view the phenomenon of influencers with vague bewilderment. Who are these people, and why are they so famous? How do they make money? And why do people want to be influenced by them?

Some, if not all, of these questions are answered in Fortesa Latifi’s Like, Follow, Subscribe. Latifi is a journalist who has written for several major publications, had a child in 2024, and found herself drawn into the world of mom-influencers, watching their videos, reading their feeds, and following them on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook before she decided to study them for this book.

Moms were writing on the internet from the turn of this millenium: an early one was Dooce, who started a blog about her own depression and parenthood that became wildly popular.

It was a way of existing intellectually, outside of the physical drudgery of motherhood.

Many women read, followed and loved those blogs, and by extension, their creators. Even then, though, there were hints of the future: the bloggers got nasty comments from haters, got stalked, and the children featured in those blogs lost their privacy and got teased by peers. The money the bloggers were earning from ads and brand partnerships was sometimes enough for them and their husbands to leave their day jobs, even if they held a growing uneasiness about their lives being mined and modified for content.

Yet, those early days seem halcyon compared to what happens now. The ‘mommy-bloggers’ are passe. It’s all about ‘mom-influencers’ now, and, as I learned, there are a LOT of them. The book describes hundreds and thousands of them, all making money, sometimes well into the millions per year.

The big change has been in the content. The mommy-bloggers wrote mostly about themselves: their own struggles and ambivalence and exhaustion and mental or physical issues. The mom-influencers put their children front and center, because that is what sells. Posts featuring children get more views than posts featuring adults. In this book, Latifi explores the question of whether this is exploitation, what the children get out of it, and whether they have any choice in the matter.

It is not surprising that what she finds is pretty bleak. The family’s survival depends on the posts and photos and videos, so there is enormous pressure on the children to perform, over and over. They spend huge amounts of their day being videotaped, over and over, until a cute captivating 10 seconds of video is captured and edited and polished for release. The family makes money, but this is an unregulated business so the children may see none of that money when they are adults. And the children lose

their safety, their privacy, their ability to grow up experiencing childhood and life not through the lens of public perception.

Their most intimate childhood moments are published and monetized: their pre-natal lives, their births, their illnesses, their tears, their milestones (“her first period, brought to you by Kotex Teen Pads”), their proms and dates.

An interesting sidelight discusses why Mormons are so prevalent in the mom-influencer space. It turns out that the Mormon church has always encouraged journaling and record-keeping, and the former scrapbooks have moved onto the internet. They want their adherents to display the wholesome family lifestyle. Less amusing is the fact that the Mormon influencers are white, marry young, and have lots of children, which are all big advantages in the influencer world. Blond families, apparently, do even better.

Teen moms are another popular subset of influencers. Some had children at 14 and 15 and 16, and the internet loves to watch very young mothers.

[Rilah, who was a mother at 16] “I feel like people like to see others in a vulnerable situation. They get entertainment off it.”

Then again, these very young mothers who have few resources and little education can actually make a living off being an influencer, and they would be destitute otherwise.

Kylie, after getting pregnant at fifteen, paid for her first car in cash, something I’ve never done at the age of thirty-two.

Tragedy is sometimes the springboard for a vlog: after their child was killed in an accident, one family had the shocked realization how instantly lives could change, so decided to seize the day and travel the world in a vintage bus. (This sounds sweet and harmless, but then of course, the family decided to document every detail of their travels….)

Do vloggers ever have regrets, or change their minds? A few, apparently, do. It often doesn’t seem to last: the families who stop featuring their children in videos find that viewership drops, and then they rationalize featuring the children again. All of them claim that the children want to be part of the family enterprise, and if they choose to opt out, the family is fine with that. But both the author and this reader are dubious about this claim.

Some vloggers say they want to preserve their memories, and sure, old family photos and videos are fun, but of course, this is hardly a rationale for sharing it with millions. Some say they

are so proud of their family and want to show them off

Some (barely) gloss over the money. It is more than possible that some have additional kids because it is good for business.

What’s missing in this book is a detailed discussion of the readers. Is the influencer readership largely female? (How many busy working moms have the time to endlessly scroll feeds from all these influencers?) The author says she spent many hours reading the influencer posts, but then, she was researching a book. She thinks the fascination for readers is a combination of identification with the influencers, ‘natural human curiosity’ about how other families live their lives, and rubber-necking, but there are no stats to really back this up. Are lots of men really interested in the gory details of pregnancy and miscarriage and sore nipples, and for what purpose besides the obviously creepy?

A chapter does discuss the unsavory aspects. It is routine to get comments from older men who comment approvingly on a child’s beauty. There are requests to show more of the children, more of their bodies, and much worse that the families uneasily block and ignore, with little help from the massive internet companies who are also getting wealthy off this cesspool.

The author’s own motherhood journey is mentioned periodically as an explanation for her interest in the mom-influencers.

I am frantic for a model of how to be a mother. I look to my sisters and my friends and my own mother. I read parenting books. I listen to a podcast. But mostly, I look to my phone and the mom influencers who live inside it.

But why? She says that ‘motherhood in America is a uniquely lonely and isolating experience’, but she is not alone: she has sisters and friends and a mother, so what she gets from the influencers is not really explained.

The book is well put together and well researched, and I’d recommend it over actually going down the black hole of influencer content.

---