The Influencer Impact

An influencer is someone who builds a social media audience by sharing their life, expertise, or preferences, and who can shape what that audience thinks, wants, and buys. Influencer content often involves:

• • Closeness: They share personal details, daily routines, and emotional moments, which make viewers feel they know them as a friend rather than as a stranger.
  • Reach: Their personal content travels to a large audience they have likely never met.
  • Money: Content creation for many influencers is guided by sponsorships, brand deals, and advertising.

Three aspects of influencer content explain why they are so persuasive, says Liselot Hudders, PhD, Full Professor, Ghent University Director, Center for Persuasive Communication:

Expertise

Influencers specialize in a niche area such as food, toys, fashion, fitness, parenting, or gaming. By concentrating their content in one area, they build knowledge and become opinion leaders. As a result, the products they endorse and the brands they highlight come across as trustworthy to their followers, says Hudders.

Followers then turn to these creators for trends, guidance, and recommendations. Their perceived credibility strengthens the bond: “Because they are experts in a domain and give you insights and new trends, you really believe them and trust what you are seeing,” she says. For a child, this means an influencer is not only entertainment but a trusted source of information about what to buy, wear, eat, and try.

Authenticity

Expertise alone does not explain the pull. Influencers also come across as ordinary people rather than as polished spokespeople, and that sense of realness is part of what makes their recommendations persuasive.

Influencers often reinforce this authenticity by giving followers a glimpse into real aspects of their daily lives, including their friends, their family, their house, and their hobbies. This behind-the-scenes access means followers don’t just see the advertisement, they see the context around it. That fuller picture signals that the influencer genuinely likes what they are promoting. 

This effect is stronger for children because influencer content often looks no different from content posted by an ordinary user. A sponsored post can arrive in the same feed, in the same format, and in the same casual voice as a video from a classmate, which makes it easy for a child to take a paid recommendation as a friend’s honest opinion.

Intimacy

Intimacy reinforces expertise and authenticity. Influencers work to make followers feel personally known. They invite questions, answer them on camera, reply to comments, and respond to direct messages. “You can start to feel as if you have become a friend to that influencer,” says Hudders. 

This bond is known as a parasocial relationship, a one-sided connection with a media figure who does not know you back. People have long formed attachments like this to actors, musicians, and athletes, but social media has changed how these relationships function. Young children and teens are particularly vulnerable to online influencers because they are still developing cognitive reasoning skills, making it harder for them to spot manipulation.

“In the past you could not interact with someone like Oprah unless you were in the studio audience. Social media lets people interact with influencers, especially micro influencers who actively engage with their fans,” says Pamela Rutledge, PhD, MBA, Director of the Media Psychology Research Center and Faculty Emerita at Fielding Graduate University. The exchange remains one sided, however, as the follower knows a lot about the influencer, but the influencer knows almost nothing about an individual follower.

Several features make this bond especially strong for children:

• • Access is constant, so children never have to disconnect from the influencers they follow.
  • Influencers look directly into the camera, break the fourth wall, and speak in ways that feel personal and familiar. 
  • Children build communities around these creators, commenting on posts, interacting with influencers, and connecting with other followers.

(Rutledge)

Taken together, credibility, perceived authenticity, and closeness can strengthen children’s trust in influencers, and trust increases persuasiveness, says Rutledge.

Children treat influencers as role models and often imitate what they see. Influencers are powerful and, arguably, “more powerful than celebrities,” says digital parenting coach Elizabeth Milovidov, PhD, JD. “Research shows that children are more likely to nag their parents for the advertised products after watching an unboxing video than if they watch a traditional TV commercial,” explains Josh Golin, Executive Director of Fairplay. 

In one study, kids watched a video about money and shopping and were then given a classroom shopping setup. The children immediately imitated what they had just watched, working the cash register and asking what things cost, Hudders says. Branded content had a similar effect, sparking interest in stores and products the children had just been introduced to. 

Part of this effect comes from how the human brain is built. Rutledge explains that “the human brain was not developed for social media.” It evolved in a world where eye contact meant another person was physically present, so a look into the camera still feels real. Repeated viewing deepens that emotional connection.

A great deal of influencer content that children interact with is family-based content. Influencer sharenting, where family life itself is the product, takes three recognizable forms, all mostly managed by parents:

• • Mom- and dad-fluencers document their own parenting journey, mixing advice, lifestyle, and personal stories. 
  • Family vloggers turn the whole household into the cast, filming daily life from birthdays to bedtime routines. 
  • Kidfluencers are children who review toys and take on challenges, with parents appearing as supporting characters and other children as the intended audience.

The through-line with each type of these influencers is that “everyday moments become content, and children become part of that brand,” says Hudders.

Children do not gravitate toward creators their own age – they find them too childish, notes Hudders. Children like to watch children that are slightly older than themselves, and those slightly older kids are highly persuasive as a result, she says. Preschoolers in her research also enjoyed watching adult influencers whose content was designed to appeal to children.

Children watch virtual influencers, too. Virtual influencers are digitally created personalities, sometimes an avatar built by a real influencer, sometimes a wholly fictitious character invented by a brand, and either can promote products the way a human creator does, says Hudders.

Influencing has become an aspirational career. A UK poll several years ago found that wanting to be a YouTube celebrity or social media influencer outranked traditional answers such as doctor, lawyer, and firefighter, says Rutledge, and becoming an influencer remains a common goal among children.

The broader effect is on how success is defined. “The influencer culture has really shifted perspectives, making visibility and popularity seem like avenues to success rather than hard work, talent, or expertise,” says Rutledge. “Influencer culture creates unrealistic expectations about what it means to be happy and successful in life,” she says.

Children are a constant presence in influencer sharenting content. In a survey of 89 “momfluencers” in Belgium and the Netherlands, 83% reported featuring their children on social media weekly or daily. Nearly half (46%) participated in commercial collaborations at least once a month, and one in four did so every week. On average, a single sponsored post required 36 minutes of a child’s time.

Risks to children from involvement with parent influencing include:

Identity Development

When a parent builds a public identity for a child, the child usually has little say and may not even know it exists. When the child grows up, they are confronted with a large collection of photos and information that form their public identity, says Hudders. It is unclear how this might interfere with their own identity development or how they can define themselves beyond the digital image created by their parents, she says.

Well-being Later in Life

Posts about a child’s struggles, whether difficulties eating, medical issues, or behavior, do not disappear. That information can be used by other children to bully them, in the schoolyard or online, and children can read the content about themselves. All of these later experiences can cause stress and embarrassment for them, says Hudders.

Privacy Violation

Sharing intimate details with a large audience means a child cannot know what other people may know about them. Others might recognize them when they are out in public and know personal information about them, while the child does not know that person, which can be difficult for their developing sense of privacy, notes Hudders.  

Commercial Exploitation/Child Labor

Monetized content is work. Brand deals now come with detailed briefings, approval rights, and revision requests when content does not match brand values. Because children cannot sign contracts, parents sign and receive the money even when the content is utilizing their children’s time and labor, raising questions about the child’s labor rights and who benefits most.

A 2025 study on kidfluencing identified five fundamental threats to the rights and freedoms of children involved in social media influencing: the right to consent, the right to privacy, freedom from economic exploitation, freedom from harm, and freedom of expression. Kid influencers have become so normalized that questions about these violations rarely get asked, says Hudders.

A preference for influencer content is not necessarily a warning sign. It is part of how children form their identities and learn how the world works, in much the same way they pay close attention to peers, says Rutledge. Children genuinely experience influencers as friends who share a lot of personal detail, and they become emotionally invested, partly because they can see how popular those influencers are.  Influencers who share personal information and reflect back audience emotions feel like real friends. The emotional connection is reinforced as valuable by the influencers’ popularity.

Connecting with influencers carries social currency. Children want to know what their favorite influencers are doing just as they do with their friends, especially since their social lives move fluidly from online to offline. “They talk about these influencers with their friends, increasing their meaning and impact,” says Rutledge.

Criticizing a child’s favorite influencer will end the conversation before it starts. “That’s like insulting one of their best friends,” says Rutledge. Forcing a child to break up with an influencer tends to produce more pushback than change and is very difficult to enforce.

Instead, approach the conversation with curiosity and give children space to talk about what they like about the influencer and why they connect with them, she suggests. It helps to remember what part of the brain you are talking to. This is emotional territory, not rational territory, so explaining why something is wrong will not land, notes Rutledge.

Critical thinking about influencers means pausing to ask questions about who is making the content and their motivations for doing so. It is a habit to build, rather than a lecture to deliver. “Critical thinking and digital literacy are the key tools parents have here,” says Milovidov.

Critical thinking skills help protect children because influencer content is most effective when it feels like authentic sharing rather than advertising. When a child can recognize that a post is designed to persuade, they can weigh it rather than simply absorb it. Advertising literacy relies on a questioning attitude toward what is in front of them, says Beatriz Feijoo, PhD, Associate Professor of Advertising and Marketing at the International University of La Rioja. Research supports this. When children see their parents openly question and poke fun at advertisements, their materialistic desires decrease, says Tim Kasser, PhD, author of The High Price of Materialism and Hypercapitalism.

When nurturing a child’s critical thinking skills, start earlier than you may feel necessary. Waiting until a child is 12 or 13 to introduce these conversations means missing valuable opportunities to build the habit, says Hudders. Even preschoolers watching YouTube can begin learning to think critically about what they see.

Questions to ask your child about influencer content:

• • Why are you watching this? Why are your friends watching this?
  • Who created this message, and why?
  • Who is their audience? Who are they trying to reach?
  • What techniques are they using to get your attention, stir your emotions, or make you want something?
  • What is the underlying message? What lifestyle or values are being shown?
  • What perspectives are shown, and what perspectives are missing?

(Rutledge, Milovidov)

It can also help to “lift the veil” and talk about the “real life” of a favorite kidfluencer – talk with your child about the realities of how much time it takes for their favorite influencer to film and edit their content, and how much less play time they may be enjoying, for example, or even how “real” the shown activities may actually be.

More than ever before, children’s entertainment content is intermingled with commercial messages from influencers. Talk openly with your child about how the influencer business works: why brands pay influencers, how algorithms decide what appears in a feed, and what advertising is designed to do. Parents have an important role here, says Hudders.

It can be difficult to recognize when paid advertising is masquerading as a personal recommendation. Influencers often recommend products as part of their everyday content and expertise, making paid promotions look like genuine favorites. Disclosures can help, but they are imperfect. Paid promotions are supposed to be labeled through platform tools or hashtags such as #advertising or #sponsored, while giveaways can also signal a commercial relationship. But influencers may hesitate to disclose promotions because they fear losing credibility, notes Hudders. Teen influencers in her research also describe the difficulty of being honest about disliking a product when they worry it could cost them future deals or free products.

Importantly, even recognizing content as an advertisement does not make children – or adults – immune to its influence on their behavior, says Marie Bragg, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Population Health at the Grossman School of Medicine, New York University. The goal is to equip children and parents with the knowledge to recognize and think critically about influencer marketing and how it changes their behavior, while recognizing that multibillion-dollar marketing campaigns are deliberately designed to make saying no difficult, she says.

Kidfluencer videos are often scripted, but young children may not recognize that what they are watching is essentially pretend play built around a scenario, says Hudders. As a result, they may come away believing that everyone lives in a big, beautiful house, that they should want piles of toys for their birthdays, or that enormous parties are the norm.

Younger children also struggle with the mechanics and purpose of advertising. Preschoolers can recognize a pre-video ad on YouTube and know to skip it, but they can’t yet explain what advertising is or what it is designed to do, says Hudders. Primary school children have a better understanding of advertising’s purpose but still have difficulty identifying commercial content woven into an influencer’s video.

Media use has become increasingly solitary. Children have their own tablets and phones, while parents are often occupied elsewhere. Sitting next to your child as they watch influencer videos makes it possible to actively mediate what they see and talk through the content as it comes up, says Hudders.

Some of what you see will not be to your taste, and that is part of the point. “We have to look at some of the things and talk about the things that we may not want to, but we have to be there,” says Milovidov.

For younger children, co-viewing works best as coaching. Pair your app with your child’s so you can curate what they see, ask why they like a particular influencer, and encourage the behaviors that support their social development, suggests Rutledge.

Online trends move quickly,  and a child on social media is likely to encounter one on their favorite influencer channels well before a parent hears about it. Watching content together is valuable, but it only shows you what your child chooses to show you. Spending some time on the same platforms independently gives you a broader view of what is circulating in your child’s sphere of influence. “You don’t necessarily have to follow your children, but it helps you to understand what is circulating on those platforms,” says  Kelli S. Burns, PhD, Associate Professor at the University of South Florida. It also helps to know the slang your child’s peers are using, since a trend often has a name long before it has news coverage, says Titania Jordan, Chief Parent Officer at Bark Technologies and co-author of Parenting in a Tech World.

Most viral trends are harmless, and some are genuinely creative. A smaller number involve real risk, whether of physical injury, legal trouble, or pressure to change how a child eats or looks. Algorithms make this harder to track, because every app is working to keep a child in that app, which means a single video a child lingers on can turn into a feed full of similar content, says Jordan.

Most children follow influencers without any cause for concern. What’s worth paying attention to is whether this exposure changes how a child eats, spends money, or feels about themselves. Watch for shifts in everyday behavior, including new eating patterns, sudden interest in particular products or brands, or the adoption of a trend or challenge, says Burns. Not every change signals a problem, since exploring new interests is a normal part of growing up. The question is whether the change traces back to something a child saw online, and whether it is making their life narrower or more anxious. 

Another sign for concern is if a child shows a growing sense of not having enough. Watching influencers can contribute to a feeling of scarcity, and a child may believe that they lack what they need in order to be happy, which can shape a consumer-centered outlook over time, says Jennifer Miller, MEd, author of Confident Parents, Confident Kids. Children who watch a lot of product and unboxing content may ask for more things more often, and may not realize that the items being reviewed were given to the influencer for free, says Burns. It is also worth paying attention to how a child talks about themselves after time online, since comparing yourself to strangers whose lives are carefully curated can leave children feeling worse about their own lives.

A feeling of connection to an influencer is not automatically a problem. Worries that a child who is deeply engaged with an influencer will lose the ability to make friends are overblown, just as learning to text did not stop anyone from reading, says Rutledge. “There are problematic levels of connection and there are very healthy levels of connection,” she says.

There is no evidence that parasocial relationships displace real friendships, except when other mental health issues are present, such as social anxiety or social avoidance. In those cases, the appeal of a friend you never have to speak to can complicate those difficulties, says Rutledge.

A clearer warning sign is distorted expectations about relationships. When a child starts forming unrealistic ideas about what relationships look like, based on a version of romance they see online, it may be time to initiate some conversations with examples that  reconnect with reality, says Rutledge.

Help your child to be intentional about influencer content, emphasizing positive, validating, inspirational, and connection‑promoting content that encourages positive values or behavior. Influencers can model genuinely useful behaviors, such as playing a sport, cooking a healthy meal, or explaining why a goal is worth pursuing, and those examples can help children understand what positive effort looks like, says Hudders. She notes, however, that real behavior change is slow and unfolds over time, which doesn’t always match the fast, fluid rhythm of social media.

Online media adds something traditional television never could: the ability for children to find people who share their identities or life experiences. Television typically showed kids characters unlike themselves, but “online, you can find someone who is just like you, and there are many wonderful things about that,” says Sherri Hope Culver, MLA, Director of the Center for Media and Information Literacy and Professor at Temple University.

Many young people, including those in the LGBTQ community, find influencers who share their struggles and experiences, and that sense of recognition can feel deeply validating, says Rutledge. Inspirational influencers can help children feel less alone and more understood.

Social media content feeds can narrow in topic focus over time, making it common for children to become increasingly exposed to the same kinds of content. “It’s easy to get lost in the algorithm,” says Milovidov. This algorithm focus can carry a child toward hate content and normalize fringe ideological material and perspectives.

The concern is not just the content itself, but the narrowing of the feed. Algorithms can create a silo of people and ideas that reinforce one another, with the walls closing in over time, says Milovidov. Repeated exposure can also desensitize children to violent or hateful content.

Social media use can quietly encourage goals that are difficult or impossible for a child to achieve. Concerns about beauty standards and social comparison are familiar, but the same dynamic applies to popularity: what makes someone a good friend, what makes someone popular, and what a person might do to get attention online.

The deeper concern is how children define success. “It’s shifting from internal competence to external competence as a marker of success,” says Rutledge. Talking with your child about what they value, separate from what gets “likes” or performs well online, gives them an anchor that a like count cannot provide.

Social comparison can be positive or negative depending on how it’s framed mentally, and parents should notice how their child is engaging with “inspo” content. Fixating on something you will never have is the negative version, says Rutledge. But noticing that practice and persistence can lead to improvement is the useful version. “If you can keep shifting the point of view to what you can take away, that’s positive. That builds your competence,” she says.

The practical goal is to turn watching into doing. Parents can help children move from what they see online to something they can actually do or learn from it, suggests Culver.

Children do not always realize that they have control over what appears in their feeds and that algorithms can be retrained. Remind them that they can unfollow, mute, or block accounts, even when the person behind them is perfectly nice but their posts are simply irritating, says Rutledge. They do not have to keep following someone just because they like them or know them.

YouTube was not built for children which is why YouTube Kids exists as a separate product, notes Milovidov. If you do allow a young child to use the main platform, sit with them and teach them how to use its tools. “Show them how to block, report, mute” – even a four-year-old is perfectly capable of using these tools, she says.

Better still, help your child choose alternatives that stop fully when the video ends rather than automatically playing another video or recommending what to watch next. Look for a streaming series or channel that starts and ends without a queue of automatic recommendations, suggests Milovidov.

A few days of notes can reveal patterns that are easy to miss in the moment of scrolling through the feed. Have your child jot down what they did, why they opened the app, and how they felt before and after, using smiley faces if that makes it easier, suggests Rutledge. Keep it simple enough that they will actually do it.

The goal is not to quit social media, which is neither realistic nor necessary. “You can make choices and curate the content you’re engaging with, and that’s really the key to positive use of technology,” says Rutledge. Try it alongside your teen and compare notes, she suggests; the conversations that come out of it can be valuable.

Many parents think that their kids want to be influencers, but first ask yourself, “Who really wants to be the influencer?” The motivation should come from the child rather than the parent, says Rutledge. Parent and child need to be in it together, and at some point, the child needs to have ownership over their own image, she says.

Research suggests that almost all kidfluencer profiles are actually managed by the parents, so even though the profile looks like it’s managed by the child, usually the child has no direct access to the profile, says Hudders.

If a child wants to become an influencer, parents should talk about the power and responsibility that it entails, what important boundaries and rules you need to respect as a family, and in which ways your child can contribute, says Miller. Miller relays the story of her son, who asked if he could produce unboxing videos, but Miller set the boundary that he could produce videos that either ‘teach something,’ ‘tell an original story,’ or ‘help someone,’ and offered him examples in his interest areas. Four years later, he was publishing videos on YouTube on ways in which he customizes model trains with his own creativity and has learned extensively about how to manage social media in healthy, constructive ways.

Maintaining a public persona alongside a private self is difficult at any age, and especially challenging for young people who are still figuring out who they are. “It’s very difficult, no matter what your age, to maintain your sense of identity – i.e. what’s my online persona vs. my offline self,” explains Rutledge.

An influencer is supposedly showing followers their authentic self, and if they reveal too much of themselves online, they run the risk of letting the feedback that they get from their fans define their identity, rather than their intrinsic motivations. This raises questions worth asking out loud: “What do you get to keep private? How much is too much? Where is the line?” says Rutledge.

It’s important that parents closely monitor children who begin to have a presence on social media and help them steer towards their own authentic personalities and interests, and not just what’s getting the best engagement or response from their followers. These conversations need to be revisited often and over time rather than settled once, because unmanaged identity conflict can have serious consequences for child performers, she says.

Fame behaves a lot like addiction, says Rutledge. You love it, then resent it once your privacy is gone, then find you cannot live without it. Maintaining that level of attention can push people toward poor judgment and often ends in mental health struggles.

A realistic picture of the chances for financial success from being an influencer also deserves a frank conversation. Slightly fewer than one in 20 influencers earn enough to make a living, and that means covering the electric bill, not getting rich, says Rutledge. The influencers making serious money are the exception rather than the rule, and are essentially running full-time operations, often with staff, lighting, and makeup crews behind the scenes, she notes.

When a family’s income becomes tied to a child’s appeal, a concerning conflict of interest can emerge. A cute two-year-old becomes a four-year-old, but the pressure to keep performing does not go away. “The job of the parent is to raise and protect their child,” says Rutledge, which can conflict directly with needing that child to earn money.

Any family with a child influencer should start therapy right away, says Rutledge, not because anything is wrong, but because everyone needs regular reality checks, she notes.

Connecting influencing work to a purpose larger than getting attention can give a child something more durable to identify with over time. The pressures of fame are often offset when influencing becomes part of something bigger, such as wanting to use a platform to save abandoned dogs or address world hunger, says Rutledge.

Decide in advance what your child will and will not promote, and revisit those boundaries as they grow. “Be careful about the boundaries of product sponsorships,” says Bragg. For example, think about when a child gets older, will they be allowed to test e-cigarettes or junk food on their profile.

Stay aware of what is circulating on the platforms more broadly, too. Influencer content can be genuinely prosocial, but it can also spread trends that put young people at risk, says Bragg.

The social media feedback loop can hook parents as easily as children. A picture goes up, the likes and comments pour in, and it feels good, says Ryan Allen, MS, LPCC-S, Licensed Professional Counselor with Preschool Therapy & Consulting. “When things start to feel good, our brain starts to justify it so that we can get that good feeling again,” he says. Over time, that can make it easier to rationalize a situation even when it is becoming unhealthy.

The drift can be gradual, which makes it worth naming out loud. It can pull a family toward increasingly exploitative content, such as creators who have built followings entirely around pranking their own children, says Allen.

Being the parent of a child influencer is a bigger job than being the parent of a child. You are the legal guardian, the digital guardian, and the guardian of the child’s psychological and emotional well-being, says Milovidov. That may mean becoming “that nightmare stage mom that nobody wants on scene.” Tech companies will not do it for you, she notes, because their job is to maximize profit.

Legal protections have not caught up. Children are earning real money with essentially no protections in place, says Rutledge, making it critical for parents to take on the protector role and keep it separate from their financial interests.