Born to Be Viral: The Real Lives of Kidfluencers

Just finished all six episodes and was genuinely impressed with how well this documentary is done! It's polished, professional, and thoughtfully produced. Each 20-minute episode is short, sharp, and easy to digest, making it both entertaining and accessible.

The topic-child influencers on YouTube-is completely new to me, and I found myself discovering an entire world I knew nothing about. It's not just entertaining; it's also eye-opening and educational. The documentary raises important questions while managing to stay engaging throughout.

It definitely gave me a lot to think about. I'm not sure this is the path I'd want for my own children or grandchildren, but much like AI, it's already part of our world-whether we like it or not. It reminds me of nuclear energy: it has the potential to be incredibly valuable, but also highly disruptive.

I found this to be an eye-opening docu-series. I have a 2-year-old and wanted to better understand the social media world he will likely enter in the future. I was expecting this docu-series to feature tragic, "E! True Hollywood Story"-like stories, but I was (pleasantly) surprised that this wasn't the case. The documentary filmmaker actually showed a lot of empathy toward both the kidfluencers and their parents. At least in terms of the families this documentary filmmaker followed, the parents of influential kidfluencers appear to be doing what they believe is best for their family. While it is easy, from the sidelines, to judge parents of kidfluencers as "exploiting" them, or opening them up to creepers who watch them online, this series showed these parents as being very protective of their children, and thinking in terms of how their social media business will pay for their kids' college education. It's hard to judge parents who have such goals in mind. One of the parents said that he absolutely loves the social media business that he has created with his kids, because it allows him to spend time with them on the job, and because the business is paying for their future.

The series does feature families of kids who do want to be influencers but don't make it. In that set of families, one of the most poignant moments comes in episode 3, when the show features an aspiring kid-influencer named Ethan and his mom. His mom (who has a full-time job that's unrelated to the social media project) is really the driving force behind the attempt to make Ethan into a social media influencer, but her attempts fail. Although Ethan is funny and charming, he just can't get traction with a large audience. His mom is frustrated, and Ethan is sad. The filmmaker asks Ethan if he's happy or sad. He says that he's sad. The filmmaker asks Ethan what makes him happy. He says, "Spending time with my mom and dad." That line put tears in my eyes. To her great credit, Ethan's mom drops the project in order to simply spend time with her kid and be in the moment and create memories, rather than try to force him to become a kid-fluencer and put on a fake show.

Great docu-series. Well worth watching, especially for parents.