Friday essay: family as 'brand' – the rise of the digital mumpreneur

“Taylen has become a brand,” says Angelica Calad, the mumpreneur behind the #influencer account #taylensmom. Taylen Biggs, age five, has more than 150,000 followers. In an era of advertising ennui, #influencers like Taylen’s mother can collect more than 3,000 likes on a single post, with some garnering sponsorships worth thousands.

“Believe in your inner Beyoncé,” declares one post, tagged “#bdaymonth #tayoncé”. The text is accompanied by a photograph of Taylen in a silver leotard topped with a gold tiara. US-based Taylen has worked with fashion labels Betsey Johnson, Sherri Hill and Little Miss Aoki, walking their shows at Fashion Week, along with the Kardashians. Between back-to-back photoshoots Angelica can be seen spruiking concepts for a television show hosted by her daughter, or even a sideline in home decor. “Tag your girls,” declares another post, this time on Facebook. “I meannnn Pay attention to that leg pose.”

A few seconds of video posted above the text features Taylen gazing at a bunny-shaped mirror in a way that’s guaranteed to set a second-wave feminist spinning in her grave. But Taylen’s mother doesn’t see it like that. Angelica understands the branding as a natural extension of her maternal caring work. “I’m a stay-at-home mom, who runs my daughter’s career,” she told Cosmopolitan last year.

And she’s far from alone. There’s six-year-old London Scout, who debuted at New York Fashion Week waving to a crowd of paparazzi-style photographers. “Just an average day in the life of my 4-year-old,” London’s mother, Sai De Silva, messages her daughter’s 105,000 followers.

Then there’s Alonso Mateo, age ten, the so-called prince of Instagram, who appeared in the Dior show at Paris Fashion Week. Mateo, commonly photographed in his signature drop-crotch pants and Ray-Ban sunglasses, has more than 600,000 followers. Mateo turned Insta-famous before the age of four.

But, for sheer numbers, few can beat Korean toddler Yebin, who went viral as a three-year-old with over 21 million views on a single YouTube video. Yebin has now moved with her parents to the United Arab Emirates, where demand for Yebin product endorsements runs high.

Of course, back in Australia there’s Roxy Jacenko who runs a well-tracked account for her daughter Pixie, boasting more than 100,000 followers and a signature line of hair bows.

Middle-class horror

There’s a special kind of middle-class horror that attaches itself to parents who make money out of their children by setting them to work as social media celebrities. It’s a qualitatively new and largely symbolic horror that bears little or no resemblance to the centuries-old spectre of children set to work as chimney sweeps or in match-making and boot-blacking factories.

“I look at this whole thing from afar and think, ‘This is not normal’ … ,” Jacenko confessed in 2015, “but if you see an opportunity, if you’re savvy, you maximise it.”

Condemnation of #influencers runs high in mainstream media, where the comment boxes invariably teem with outraged incredulity – “Wrong on so many levels,” said one commentator on a Guardian story about the high-end world of children’s fashion. “What a terrible indictment on our society,” declared another.

When New South Wales police investigated a case involving obscene photographs of Jacenko’s daughter circulating on social media in 2016, the mother received little journalistic sympathy. “You’re absolutely right to be disgusted”, Waleed Aly told Jacenko on Channel Ten’s The Project. Aly then set out to address what he called the “broader criticism” of Pixie’s Instagram account, speculating that at some point in the future Pixie may well take legal action against her mother for “commercialising her daughter as a four-year-old” and “turning her into a commodity”.

And yet, strangely enough, this same level of disapprobation does not attach itself to Zoë Foster Blake, the former Vogue Australia fashion editor and founder of @ZoTheySay, a similarly well-tracked – albeit, more restrained – site which combines pictures of Foster Blake’s luxurious lifestyle, including her spritely Bonds-clad toddler Sonny and baby daughter Rudy, with a line of “Go-To” skincare products.

A typical Instagram round up from Buzzfeed or Cosmopolitan magazine may read “29 Times Hamish Blake’s Son Was the Cutest Kid You’ve Ever Seen”, “Sonny Blake Was 100% The Cutest Part Of Hamish And Andy’s 60 Minutes Interview” or “Sonny’s got a Sister!”, but Zoë seems to have her audience on side when she insists in relation to Sonny, “we are as sure as shit not exploiting him”.

It seems Foster Blake’s squeaky-clean image falls more neatly within the bounds of acceptable maternal representation, whereas Jacenko, the founder of the Sweaty Betty public relations firm and new owner of a $6.5 million Sydney mansion, is conspicuously fond of challenging the limits of the acceptable. She recently posted a photo of her backside in a thong on Instagram.

A social media phenomenon

Typically, disapprobation of the sort expressed by men like Aly, and also by many women, lacks the awareness that the mumpreneur phenomenon is not a case of “us” and “them” – the saintly mums and the money-grubbing sinners. Rather, along with child beauty pageants and feature-length toy commercials, family #influencers are inextricably entwined with the fabric of our culture. This is a social media phenomenon generated, produced and owned by everybody.

Indeed, down the rabbit holes of the internet, you’re likely to find mothers swapping tips on how to launch their own #ad company, with many other mothers seeking guidance on how to raise their children and make ends meet.

Inflexible and unforgiving work schedules loom large as topics in mothers’ chat forums, alongside discriminatory attitudes towards part-time workers and complaints about poor-quality part-time jobs and the high cost of child care. There’s also a strong sense of stay-at-home mothers wanting to validate their life choice not just by calling it a “job” but also by turning it into a viable income-generating activity.

“It’s kind of a dream gig to be able to stay at home and get paid to do it,” says Emily Frame, the owner of the blog Small Fry. “I can be a stay-at-home mom, and I get to be creative.”

Nor is #influencing entirely confined to normative family arrangements. “We are two mums, two sets of twins and a dog living our own ‘happily ever after’ in London,” declares Meet the Wildes, a briefly lived mummy blog production with a magical fairytale quality, featuring lots of long frolicking walks and inspiring same-sex parenting advice, set against a supernaturally green landscape.

The micro-celebrity of Instagram is especially appealing to mothers who feel limited in their social and economic agency. As mothers have moved back into the workforce, a lower cultural value has been placed on their caregiving work. But on the internet, these mothers appear to turn their social identity as carers into economic capital as #influencers.

Here, what sociologist Kara Van Cleaf once called the “fantasy” that motherhood could become an “entrepreneurial act” is daily conjured as reality. In this sense, family #influencers exhibit an uncanny understanding of the logic of socio-economic life – trading emotion for personal gain begins to present itself as an apparently rational choice.

These monetised blogs seem to bring their owners not only income but also a chimerical sense of empowerment. Other mothers recognise such women as positive, resilient and creative individuals who are “entrepreneurial” and therefore deserving of value.

And yet, despite the existence of websites like Meet the Wildes, it is relatively privileged, heterosexual, middle-class women with supportive partners who tend to dominate this particular cultural meme.

Moreover, aside from the flexibility, which is deeply valued, digital mumpreneurs often find themselves working more not less. Indeed, despite the hype that exists around a handful of highly paid micro-celebrities, the work for most of them remains precarious and poorly compensated.

Conspicuous consumption

Hashtag influencers accumulate social and economic capital because they turn themselves – and their children – into brands and corporations. But the chimera of corporate branding is no antidote for lives lived in precarious times. The problem is not just that money cannot measure sentiment. Rather, it is that branding and consumption threaten to become the primary mode through which our emotional lives are shaped and measured.

Family branding encourages us to value our social world through newly rationalised forms of emotional and economic exchange – our lives become so many Likes, Tweets and Friend Requests – and we are distracted from the pursuit of more profound and far-reaching social solutions.

Thorstein Veblen, in his sociological classic The Theory of the Leisure Class, was one of the earliest social critics to attempt to grasp the paradoxical relationship between consumerism and inequality. Veblen, writing in the late 19th century, argued that the shift to a consumer society had occurred at a historic point at which commodities were valued less for their intrinsic worth and more for their role as markers of social status or success.