Meet The Sharents
Like everyone else in 2020, Grant Khanbalinov downloaded Tik Tok. He wasn't trying to learn dances or find a community- he wanted to learn the platform for his marketing job. To practice using the app, he made videos with his wife and kids. Then a video of his three-year-old daughter went viral, and Grant’s account blew up. He gained millions of followers and eventually made hundreds of thousands of dollars from his videos. It all felt like a dream, until…one night he realized there is a dark side to sharing his kids online.
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You can follow Grant on Tik Tok @heyelliamfamily.
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This week’s bonus episode on TTFA Premium is an interview with Sarah Adams (@mom.uncharted), an advocate for children’s privacy online, and Chris McCarty, a 19-year-old who is working to make policy changes to protect the children of influencers.
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Follow our other show, The Terrible Reading Club, to hear an upcoming episode featuring Nora and friend of the pod Kate Kennedy and their conversation around books that explore this idea of "sharenting".
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If you want to learn more about sharenting and putting kids on social media, check out these resources:
Surgeon General report on social media’s effects on teens
YouTubers Myka and James Stauffer shared every step of their adoption process. Until the last via The Cut
A Child’s Tik Tok Stardom Opens Doors. Then A Gunman Arrives via New York Times.
18-year-old sues her parents for sharing childhood photos
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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.
Introduction
Podcast Intro: I was in bed at one o'clock in the morning. And this thought came to like, what the hell am I doing? Like, why am I making videos of my kids? Why am I exposing my children on the internet? Um, How are you? Most people answer that question with fine or good, but obviously it's not always fine and it's usually not even that good. This is a podcast that asks people to be honest about their pain, to just be honest about how they really feel about the hard parts of life. And guess what? It's complicated.
I'm Nora McInerny and this is terrible. Thanks for asking.
[00:01:00] music
Nora: I am an online person. I have been for a long time. I'm of the generation where my first Facebook account was attached to my college email. I blogged my entire 20s. The minutiae of every day was laid out on Tumblr. Whenever a new social media platform emerged, and this has been true now since the early 2000s, I made and account and threw myself in.
My audience was: nobody, friends and family, and a handful of strangers. This was my online journal. Aaron's treatment of his brain tumor was documented on Instagram. I was writing updates about his health on Tumblr. And when we had a baby together in 2013, it felt natural to share my son on these platforms as well.
At first, most of the people who saw these photos were my family and friends. But then Aaron died, our obituary for him went viral, I wrote a book, started this podcast, and all of a sudden my social media pages weren't just for friends and family - they were a tool to connect with listeners and readers, and there were a lot more people watching. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Over 100 thousand.
And the people in this community, as wonderful and thoughtful as most of you are, are still strangers. Well, I know some of you now. Hello Dan, Kathleen, Carly…But most of you? I do not know.
And sometimes... strangers recognized my kid when we were at the grocery store. Or Target. Or heading into the pediatrician. They knew he was a little boy who lost his dad, whose mom was grieving a version of life that wouldn't happen...and as he got older, it started to freak him out that so many people knew this.
So a couple of years ago, I stopped sharing him- and his siblings- online. I gave them all some privacy.
The decision to [00:03:00] stop posting about my kids didn't happen overnight. There was some denial, some hard conversations and an inciting incident where my kid googled himself and was horrified to learn that there were toddler photos of him on the internet. Turns out, kids are embarrassed by the fact they used to be babies.
I wrote an entire chapter about this in my book of essays, Bad Vibes Only, about that period in my life, what led to it, and how I feel about it now.
Because as easy as it is to judge what I put online – and judge myself I did – I could also justify it.
[music]
Parents are all over social media, sharing details about their kids. Milestones their infant is hitting. Pictures from the first day of school. Videos from a dance recital.
For many parents I know, social media is a way to share with friends and family.
But there's a whole other part of [00:04:00] the Internet, the one I found myself on the edges of, where parents have a lot more followers than friends and family. And a lot of the content on their pages involves their kids.
These influencers, or people paid to promote products on their social media posts, have introduced their kids to hundreds of thousands, and even millions of people online.
[music down]
They are sometimes called sharents - oversharing parents- and when we follow them, we learn more about their kid than kids we actually know in real life.
We know their kids names, and their feelings…
[fade up Tik Tok video]
Parent 4: We came here a few weeks ago and it wasn't open, and the disappointment on Olsen's face was so sad,
Nora: We see where they play during the day.
Parent 4: We just got to this park All right. Are y'all ready, daddy? So excited.[00:05:00]
Nora: We see their daily routines...
Parent 3: Starting off super strong with Gemma throwing a bit because Ellery looked at her and it made her leg hurt. (fade down) We got her hair done and moved on to Ellery.
Nora: We see moments that are usually private.
Parent 2: Good morning. He's so happy to see you. She's
Nora: The kids are even in the sponsored posts, selling us stuff.
Parent 1: So what are you wearing? Exactly, exactly. (fade down) She's wearing this blue dress with nude leggings, crocheted shoes, and some bows.
Nora: The thing about this kind of content, is that the kids are one of the reasons people watch the videos. People scrolling like to see the kids say funny things, or enjoy [00:06:00] watching how another families live. I like this! I've seen really funny, sweet, moving videos of kids doing funny, sweet or moving things! The followers of these families feel like they know these people, and the kids become characters in these little stories we are following in our phones.
But... we don't actually know these people.
Nora: One day last year, I was scrolling my Tik Tok for you page and in between the makeup tutorials I might try and videos of disgusting swimming pools being transformed into sparkling swimming pools, I came across a video that stopped my swiping.
Grant Khanbalinov: First, I wanna say thank you for the support on this. Um, you know, there's so many different factors and reasons on why we stopped doing family TikTok. I'll just name a few of them. Now. Mental health of the kids, kids should be kids. They shouldn't be, you know, employees. They shouldn't be making you money. They should be kids.
Nora: When I clicked on this guy's profile, I saw he had 3.2 million followers, which meant he was a legit influencer. And if he was sharing his kids, a lot of people were seeing them. But as someone else who once shared a lot of my kids online and later changed my mind, I wanted to hear his story. So I clicked the profile and sent this dad a DM.
Grant Khanbalinov: So my name is Grant Khanbalinov. I'm a 13 year Navy veteran who's medically retired. and I guess I'm a, like former family vlogger, former family, Toker.
Grant Khanbalinov: One of my final assignments while I was in the Navy was I was, something called their national social media trainer. So I traveled the country and I was training, sailors and different commands, how to use social media, how to recruit, how to do all these things using social media, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat. You know, I, I pretty much had a [00:08:00] knowledge of all of them. and TikTok started to emerge at that time and that was one platforms that I had to kind of really dig into and see if that's something that we could use.
Grant Khanbalinov: so it really just started for like a work thing and then I made a video with, my daughter and it went viral. I had my daughter with me and I was like, okay, now like repeat after me. Say 'I will never have a boyfriend'. And as soon as I said boyfriend, she screamed out 'no!' . And you know, like that video went super viral and got millions of views and you could see it like traveling across the globe. Like first went viral in the United States.
[ sound design of social media pings]
Then it went viral in Italy, then [00:09:00] Spain, then Russia, because like the languages and the comments would change. and then I did another video with, um, my son a few days later, which also got millions of views and it was like this time machine video to where like, I walked into a room and my son walked out. and same thing. It just, you know, millions of views and likes and comments and it started to spread across the globe. And that's when it kind of like hooked us, like, Hey, this is, this is what we should be doing.
Nora: Grant starts making a lot of videos, and many of them feature his kids. His kids were 3 and 5 when he started posting on Tik Tok, that perfect age where kids say hilarious, bananas things and aren't self conscious about it. The videos Grant posted were not embarrassing- his kids weren't having a meltdown or running around naked or anything like that. They were family friendly videos. Like his daughter talking about Crocs.
Elliana: If you ain't [00:10:00] crocin' and sockin'
Nora: Or both of his kids reacting to someone dressed as the Grinch busting into their living room.
[video for this is saved in Google Drive]
Grant Khanbalinov: we were doing three to five videos a day for probably two to three years. I would say it would be a pretty 50 50 split between some of them being completely scripted and practiced to some of them just like regular family stuff.
Nora: Regular family stuff like...talking to his daughter about her school picture, where she's holding her hands in front of her face, and each finger has a ring on it.
Grant Khanbalinov: So you had picture day yesterday? Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Can I ask you something? What's going on here this month to show me your rings off. You want them to show your rings off with the deluxe package? This,
Nora: Grant was having fun making these videos and his kids seemed to be having fun too. And with each video of the kids dancing with their mom, or talking to the camera, more and more people followed Grant's account.
[let's do sound design of social media noises. little pings like his follower count is racking up]
Grant Khanbalinov: you see the likes coming and you see the comments and you see the money and people are recognizing you, you know, it is an addiction. it's raising your serotonin levels and it's putting you in a better mood. And then on the flip side, when it's not happening and your videos are not getting the likes that they should, you're, you're in a horrible mood cause you're not getting that, morale boost.
Nora: Look, most of parenthood, most of adulthood is really mundane. Grant works his marketing job, unloads the dishwasher, folds laundry, takes his kids to school and all the other things that made him like every other Dad. But on Tik Tok, Grant felt special. After about 6 months of posting, Grant gets a message from a company asking if he wants to get paid to promote a water bottle.
Grant Khanbalinov: Our first brand deal, we were like, oh wow, we got a brand deal. It was $150 for 10 videos. which for us then was like, oh, look, like, look at you guys, like you're making money already. You're so small. and then they started to increase and then like, a brand would come in and paid us $13,000 for a 30 second video. And then another brand came in and paid us $10,000 and another brand. And I'm like, we're literally making my entire paycheck in 30 seconds.
Nora: Influencer marketing has blown up in the last few years. As people spend more and more time on social media following celebrities or other people with big followings, brands want to monetize those eyeballs. So people like Grant, or sometimes me, who have a lot of people following him, get paid to promote products, companies and vacations.
Since a lot of Grant's content featured his kids and his life as a dad, the brands wanted that for their ads as well.
Grant Khanbalinov: And that's kind of like where it grabs you. It's like, you know, you're going from working this nine to five job to, money just like pouring in. and I think that's like one of the big hooks that are out there. And, compared to others, we were just like micro influencers on TikTok. 3 million followers on TikTok is like a hundred on Instagram, you know? but there's other people out there that are making 50, 75, a hundred thousand dollars per 30 seconds.
Nora: To be clear I am not one of those people. Grant and his wife are stunned at the kind of money they were making from TikTok. It was enough money that they realized they needed to come up with a plan. One thing they decided early on was that this wouldn't be their main income, no matter how much they made. They would still pay their household bills with the salaries from their jobs.
Grant Khanbalinov: Because we did recognize that our kids were the ones working for this. So what we would do is we would split it into three, 30% would go immediately to the kids, into their savings accounts. 30% would go towards taxes because there's kind of like contract jobs. and then the other 30% would just go for like experiences for them. So whether it's Disney or buying them things or something like that. So at least we have that, like our, our kids are, you know, they have a little bit of a safety [00:15:00] net.
Nora: For a while, that safety net made Grant feel really good about this little side job. He was giving his kids a cushion in the future, which is a very hard thing to do as a Millennial parent in this economy!
But more brand deals meant they had to keep making content. If they got more followers, they'd be paid more. To get more followers, you have to post regularly and consistently. He couldn't stop posting for days or weeks, he had to keep feeding the machine to stay relevant.
And eventually, that came at a cost.
Nora: Grant and his family are making significant money from posting on Tik Tok, and financially, it feels like a dream. He and his wife are able to take the kids on vacations and put money away for their future.
But when you're living some of your life online, it's easy to forget all of these people who follow you and these interactions you have don't just say in your phone. Aside from the bots, those usernames are connected to real people, who also live real lives out in the world. And they were seeing Grant and his kids in real life.
Grant Khanbalinov: it would be everywhere, malls, in the middle of the street, outside at a park. Just everywhere. Now we live in North Florida and you know, it still kind of happens to where like someone will be like, oh, is that Liam and Eliana? Or you, Liam and Eliana's dad? Or You're Liam and Eliana's mom. And like they ask questions like, oh, can we see the kids? And I'm sure it's totally harmless, you know, it's like a 15 year old girl. But if they're asking, you know there's some 57 year old man at home eating Cheeto's off of his stomach that also wants to see it.
This was the first alarm bell for Grant. He hadn't thought about it before, that people watching his videos might live in his town. He starts to feel more exposed...startsto feel [00:17:00] like their Tik Tok account was making his kids more vulnerable
We would get babysitter and we would always like screen the babysitters before they would come in and wewe would have them meet while we were around. and we would first see if they noticed us. then we would also then give them the heads up, like, listen, we do have, this strong following and these kids are out there so we would really appreciate if you keep where we live private, if you do not take any pictures or videos of the kids or anything like that, um, just for our own privacy.
Nora: That might sound hypocritical to some of you..that the babysitter needs to prioritize the kids' privacy but Mom and Dad can post 3-5 videos a day. It might feel easy to judge him...but I empathize with Grant.
I can say now that some part of my brain knew that I was exposing my son without his consent. But for a couple years, I just treated it [00:18:00] like a really tiny voice in the back of my mind. A little part of me felt like I might be sharing too much....but then hundreds of people would justify my choice by liking the post.
I was also lonely. My husband had died, and the Internet stepped in to be the witness for the raising of my son. When you don't have someone on the couch next to you to say, "oh my GOD look how funny he is pretending to call our friend Kara on the phone!" The internet will do.
Grant Khanbalinov:There was times where people would come and attack us on TikTok and be like, you know, you're oversharing and you're this, and you're that. And you know, my wife and I would go in and defend it. When you're in it, you try to defend it as much as possible and you're doing the right thing. And like, this is what every kid wants, like every kid wants to be famous, every kid wants to be an influencer. Every kid wants to be TikTok [00:19:00] famous right now. Which is like, for the most part true. They like they do because this is like the hot thing.
we never forced them to do something or they never did anything that like we could tell that they weren't having fun. But then after a while you realize that they're only having fun because you're having fun and they only want to do it because you wanna do it. You know, like these are your kids and they look up to you and they're, they think that like this is the right thing to do. but as we were diving like deeper and deeper into this, I noticed that, they started to focus so much on what are the comments? how many likes did videos get? How many views did videos get? Why did know this video get more views with Liam in it and this video did not with Eliana and it and vice versa. And then they started to read and they started reading comments themselves. And whenever we would go into like experiences, whether it's go to Disney or go like, you know, whatever indoor skydiving or to the zoo, it was [00:20:00] less about what's going on in the outside world and more of, where's the camera? Where do I look like to make this content? And once we started to see that, both my wife and I were like, like, what are we doing? This isn't how we want our kids to grow up. We don't want them to be influenced by some 57 year old man in a basement eating Cheetos off of his chest, while watching our videos.
Nora: This is the second time Grant's brought up this Cheeto man image so now I'm really thinking about it. He's essentially describing the Chicken Man from Toy Story 2 as the person watching videos of people's kids....which is sufficiently weird when I spend too much time there. But it brings up a very important part of this conversation about putting our kids online.
While a lot of people scrolling Tik Tok might be casually interested...some people are...I'm sorry to say, sickos. When you have hundreds of thousands, or millions of followers, you can never know everyone watching. That was one of the things I wasn't considering when I was posting my kids online - the possible danger that could come with their face and names and personal information being available through a quick Google search.
And this is what Grant was starting to think about in October 2022. He was becoming more aware of how exposed his kids were...and it wasn't sitting well with him.
Grant Khanbalinov: I've never had an epiphany before in my life. This was like an epiphany, like two o'clock in the morning. And this thought came to like, what the hell am I doing? Like, why am I making videos of my kids? Why am I exposing my children on the internet? Why am I treating them like employees and not like children? Why am I taking time away from them by putting, a camera in their face constantly? And it was just like all [00:22:00] these thoughts started rushing through my mind. I'm like, we're done. No more.
Nora: The next morning, Grant tells his wife about this lightbulb moment.
Grant Khanbalinov: she didn't even fight it. She was like, okay, we're done. You know, no, no more kids on social media. It's, you know, it's totally fine.
Nora: The decision is made: no more kids on TikTok. Grant and his wife will keep the account, but pivot the content. And Grant has to try to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
Grant Khanbalinov: at that point I just spent days, hours and hours and hours and hours every single day deleting , and videos and, You know that that's only gonna go so far because the internet is forever. And there’s people who have saved the videos or have them downloaded to their phone, but it was at least a little bit of damage control.
Nora: The Internet is forever! I think that's the Don't Drink and Drive slogan of this generation...people tried to warn us when we were in college! and while it's true, Grant is trying his best to fight it.
Grant Khanbalinov: If you still search our handles, videos will still show up that like people have saved and reposted, and I'm like commenting on the videos like, hey, like can you please take this down?
Nora: He asks his followers to help him
Grant Khanbalinov: so if you guys see any videos of Liam or Eliana circulating out there, floating out there, please comment. Please report the video, help us get some of the stuff taken down at least a little bit.
Nora: After a few weeks of removing old videos, Grant makes the video I found, explaining exactly why he took his kids off social media.
Grant Khanbalinov: Honestly, it was like, it, it was positive. You know, everyone was like, we completely agree. This is 100% what you should be doing. This is, you know, what all parents should be doing. And I wasn't like, I wasn't expecting that at all. Like people were saying like, yes, we're gonna miss your kids, but we a hundred percent support this. Over a span of two weeks, we lost a little over 200,000 followers across all platforms. And again, it, it gets to the point to where , I don't care, you know, the, the follower account, the likes and [00:24:00] comments like that stuff, just like I said, overnight, just completely shifted and, it doesn't matter.
Nora: Grant and his wife were running their Tik Tok account like a business, so when they decided to pull the kids out of videos, they changed their product. And they changed their product right before Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Grant Khanbalinov: during the holidays, that's when you see a massive influx brands brand deals. So all of these brands are coming to you like to toy companies and , just, all these companies are coming to you and say, Hey, can you advertise our product and we'll pay you this much? And usually our revenue around the holidays is about six figures.
when we came to this decision, I had to go to all the brands that we were contracted with and I'm like, Hey, show is, this is what happened. , do not wanna kids and, know, we would still love to work with you guys. And 99% of them said no. 99% of [00:25:00] said, wanna see the kids. , and if not, you're out of the contract.
And we had to get lawyers involved to break some of the contracts so we didn't end to pay them. And it's like one of them was a blanket company, , what do you need to see a kid for, for a blanket company? Don't understand. , but yeah, a lot of them fell off and I was like, that's totally fine.
brands will still approach us. , we had one just recently come to us and was about a $20,000 deal, and it was for like a kid's learning platform, and I told him the same thing. I like, listen, I don't know if you've seen our new account, but this is, this is the type of content that we have now. And they were very supportive. They were like, that's totally fine. We don't need to see the kids. We don't need to see their faces. We don't need to see anything, you know, we just want you to talk about it. So we do see revenue still coming in. Uh, again, that's not for us to survive. All of that is still gonna go towards kids and into their safety net.
[ Tik Tok [00:26:00] Audio fades up]
Grant: Babe, we gotta do this trend really quick. Come here. Two three, hit our cups. It's a boomerang. Didn't work. Do it again. Do it again. One, two. No, babe. Too hard. One more time. One more time. (fade down) .
Grant Khanbalinov: I still have a page. it's just my wife and I really, it's just me messing with my wife or her messing with me or some video games. And honestly, it takes the weight off of your shoulders for multiple reasons. Like one, I could show who I truly am. If I slip up and say a curse word in a video, you know, I said it, um, if like we're gaming or whatever it is, like I don't have the constant pressure of like, oh, you're about to get canceled because you're running a family channel and you're showing kids. Like every now and then, uh, my son and I will like live stream playing video games, but it's only me on the screen and you could only hear his voice, but other than that, we, we don't do it anymore.
Nora: And turns out, this decision was good for everybody.
Grant Khanbalinov: So we had this routine, like before bed every night we would watch like five minutes of TikTok. And again, we monitored, we would control what they saw and what they didn't see. And we noticed that like they would sometimes complain about their sleep or they would have nightmares or whatever it is. And they would come into our room at like three o'clock in the morning. And then once we stopped again, it was like a light switch, went off. Like they're sleeping perfectly. They're sleeping through the night. they're not waking up with nightmares. Obviously every now and then they'll come in, but like, just normal kid stuff. Um, but yeah, I would say like the sleep was the biggest one that got a lot better.
Social media just like completely changed and there's things in our feeds that now we don't even follow them and it's just showing up because these algorithms think that that's what we wanna see. Our daughter came up to us and it was like, oh, like I think I'm fat. And I'm like, where are you getting that from? And she's like, oh, well I was [00:28:00] watching YouTube kids and you know, this girl was at the gym. And I looked and it's like this seven year old girl doing sit-ups at the gym and she's talking about like the rolls in her stomach and I'm like, stop watching that shit.
Nora: This year, the surgeon general of the U.S. published a report called 'Social Media and Youth Mental Health'. A study mentioned in the report found that adolescents who spend more than 3 hours per day on social media are twice as likely to experience symptoms of depression and anxiety. It also said the more a teenager spends on social media, the lower their self esteem is, and the worse their body image gets.
This report lays out safety measures that tech companies could implement and gives parents some ideas on how to keep their kids safe.
Which is helpful. But parents playing defense can feel like a David and Goliath situation. Social media is constantly changing. New platforms emerge all the time. The algorithms are hard to predict and the capabilities of this technology seem to only get closer and closer to a dystopian novel. That's hard to try and protect your kid from, and that's something that Grant's been thinking about lately. He's been looking at the advances with artificial intelligence and thinking about how it could be used to trick kids.
Grant Khanbalinov: We had to sit them down and about safe words. Like, Hey, you might get a phone call that sounds just like me. And I say, Eliana, this is your dad. You need to come outside. I'm here to pick you up from camp or whatever. And I'm like, that could not be me. That could be someone using my voice. And I'm like, if you ever think that something might be off or we're not picking you up at the correct time or you know, you're getting a phone call at [00:30:00] a different time. Ask for that safe, ask for that password, ask for that phrase to know that it's us because it's just, it's one of those scary things that, you know, before it was, don't get in the creepy white van of someone, you know, offering you candy and puppies. Now it's like, you have to get them ready to be protected with, you know, from other things.
Nora: This is the kind of thing he's sharing with his followers as well:
Grant: Want you guys to take a look at this. It is absolutely disgusting. It is repulsive. It is a huge reason why we decided to pull our kids from social media. Quebec man sentenced to prison for creating AI generated synthetic child. In the article, you'll see that he had over 445,000 computer files of this type of content.
That's just one person. Imagine all the other people around the world that are doing this, and you don't have to have a massive following. As soon as you put something out there on social media and your account is public and you allow everyone to come in and [00:31:00] see. You are putting your children at risk for something like this to happen.
Nora: Grant knows he made the right decision for his kids. But he also knows that he made the wrong decision for his kids.
Grant Khanbalinov: I would say it's 10% relief, 90% guilt. this is stuff that like, it literally chews me up and kills me at night. How could we have been so stupid to do this for so long? To the point to where I've reached out to mental health counselors and I've, got on medication to walk me through it. And I got to the point to where , yes, we fucked up. And that's something that we're gonna have to work through, you know, the rest of the kids' lives, but, it's better that I'm here and we all work through it together with them than, us continuing to do this just for like views and comments.
music up
I lost those years with my kids, because rather than looking at them, I was looking [00:32:00] into a camera or into a phone screen and I was taking away my experience with the kids and then the kids' experiences with me just to share it with someone else.
Do we still take pictures and videos? Absolutely. But not to make content, just like to make memories and it's a lot less and they just enjoy everything around them a lot more. And you they have their own thoughts and they have their own feelings about things and they're reacting to things differently, um, than when we were just making content. Cuz they started to get used to like, This is what we have to do, you know, to get a positive, you know, impact on social.
Once I got out of it, and, I saw like the mistakes that we were making, you know, it, it changed for me to where what I would like to do now is kind of just like educate others, and that's where my serotonin comes in now, is educating others [00:33:00] on like the mistake that they are making by doing this. And you know, I've reached out to other influencers that we were friends with and I told 'em like, Hey, we're done. We're not doing this anymore. Let me tell you why we're done. You might want to consider stopping too. Here are all of the reasons, and some are like, yeah, you know, we'll think about it. And others would just like get extremely defensive and like, you don't know what you're talking about. My kid loves to do this. And I'm like, okay.
You know that's not something that you notice when you're actually like in the thick of it. These videos are great now. What about when they get older? What about 10 years from now, 15 years from now when they're applying for jobs, it's not the same that it was a while ago. Like now digital footprint follows them. and it's just like the constant of looking for a camera or them looking at us to like tell them what to say or whatever. It was like they weren't developing the way that they should have been. Just [00:34:00] because they constantly had that influence of the internet
they're gonna need therapy 100%. Um, but I feel like everyone could use a little bit of therapy.
Nora: After months of posting about this, Grant started to find more people on Tik Tok agree with him.
Grant Khanbalinov: Parents have not come to me, but kids have. A lot kids in comments and private messages. , I received one, , message on Instagram and it's like, Hey, like this is a burner account. I can't tell you who I am, but our family has millions of subscribers across every single platform there is. And , we absolutely hate it.
And every day that we wake up, there's cameras put in our faces and. We don't even think that we're their kids anymore. We're just their employees. And please continue to speak about this and please continue to raise awareness. And as those like messages and as those comments were coming in, I was like, you know, it just like reinforced our decision of like, this is what we should do.[00:35:00]
(music)
Nora: Grant's videos reach a lot of people like me, who agree with him. And they probably also reach a lot of people who don't agree with him. Who might think he's being too extreme, or focusing on the worst case scenario.
Grant says he totally understands why they do what they do. And he hopes they'll reconsider.
Grant Khanbalinov: if you're just like this average person that nobody knows, nobody follows, nobody recognizes you on the street, you're just, a regular human working a nine to five job, and then you find this fame and it pulls you in. It's no different than a drug. And once you try it, and once you get a taste of it, you want more and you're addicted to it. And I said, you put these blinders on, you don't see anything around you.
And it's like this is everything that you know you've wanted. And you're now providing a life for your kids and your family that maybe you didn't have. You need to know where the [00:36:00] limit is, and you need to know that you can get out and you can stop. It literally keeps me up at night, almost every single night that we did this for so long and we didn't even do a fraction of what some of these other people are doing. I definitely feel like moving forward, like there's there's rehabs for alcohol. There will be classes and there will be sessions on how to pull someone out of that social media addiction.
it gets to the point to where the kids watch YouTube and they see TikTok and they see other kids on tv and They think that's , that's what we want to do. Like we want to be famous and we want to be popular, and we want all these other kids to recognize us and notice us.
But then once you have it, it's kind of like, do do I actually want this? And the big difference between kids on tv, like in Hollywood and in shows and kids on social media, social media is completely unregulated. If I want to put a [00:37:00] camera in my child's face, For 20 hours out of the day and make them do whatever I tell them to do, I can do that. In Hollywood at least there's some sort of reg, regulations. A lot of these parents, there's no limitations, there's no, you know, I can only record my kid for three hours a day. They really do whatever they want. Once you get out and you're like on the outside looking in, you see how like miserable these kids actually are on camera.We have a drinking age. We have a smoking age. This is just the new thing. Drinking and smoking hurts your body physically. Social media is hurting your body mentally, and there's no difference.
(theme music)
Thank you to Grant for sharing his story with us. You can follow him and his WIFE on Tik Tok at hey elliam family that's at h-e-y-e-l-l-i-a-m family.
We are not done talking about sharenting, influencing or kids online.
This week’s bonus episode on TTFA Premium feed features an interview with Sarah Adams.
Sarah Adams: And now that is a piece of, their digital footprint, that if God forbid a bully comes across later in life and says, well, yeah, well, even your dad didn't want you. Look, look what your mom said it like my heart can't take some of those thoughts. Because they're going to deal with the consequences of our actions when it comes to all the things we chose to overshare without their permission, without their consent.
Sarah is an advocate against sharing children online, and is one of the people Grant connected with when he stopped posting his kids online. If not sharing your kids online is something you are considering for your own family, our interview with Sarah might help you.
We also have an interview in that bonus episode with a 19 year old who is advocating for policy changes around putting kids online.
You can find that in the Apple podcast app or over on Patreon, which also has our entire back catalog of episodes, organized by topic, and is a little clubhouse for you to connect with us and with other listeners.†insta
And we have a special episode of the Terrible Reading Club where and friend of the pod Kate Kennedy talk through some recent books about influencer and sharenting culture.
Terrible Thanks for Asking is a production of Feelings and Co, an independent podcast company. We also produce The Terrible Reading Club and It’s Going To Be Okay. Go to feelingsand.co to see all of our shows and shop the merch for all of our shows!
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The team at Feelings and Co is me, Nora McInerny. Marcel Malekebu, Jordan Turgeon, Megan Palmer and Claire McInerny..
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