How social media influencers affect children’s anxiety levels

Before taking a deeper look at social media influencers, let’s do a web search.

A quick look on answerthepublic.com – which lists what people are asking about right now – shows an interesting list of searches about influencers.

I’m only quoting the ones tagged with a dark green blob (the blob fades as the questions show up less often). So these are the hot/frequent/current searches:

  • Are influencers celebrities?
  • When influencers cry for likes
  • Will influencers last?
  • Why influencers are bad
  • Where influencers shop
  • How influencers make money
  • Can influencers sell gifted items?
  • Influencers for hire
  • Influencers without makeup
  • Influencers to follow
  • Influencers and fast fashion

This is the tip of the iceberg, but the public is definitely interested in social media influencers!

Illustration of a social media influencer with likes and loves and smilies and hearts responding to the message

What is a social media influencer?

Most parents will already know the answer to this. But maybe you haven’t realised three things:

  • just how far marketing executives have stepped into the situation to recruit and provide goods for children to use in their vlogs (video blogs)
  • how far children simply do not yet have the mental agility and reasoning to realise what’s happening in front of their eyes
  • just how much they yearn to be somebody with the looks and power of the children they watch.

Is your child a Ryan’s World subscriber? Do you even know who he is?? OK, that’s unfair. But this child has 30.7M subscribers and is worth around $32 million. He’s 10. His channel is technically for those aged 2-6…

It's easy to write him off as an innocent bit of screen time, but he’s likely to be on screen in a home near you! Along with many other social media influencers.

Child social media influencers influencing your child

Here's a list of the top 10 child influencers on YouTube. They come from a range of countries.

Some demonstrate toys, games, creative stuff, physical activities and science experiments.

Others dress like mini adults and posture.

These and some other influencers on social media are very young indeed, some are funny, and some are bright and breezy in their presentation. Why would your child not want to be like them?

They’re

  • entertaining, 
  • funny and 
  • popular.

If you’re a child having trouble at school, bored at home, or simply yearning for something else, you’re instantly attracted to anything “entertaining, funny and popular”. And you lap it up.

And that’s before we even talk about the products your child may be influenced to demand after being, well... influenced. 

Why social media influencers are bad for your  child’s anxiety

It’s easy to see how there’s an inherent danger for a child who simply lacks the cognitive development yet to distinguish between reality and a certain amount of “put on” fantasy and hype – which, truthfully, is what the social media influencers I've watched veer towards!

What's so bad about the effects of these influencers? (Not the child or young adult, note, just the effects they're likely having.)

First

What used to be “character advertising” with endearing cartoon characters linked to products (often on packets and on TV), has morphed into real child social media influencers being inextricably linked to the product and therefore to your own child via relationship building, envy of their status, and trust built over time. A lethal cocktail!

The end result for your child is often unhappiness or anxiety about NOT being OK as they are. This can lead to self-harm.

Second

A child who’s influenced to want the product they’re watching the social media influencer advertise or unwrap is going to leverage huge anxiety in their parents, if nothing else.

Mum and Dad can’t afford every last thing they desire. So in turn, being refused the product by parents will feel to your child like emotional deprivation. They’re heavily invested in wanting it and see provision as proof of love at a younger age. This leads to anxiety.

We’re not talking cheap stuff you might afford. It’s always the high-end products that influencers on social media push! Expensive toys, posh trainers, the latest fashions, special food.

Manufacturers now target social media deliberately (via social media influencers, often children and young people) as part of their marketing strategy for high-end products because it's an easy win to pair children with desirable expensive goods/toys/clothes etc.

It’s worth noting that while TV is now quite regulated in what they can show children – and when – vlogging sites are relatively unregulated. Water finds the easiest channel south!

Third

In another worrying development, some advertisers invent digital people to garner followers on social media. These are known as fake influencers! 

But imagine the distress to your younger, vulnerable child to find out the seemingly real person they’re relating to is not real at all? Trust in adults, once destroyed, is not easily regained. It leads to later trouble if not put right as early as possible.

How many children watch social media influencers?

A couple of years ago (2019), Pew Research Centre found that 85% of adults allow their under-11s to watch YouTube, the main platform for social media influencers. That figure will be much larger now – and then Instagram and TikTok have muscled in, too. 

At the time, Ryan’s World was the 6th most watched YouTube site for children.

And now – this year – a study has shown that one in five children wants to be an influencer when they grow up. 

This is turning life on its head! We’d surely all prefer our children to get a work ethic (earn what they need) rather than expect to be given a living in return for praising a product up.

But hot on the heels of many boys wanting to be famous professional footballers (probably girls, too, nowadays!), many children clearly have influencer status at the top of their wish list.

What can you do to mitigate the social media influencers’ influence on your child?

We’re mostly concerned here about helping your children not to become anxious about 

  • what they look like, 
  • the friends they have, 
  • the expensive things they can’t have, or 
  • the things they feel they’re missing out on.

So here are some pretty simple guidelines. They're simple, but in our pressurised, time-poor society they're worth spelling out. That's because it's so easy to just check our text messages and ignore the messages our children are grabbing from a screen near you!

1 Find out what they’re watching and watch some of it with them to get a feel for it. 

Strangely, although a shared activity validates it as worthwhile in your child’s eyes, in this case you’re setting up a friendly atmosphere for discussion of social media influencers!

2 Ask your child what they think of what they’re being shown. 

It might be an unwrapping, a science experiment, a gorgeous-looking kid who’s clearly wearing make-up(!), or a K-drama or K-pop. Whatever.

But ask them the question. You may be surprised what they’re thinking – more mature than you thought? Or a bit naive? (Never assume anything about a child, I’ve learnt in therapy sessions!)

3 Discuss some of the ideas you’ve seen at a later opportunity. 

Don’t spoil their viewing at that moment as this will turn them off. Just watch with them and solicit the odd comment in a shared fashion.

But while doing a chore together soon afterwards, ask for their opinion. Sound tentative, genuinely interested, and (key here) “wondering” or "curious" about a different sort of view on it all. 

Let’s have an example of that one. 

The child or young person in the vlog is happily exuberant. “They don’t have to do stupid reading homework every night,” your child says morosely. This is your entry card!

You might tentatively put forward: “I think the law says they still have to go to school, or at least do their learning at home. Do you think they rush through their homework during the lunch hour or something? Maybe they just don’t do it?”

This isn’t a fab example, haha, but you get the idea. You’re not being the expert and shushing your child down. You’re opening the way to a conversation where they can learn something new without being defensive.

Other example comments:

Questions for a parent to ask tentatively about social media influencers

Those questions – or ones like them in essence – offer the chance for your child to give their opinions without feeling they're already being wronged.

The idea is to feed in counter-ideas that they will not easily forget because they've not been shutting their mind but having a grown-up, friendly conversation with you.

In conclusion

By keeping a conversation open and ongoing, you’re avoiding the great split between real and not real. Not much is all one or the other in life. So it's a good tactic for social media in general.

[I've talked about online content in general here, if you want to read further.]

Our children need to learn early on (sadly) that some aspects of social media are inventions that bear little relationship to real life. You can balance that out with some of the good stuff, of course. Isn’t that what parenting is about anyway? Helping them discern the good, the grey shades, and the downright awful about anything!

If you can walk steadily on this tightrope, your child will be able to stay more grounded and there’s far less chance of anxiety creeping in on account of them believing that there's a much better life out there somewhere.

I know you’ll be thinking (perhaps!) that all this is obvious and commonsensical. Well it is, in one sense. And I admitted that earlier!

But have you seen how many "social media influencer" notebooks are available on Amazon as super presents for your child??! For them to make notes in to "smash those likes", "make a fortune" or "plan their social media"??

So the key takeaway is: 

Find out what they watch when you’re not aware of it – because they’re at this social media influencer stuff at a much younger age than you might think – and start conversations around the topic now. It's worth it for the long term.

Here's a great article for parents on this topic.

Internetmatters addresses a number of key topics, but this one is really relevant here. 

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