Branded childhood: Infants as digital capital on Instagram

Abstract

The relationships between childhood, labour and value are changing in today’s digital culture. Drawing on a visual discourse analysis of 10 Scandinavian influencers’ Instagram accounts, this paper explores how the connections between the commercialisation and sacralisation of children appear in the digital age. The results show how infants function as digital capital for building relationships between consumers and products and how they are structured into a framework around consumption and used in narratives to strengthen the parents’ brand. The findings suggest an urgent need for a legal framework for child labour in social media.

Work it baby! A survey study to investigate the role of underaged children and privacy management strategies within parent influencer content

“…For parent influencers, authentic representations of everyday domestic contexts and children are often shared with the ultimate goal to create an illusion of closeness and relatedness among audiences, to ultimately maximize the effectiveness of the incorporated branded content (Campana et al, 2020;Abidin, 2015). As opposed to traditional call-to-action marketing efforts, whereby one exposure to an anonymous child was used to stimulate sales, parent influencers are slowly but steadily building their personal brands and monetizing their family by, inter alia, sharing their child's ultrasounds, child birth details and development with many unknown others (Abidin, 2015;Ågren, 2023).…”