If, like many people, you have ever found yourself “Keeping up with the Kardashians” you may have recently seen eight-year-old North West, taking her thousands of followers on a virtual house tour.
The eldest daughter of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West went live on the social media platform TikTok, where users should be over the age of 13 to share content. North can be seen in the video taking her followers around her house. The tour promptly ends in Kim Kardashian’s room when she tells her daughter: “Stop! You’re not allowed to [go live].”
North West has only recently entered the world of TikTok with an account named ‘KimandNorth’, that already has over 2.3 million followers. The account is clearly shared, or at least monitored by Kim – who features regularly on the videos made. Comments are turned off for the public on the account, perhaps to create a more “child-friendly” TikTok experience for the eight-year-old. But this wasn’t enough for North, who wanted full creative control and decided a live video, without her mother’s consent, was the best way to go about it.
Children are always told to never speak to strangers, so for any parent – even Kim Kardashian – a child having access to thousands of strangers at the press of a button is a thing of nightmares. And when it is especially child of high-profile parents, letting them have access to thousands of strangers at the press of a button could be a recipe for disaster.
But is there hint of hypocrisy when you think about how North West was literally born on Season 8 of the TV show ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ and had most of her childhood broadcast and publicised for the world to see?
Like the rest of her siblings, North West has been born into a very privileged position, due to the celebrity status of the Kardashian family. The limelight is all she’s ever known and for her, flashing cameras, not being allowed in public without security and strangers knowing intimate details about her is just part of her “normal life.”
So, no wonder lines are blurred when these children, who have grown up in camera-centred environments, are trying to understand what is and isn’t okay to broadcast to the world and it leads to the question: can children who grow up in the limelight be blamed for their minimal understanding of privacy?
It’s not a rhetorical question. The answer is no.
Children have a hard enough time navigating life and learning about the world around them, without the added pressure of worrying about privacy issues, legalities and maintaining their families’ public image.
At the other end of the spectrum, some celebrity parents decide to keep their children’s lives very private and out of the public eye. Pharrell Williams, Alexis Bledel and Paloma Faith have not even shared their child’s name with the public.
Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher are also parents that keep their children very separate to their celebrity lifestyles. Kutcher has previously said in an interview that they do not share photos of their children as they feel “being public is a personal choice.”
Read more from Kutcher here.
It’s no new surprise that people raise their children in different ways, but the idea of consent when it comes to celebrity parents and what is publicised about their children varies staggeringly.
Perhaps parents, like Ashton Kutcher, prefer to shield their children from the outside world and want them to have a childhood, unaffected by the fact their parents are celebrities. Maybe they remember their childhood and want their own child to have similar memories of all that “regular kid stuff.”
Or you could have the complete opposite, with the parents that push their children straight into the eye of the public and are the ones producing the content to post.
Kulture Cephus Almanzar, Everleigh Rose and Elle McBroom are all children under the age of 10 that have verified Instagram accounts, with over two million followers, that are maintained by their parents.
These accounts all post photos of the children, what they are up to in their daily lives and any milestones they may have. And most peculiarly, despite the accounts being ran by parents, the content published is written from the perspective of the child. Kulture, the child of Offset and Cardi B, is only three years old and probably unable to read the posts on her account.
It is bizarre that these parents deem their children old enough to have content of them plastered over the internet, but too young to have control of these accounts. Is it because their child’s “off camera” life does not match the social media ideal of the “perfect family”?
The world of private and public is consistently blurred in many celebrity children’s lives. With most of these children too young to even comprehend what is going on or to have a say in what is posted about them. In years to come it will be interesting to see their opinions on their childhood being used as content material.
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