Mother accused of ‘exploiting’ her 6 children by forcing them create at least 40 TikToks on a family holiday – and monitoring them with a spreadsheet
A mother has been accused of ‘exploiting’ her children by forcing them to create 40 social media posts while on holiday – and tracking their progress in a spreadsheet.
Disney lovers Lilly Davis and her husband Paul from Salt Lake City treated their six children to a Disneyland trip.
Each child was reportedly asked to create themed content for their mother’s social media channels, with a goal of 40 videos together, with Lilly insisting she didn’t want them to be “overworked” during the trip.
According to Lilly’s Collabstr website, the parents earn a hefty $2,150 per Instagram photo feed post or roll and $1,150 for each TikTok video.
However, the mother has since faced criticism online from appeals board member KC Davis, who claimed Lilly has ‘exploited’ her children out of content.
Lilly has since made her TikTok account private, but KC’s video has amassed more than two million views, and many others have taken to the comments section to express their concerns.
Lilly Davis (pictured) is receiving criticism on social media for asking her children to create social media content during the holidays
On TikTok, KC claimed that consuming family vlog channels is equivalent to “supporting the exploitation of children.”
She explained, “I don’t know this woman, and I don’t have any personal animosity toward her, nor am I trying to direct any hatred toward her.”
KC then used a video of Lilly explaining that she doesn’t want her family to be overworked during the holidays, so the kids only needed to record a minimal amount of content.
Lilly shared a snippet of a detailed spreadsheet for each child’s tasks.
“We don’t even get to see the whole spreadsheet, but there are at least 71 lines,” KC said.
She added, “I went back and counted and it’s 40 videos, and that’s not even the whole list.”
“The idea that their kids aren’t working is making forty videos, and as you can see, they’re meticulously planned, and I know some of these trends; they don’t shoot fast… there will be reshoots, there will be outtakes.’
KC urged viewers to see an alternate reality behind the videos. She said, “If you have this idea in your head that… family vlogging channels or family influencers are just living their authentic lives and recording things while they’re thinking about it, then I want that to pop into your brain – that’s not what’s happening. ‘
KC Davis (pictured), a US-based professional counselor, has accused Lilly of exploiting her children
Lilly and her husband (photo center right) treated their six children (photo) to a Disneyland trip
KC claimed that influencer lifestyles will have potentially harmful effects on children.
She said: ‘It’s about putting a camera in every aspect of your life as a child, putting it into categories, thinking about how to package it.’
“This isn’t ‘you did something funny, let’s put it on camera’, this is ‘ok, now everyone has to go to the living room because we have to do this transition, okay, now do it again, get the shot again.”
She added, “This is mom walking into the bathroom in the morning and saying, ‘Well, our list says you’re getting ready, so I’m going to hold the camera in your face while you get ready.'”
The counselor concluded, “If they let their kids off the hook with over 40 videos, can you imagine how many videos families like this and other family vloggers let their kids perform in.”
KC warned others against viewing similar social media channels for families as it distorts reality and is unfair to the children
“This is the saddest thing I’ve seen in a long time,” KC added in the caption.
The video has been viewed more than two million times, and many others have encountered problems with family-based influencers.
One said: ‘If my parents did that to me as a child after I turned 18, I would never speak to them again.’
A second added: “Those poor kids.”
A third wrote: ‘I can’t even imagine how these children are treated behind the scenes if they don’t cooperate.’
Social media users have shared their thoughts on KC’s video, and many agree with her take on family vlogs
A fourth said: ‘The amount of energy it takes to take a few family photos is already so much, I can’t imagine this.’
Another added: “It will be so fascinating when these kids grow up and start speaking out.”
A sixth wrote: ‘My child doesn’t like making a video that only we have a memory of.
‘When she sees it, she says ‘nah please’. So we don’t do that… I can’t imagine it.’
Lilly has now responded to the criticism via Instagram. She said: ‘A very large TikTok account has created an outrageous video that has reached millions of people with truly egregious and, more importantly, false claims, and as a result we are being attacked from multiple angles.
“In the video, this creator encourages her viewers not to support family vlogging channels while they exploit their children, and then she used my face and my video as a perfect example of a family content creator exploiting her children and making them perform.”
“This couldn’t be further from the truth.”
‘Anyone who follows our channel knows that we are not family vloggers and that the channel is not about my family, but about me. My husband is supportive and participates regularly, and occasionally our children participate too, but this is rare.’
‘Just to give you an idea of how rare it is. Before this latest family outing, of the last 250 videos we shot, only 14 videos featured our children, aside from our oldest Maggie who is an adult in college, and many of those were just snippets of life where they were in the background .’
“From the beginning, our children have chosen to be involved with our channel… we absolutely do not require children to ever appear in our videos.”