← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Behind the Lives of Family Vloggers
00:20:23
A new documentary, "An Update On Our Family," profiles some family vloggers, and delves into the controversy of the Stauffer family as an example of the potential consequences of the industry.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:51]
Alison Stewart
You're listening to all of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Some of the most popular content creators on YouTube are family video bloggers. These families keep the camera rolling through birthday parties, tantrums, sleep training, and more. Fans seem to love the relatable content about raising kids. One of the most beloved vlogging families were the Stauffers. Mika and James Stauffer were able to make a living posting content about their lives and their kids when they decided to adopt a little boy from China. Their followers were delighted and their views increased. But things went south when fans noticed that the new son, Huxley, suddenly disappeared from videos. The staffers eventually made a shocking announcement. They had decided to find home for their adopted son. The world of family vlogging can get murky. States have stepped in to protect the children who may or may not have had a choice. In 2023, Illinois passed a law requiring family influencers to set aside a certain percentage of their profits in a trust fund for children. Last fall, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a very similar bill into law. A new three part docu series takes a look at the Stauffer case and the ethics of family vlogging more broadly. It's titled quote, an Update on Our Family. It premier tonight on HBO at 9pm I'm joined now by its director, Rachel Mason. Hi Rachel. How are you?
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Rachel Mason
Hi. I'm so good to be here. It's really an honor.
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Alison Stewart
Thank you listeners. We want to hear from you. Do you watch family vloggers or influencers? Do you have a favorite channel? What do you think about the ethics of family vlogging or sharing videos of your children online? Let us know. 2124-339692-21243. WNY see, so what vlog? What did the vlogger share with you about why they decided to post their videos online?
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Rachel Mason
Well, one of the things that I found so fascinating was most of the people we spoke to, we reached out to lots and lots of different family content creators or mom vloggers. A lot of them didn't realize what exactly they were doing when they started and they were just, you know, posting. And especially in the earlier days of YouTube when, you know, it was a very different time, they were just posting and a lot of them happened to have kids and they were excited about something their kid was doing. And that engagement really activated their audience. And it wasn't necessarily like a conscious decision on the part of all the different people we spoke to to suddenly include their family. It was often a sort of organic process which built over time.
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Interviewer
Why is YouTube such a juggernaut for this kind of content more than other social media platforms?
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Rachel Mason
Well, I think there's probably a lot of reasons for that, but one in particular is that you're allowed to watch a longer piece of content on YouTube, whereas other social media platforms are not necessarily full video content platforms. YouTube has this long form video content opportunity. And so it really feels like another form of media. I mean, it genuinely is. And many content creators now are extremely sophisticated and probably rival the actual production companies that I work with, you know, where they have great abilities and can produce hour long content. So it's really the actual platform itself.
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Interviewer
I wanted to ask you a question about your film. You blur the faces out of the children in these videos, even if they are available readily online. Why was that decision made?
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Rachel Mason
Well, you know, the great thing about working in, in the medium of documentaries is that I don't work in isolation. I have a team and we all often communicate with each other and discuss the ethics and argue and debate. And it really came out of those conversations over time. You know, we, we landed in different places throughout our filming and yeah, so we really kind of got to this place where it made the most sense to blur the faces. When we realized we have to distinguish ourselves in this unique opportunity that we had as a documentary to even though we could, you know, get the access and clearances, we decided no matter what, we wanted to make our own unique distinction here in the form of our documentary.
- [05:16]
Interviewer
My guest is Rachel Mason, director of the new HBO docu series An Update on Our Family. It's about the parenting influencers. Micah. Mika. Micah, thank you. And James Stauffer and their decision to find a new home for their adopted son. That's one part of the show at Preneers night on hbo. Listeners, we want to hear from you. Do you watch family vloggers or influencers? Do you have a favorite channel? Tell us why. 2124-3396-9221-2433, WNYC. Before we get into the Stauffers, I want to, you know, you do feature people who have a very, I don't know, not the word successful, but they have, they do seem to walk the line between putting their kids on the air versus, I don't know, privacy. I'm speaking of the one family who, they really seem to have found a balance. Could you talk to us about that a little bit?
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Rachel Mason
Well, I think that line that you're referring to is the tightrope that they walk and it. I, you know, I'm sure there's some good days and bad days just like anyone else. As I came to understand, they're operating a small business. You know, my parents had a small business. I know what that feels like in a family context. And there's, it's, it can be dicey no matter what your business is, if your family's involved. But the really hard thing here is that it's so public. And I think what I came to realize is that most of the people we spoke to, and especially I think the ones you're talking about, they, they work hard to figure it out in a constant way. Yeah. And so I think there's this idea that, you know, there's a, there's a veneer of perfection and they, they look great. And then, you know, when. What I'm so grateful for our participants in revealing to us is that it's hard, it's not easy, and sometimes, you know, the, the fans want a certain thing and, you know, you shouldn't and you have to moderate that. And, and you know, the thing was like a tumbleweed. It grew before you could catch up to it. And so understanding that was a big part of our journey with the film itself, the series.
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Alison Stewart
I mean, let's talk about the Stouffers. What were people initially attracted to?
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Rachel Mason
Well, the Stouffer family had a lot of the qualities that many really successful vlogger families have. You know, they're very good looking, very charming on camera. Kind of a natural, kind of a natural showman quality that would work for a lot of different avenues of entertainment. Frankly, they're just a good looking couple who also knew how to play to the camera and creative, you know, doing things. I will say Micah actually had a huge amount of different types of content before she was really doing just the more strictly family stuff. She was doing things that connected to home finance and cleaning. And if you look at different mom vloggers, Often they have tracks within their channels so they'll do cleaning videos. She has, you know, hour long videos on how to scrub your counters and things like that, which is content that I was blown away by. Frankly, I was amazed when I realized, wow, the amount of different types of niches. There was also pregnancy journey content, which wasn't always what you'd expect. Some of it was her difficulties at times. And I will say that this is also where I learned a lot and especially I think our whole team, when we really understood there is a real value in, especially with women and motherhood, speaking about things that are really not that spoken about, you know, fertility struggles and really not easy things to speak about. And there were a lot of really incredible videos, I have to say, that were very open and honest and heartbreaking about, you know, which we stumbled into. And I see value in those things. So Maika herself was contributing in different tracks of her video content to a wide variety of conversations.
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Interviewer
What kind of money could the Stauffers make with this channel?
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Rachel Mason
So this is something that I really love, the fact that we have a guy named Sean Cannell. Sean Cannell, sorry, rhymes with YouTube channel. And he explains that beautifully in our series that depending on the types of, of advertising contracts that can happen, you know, it really depends and just, it just can really extend into any variety of ad revenue that any content creator can get. So, you know, it really, it really depends, you know, how much was made per ad campaign and they had a lot of sponsors. So another person that explained it really well in our series was Hannah Cho, who's an amazing, you know, voice because she Herself is a YouTuber content creator and also an adoptee herself, which really helped to explain another part of our story. And she also understood the challenge of balancing, you know, content with her child on the Internet. So to answer your question, there's a variety of amounts and I, I don't have the exact figures, but in our series we explore that.
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Interviewer
My guest is Rachel Mason. The name of the series is an update on our family. We'll have more after a quick break. This is all of it.
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Alison Stewart
You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Rachel Mason. She's a director of the film of the documentary series An Update on Our Family. It premieres tonight on hbo. The Stouffer family, they put everything about their lives, well, they put a good deal about their lives online and they decided they want to adopt a little boy and they adopt this little boy Huxley from China. What did adopt an excerpt tell you about filming the early days of an adoption that why it might not be a great idea?
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Rachel Mason
Well, I mean, frankly, it is a really bad idea. And it's the part of the story that I will say is the most painful to get into because, you know, of course it's, it's not a spoiler to say we know what happened, but you know, knowing that, you know, without getting into it, it's, it's really, really, really delicate. Adoption is a really delicate thing in general, all sides of it. And this is where I think what makes the actual YouTube and influencer culture something really, I think our whole society ought to take a pause and ask ourselves is at moments when we're really dealing with something that is a delicate human matter involving children and involving something as, you know, very sensitive as, as adoption. At what point, even though your fans and their audience, your audience might be super excited about it. Should we pause? Should we all, you know, have a moment? Because this is, I would say, the territory that the series lands in when we dive into this content. And it was really hard, I would say, for our team. I had just such an incredibly sensitive team working to watch the content and so many pieces of this footage just in some ways were like an agony to watch. And also you can't help but as a human being be fascinated and fixated and amazed and astonished and go through all these different emotions But a big part of what we all felt was like, oh, should we be watching this? Should any of us be watching this? And I think because we had that moral compass, it was important for all of us to constantly check in. And, you know, that is sort of the waters you swim in in documentaries often, as it just is the nature of the content we're dealing with. But, you know, I absolutely would love to say a few names here because like my, you know, one of our great showrunner, executive producer named Rachel Knudson and another producer named Jasmine Luom, I looked through hundreds and hundreds of videos and that's how the series was crafted through the actual process of just watching and watching and watching all the content and finding moments that we could really craft together.
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Interviewer
There were so many controversies about this adoption. It was about monetizing Huxley. There was an ad for detergent. It really struck a chord with people. But the story of him finding a new home or his parents found him a new home because he had certain issues that they weren't prepared to deal with. What I found was interesting. One of the interesting things was how quickly that story escalated. Could you describe that a little bit? Because that was also as interesting to me.
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Rachel Mason
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that is why our. The title of our series became so obvious to us. You know, we were for a long time, titles, I think, often emerge. But this one came from that exact precise reality check when we realized, oh, the video they posted that was called an update on our family was the video that destroyed their lives and just totally led to this massive eruption on the Internet. And, and looking at what that is to, to be at the eye of the storm became also very important to us because, you know, all that was written about it, the scandal and all the different reactions, it's all really, really interesting. But when you actually spend time watching hundreds videos that react to something, I think that's one of those moments as well when looking at Internet culture as an ecosystem became really important. And again, this is great conversations that I had with the team that I'm working with, which is incredible. I mean, they constantly would say, well, are we looking at the whole ecosystem? Let's step back, let's really look at it. And this is one of those things that I think the ecosystem on the Internet is deeply tied in to reactions. People post something and others react, and those reactions can just run the gamut. And in fact, that's how we. We met Hannah Cho, our number one participant, who was our great storyteller because she posted actually a Very nuanced reaction, and it was profound. And on the other hand, we found reactions that were terrifying. I mean, honestly made you wonder if they were going to be in serious trouble, bodily harm. And that's something you look at with, again, the terrifying reality that anyone can upload a video and anyone can find where you live. So there's this reality check that I think exploded on the Internet when we got deep into the Stauffer experience and all of us working on the show felt like it was worth exploring.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah.
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Interviewer
What do you think this story, their story, the whole story of family vloggers tells us about the power of parasocial relationships.
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Rachel Mason
I mean, I think it is the ultimate parasocial relationship cautionary tale. I think this is the story that, for me, at least, it allowed me to understand, wow, what a world are we in right now? Where your fans are so tied in with you, they expect this thing, and. And you have to feed them, and if you don't, wow, what's going to happen? It's an unknown. And I think, you know, I think this happens to lots and lots of influencers, regardless of whether they're, you know, family vloggers. I think you don't realize this. I've said before, you know, celebrities in the world of mainstream entertainment really do have the benefit of a team of professionals, for the most part, to protect them. Often it's publicists. When you're working on a show, especially like reality tv, TV show, there's producers, there's professionals who do work really good work to, you know, have meetings, pull, you know, pause before you air a show that you might have a problem with. You have a legal team. These influencers don't. They don't have any of those protections in place. And on some level, I look at the platforms as the leaders here to say, hey, I think you guys know this is happening, right? Your content creators are creating all this content for you, which is great for the platform. But are you. Are you looking at where the pitfalls are? Because that is what happens in, you know, regular entertainment. Showbiz. You have networks that might even say, look, we've got to adjust something. This can't just go. I mean, that happens all the time. And so the vulnerability of YouTubers and amateur content creators was something that really gave me pause once I delved into this.
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Interviewer
Were you able to get in touch with the staffers for this film?
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Rachel Mason
Unfortunately, no. And we reached out to them, and of course, that's something I always try to do, is make sure, you know, we. We would want to. However, I also believe they are absolutely entitled to their privacy. So, you know, this is, this is something that is very important to us to understand, you know, what they would feel at the outset of the show. And we made a card at the end to make sure that it was known that we did reach out to them.
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Interviewer
What do you think the future will look like for vloggers once their kids are old enough to have thoughts and feelings about all these videos which have been posted online?
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Rachel Mason
I mean, this is again, the great unknown of the present moment. And I think it's a really, really new industry on some level. And one of the things for us even working on the show was that we would look at, okay, is this person okay, there might be a family here where one of the kids might be over 18, but for the most part nobody was old enough for us to reach out to. And so, you know, I would have loved to talk to a, a former child of a, of, you know, one of these family channels. And in fact, we did actually try to reach out to one person who as the world does know about this story, the Frankie family. And that, you know, it's also yet yet again a very devastating story. But I don't know that they're all devastating. To be honest. I'm not sure. We, we need to hear from these people. We really need to hear what, what was your experience? And I think it has to be a really open minded conversation. Like I have an open mind towards the whole thing. I'd like to know what it was really like. You know, there are former child reality TV show stars, so that's the place where it's possible to engage in some dialogue. And I did look into that. You know, there's plenty of adults who were on television as children and I don't think they all have the same experience. So that's important to really listen to the people who, who actually went through it.
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Alison Stewart
Rachel Mason is a director of An Update Our Family. It premieres tonight on hbo. Thank you so much for being with us, Rachel.
- [22:19]
Rachel Mason
Sure.
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