Family vlogging is a popular trend on YouTube, with parents and children sharing videos of their everyday lives.
While it can be enjoyable for family members to watch these videos together, there are some potential drawbacks to family vlogging.
In this blog post, we’ll look at few reasons why family vlogging can be bad for families.
Keep in mind that there are certainly positives to this trend as well, but we’ll focus on the negative aspects here.
Table of Contents
Why Family Vlogging is Bad?
First of all, it can be very intrusive. The constant filming can make it difficult for family members to have any privacy, and it can also be stressful to always be on camera.
In addition, family vlogs can give outsiders a false sense of intimacy, leading to problems if people feel like they know the family too well.
Finally, posting videos of your daily life online can be risky, as anyone who watches the videos can access personal information and details about your daily routine.
For these reasons, it is essential to consider the potential downside of family vlogging before starting a channel.
Children are prime attraction:
People who make family vlogs are usually adults, but it is seen that most of the time, these family vlogs are centered around their children because of their cute looks and innocence.
However, the content is not just bound to show their innocence or lovely acts, but it usually revolves around their kids being pranked, laughed at, or bullied.
This may end up giving trauma and bad memories to the children when they grow up.
Risk of Wrong Audiences:
When you upload your personal life for the public, there are great chances that the wrong audiences will also be viewing them. Any person with some ill intentions or malicious and predatory minds can view your family content.
This can increase the risk of children being tracked down and ending up being in a dangerous situation.
Privacy Invasion:
All the vloggers who are habitual in making family vlogs are always seen having their cameras open no matter the occasion. This plays a huge role in invading the privacy of each individual that is involved in the vlog.
Not everyone is comfortable coming in front of thousands of people, and many family vloggers tend to ignore this basic ethic.
Imposing Strict Schedules on Children:
Children are far away from having their days or weeks scheduled, and they are known for being unable to commit to a regular task. Some parents make Vlogs such a huge part of their lives that they have to make a schedule to provide their audience with daily or weekly content and end up recording their children according to the decided schedule.
Who knows if the children are happily being recorded or forcefully?
Delusion of Perfect Life:
Family vlogging completely dis the concept of imperfection in relationships and life. While there is no such thing as perfect life and relationship, the vlogs show something completely different.
The minds behind the cameras are more focused on showing something impressive and aspirational.
This not only creates the pressure of living such a life for viewers, but it also makes vloggers fake their moods, living, and imperfections.
Story Behind the Scenes:
While the vlogs may show a happy and lively family, no one can have an idea of what goes behind the scenes.
There is absolutely no guarantee that everyone who is shown on a vlog is consented to before and is comfortable with the camera being shoved in their faces for much longer periods.
Pressurized for faking personality:
Even when a family member’s mental health is not cooperating, they are forced to fake their personality and show a positive side on the vlog. Not everyone is happy and playful all the time.
Social media is a delusion, and whatever you see on it may not be true. For vlog content that is made daily or weekly, it is quite understood that personalities are faked beyond measures.
Parents becoming Employers:
Parents are supposed to be the first best friends that children can have; however, with the family vlogging culture, the parents have ended up becoming employers and the children their employees.
Parents think that kids = clicks, and this makes them use their kids’ faces as their own family brand and earn money in return.
Unacceptable content:
Few families have gone too far making a family vlog that involves questionable and unacceptable content just to get views.
Some famous family YouTube Vloggers have been seen punishing their children, pranking them, having conversations with them on highly personal topics, which may make children anxious or traumatized when they get to watch the video being publically shared.
No Family Time:
The time that parents can give to their children and may have a one-to-one conversation about anything and everything that is happening in their lives is lost due to vlogging.
The parents who are completely involved in providing content end up spending more time on their devices for recording and editing their vlogs rather than having some precious family time.
Ethics being compromised:
With all the cons that this particular niche of vlogging comes with, it is quite understandable that the parents involved in recording vlogs are questioned for ethics.
Not all of them, but the majority of family vlogs, are now made not to share their day-to-day activity but to gain profits off their children’s faces.
Conclusion:
While family vlogging looks very pleasing to the viewers, what goes behind the scenes will always remain a mystery.
Are these children happily involved in making these vlogs, do they get to give their consent, or are they forced to follow a particular schedule? These are some questions that people have in their minds when it comes to family vlogging.
However, not all family vloggers are to be blamed for the behavior discussed above.
Some vloggers make sure proper family ethics are followed to make their content.
This can be normalized when YouTube and other vlog supporting platforms make strict rules to keep the content family-friendly and free of abuse.
