Family influencers made to pay children 15% of earnings in new law

Parenting and family influencers in Illinois are now made to pay their children 15% of earnings when they’re featured in content.

With the rise of family influencers, allowing families to earn money from posting monetized on social media platforms, more states and countries are looking into creating new laws to keep up with the new career path.

A new amendment to Illinois’ Child Labor Law went into effect on July 1, 2024, to protect the children of influencers. The amendment requires that children who appear on their parent or guardian’s social media profile be paid for appearances.

The bill, which was passed in 2023, specifically states that children under the age of 16 should receive 15% of an influencer’s gross earnings if they appear in at least 30% of monetized content online. The parents or caregivers must put the earnings into a trust account.

This will be supervised by requiring the parents to report to the Illinois Department of Labor how much money they made, what hours the child worked to produce the content, and how much they deposited into the child’s trust account.

The money is required to be held in the child’s name until they become 18 years old.

This law also states that the child is allowed to request the deletion of content featuring themselves, and should the adult not comply, the minor has the ability to sue for damages.

Illinois is the first state in the country to enact such a law, different versions of which other states, including Washington, Maryland, and California, are considering as the influencing industry, specifically for parents, continues to grow.

Speaking about the new legislation, Johanna Grange, a mom of two and the co-founder of Oak Street Social, a Chicago-based social media marketing firm, appeared on Good Morning America saying: “Social media has become the premium for getting your brand out to a large audience.

“Once blogging and Instagram and YouTube took off, and now we have TikTok and so many more, people found it as a viable way to make either a side hustle or a full-time compensation.”